Sleep No More
Went to see Sleep No More this weekend.
(Not my shot, I tried to take a few but given that it was with a point-and-shoot and required subterfuge to get away with it, I didn't get anything good)
It's this massive production by this British theater company called Punchdrunk. And I really mean "massive." They've taken over 100,000 square feet of empty warehouse space in Chelsea and turned it into a sort of David Lynch LARP.
The LARP bit isn't the best description. You don't have a role to play other than "audience member," but it's an active role. You're given a Venetian mask, cautioned not to remove it or speak, and then told wander through this enormous space, which they've turned into a 1930s hotel called the McKittrick, in a nod to Vertigo.
When you first enter, the entire crowd's in a club with a bar where you should really drink something with absinthe in it. Then they move you out in groups, hand you your masks, and dump you off an elevator onto one of the 5 floors, intentionally trying to split up people who came as a group. And that's when everything turns creepy as hell. The hotel space is decrepit and twisted and will thoroughly disorient you. You're left to explore, encouraged to poke around into drawers and closets and so forth, and to follow the inhabitants around as you see fit.
The inhabitants are putting on a bizarre production of Macbeth by way of Hitchcock, and doing it mostly without dialogue. Interactions with the audience are mixed; at times, characters ignore you, and at times (usually when they're insane or dead), they take notice of you. Occasionally an actor will grab a single audience member, lead him through a locked door, and shut it behind them, separating him from the audience entirely. This didn't happen to me, but apparently the actor then de-masks you and tells you a short spooky story.
They don't let you take photos, which I can understand (actors are gettin' bare-ass naked, and plus shutter clicks and flash would be awfully intrusive), but it sucks because the art direction of this environment is incredible. Every room is filled with detail, it's as symbolically dense as a Tim Powers novel. Just as one example, in this version, Duncan's son Malcolm is apparently a private investigator. In the back of his office is a darkroom, and examination of the hanging prints and the notes and books on the shelves and the various severed bird wings nailed to the walls indicate that Malcolm's really into ornithomancy. While I'm in there poking around, Malcolm comes in (followed by various audience members), types up a report, retrieves a small box from the safe, removes a scalpel from it, looks like he's going to let loose a vein, but then changes his mind and excises a single line of text from his report, only to tie it to the leg of a dead bird.
Many rooms in the hotel exist in some not-a-hotel space. There's a forest maze (Birnam wood?), with a growling wolf statue at one of the dead-ends. There's an extensive area of crumbling stone walls and statuary where Macbeth wanders in anguish for a time. Lady Macbeth's parlor lets her retreat to a space behind a large mirror while we watch.
Eeriest room I saw was Macduff's child's nursery. An empty crib, with an empty baby's jumper lying within it, and hanging from the ceiling to encircle the crib are another two dozen or so empty baby jumpers, but these are bronzed and hence have the shape of one which holds a real baby. Spookiest performance I witnessed was Macbeth's second consultation with the witches, which takes place in a nightclub (it's a duplicate of the one you enter the performance through, so it's intended to be the same but isn't the same), and turned into a drum-and-bass driven blood orgy, complete with three naked witches (one male, goat-headed, and blood-soaked) , Macbeth, and a demonic stillbirth.
You won't see everything. You can't see everything. Even though the actors repeat their vignettes several times during the course of the night, it's your pick of who to follow or where to go that determines what you get to see. I wasn't able to follow a single thread of the main plot all the way through; I wanted to see Duncan's murder, but didn't, but did see blood-soaked Macbeth enter into his lady's parlor to tell her he'd done the deed, and then later her frenzied efforts to scrub herself clean of the blood that he'd left on her. And I ended up seeing naked and scrubbing Lady MacBeth twice, but I'm not going to complain about that because, well, the actress was pretty damned good-looking even when she wasn't gyrating lithely all around her room. There's another non-Macbeth related plotline that I couldn't follow at all, and judging from the character names it's got something to do with the novel Rebecca, which I've never read. Plus a woman in a red dress credited as "Hecate" who at one point harvests tears from one of the Rebecca characters, so regarding all that I have no fucking idea what was going on.
I think it could have been better with less dance-fighting and more dialogue, I'd really have appreciated a few more anchors to the source material; I still have no idea who several of the characters were. I couldn't tell you who was Banquo and who was Duncan, for example. And what dialogue there was was almost entirely drowned out by the atmospheric (and very effective) soundtrack; unless you're right up against an actor you're not going to make out much of what they're saying; at one point I'm pretty sure I heard Lady Macbeth giving the "And damned be he who first cries hold etc" bit in low tones, but couldn't be sure. And I get a sense that if you could see everything and follow every thread to conclusion, then the plot(s) wouldn't justify the setup, that the stage is simply too big for the drama.
But despite any of those deficiencies, it's very, very cool. Then after Macbeth gets what's coming to him, you wind up back in the first nightclub again and get to party:
This guy's got some photos of the space, apparently when the setup was just about finished but before the performance started running.
The NYT's got a few official shots.
(Not my shot, I tried to take a few but given that it was with a point-and-shoot and required subterfuge to get away with it, I didn't get anything good)
It's this massive production by this British theater company called Punchdrunk. And I really mean "massive." They've taken over 100,000 square feet of empty warehouse space in Chelsea and turned it into a sort of David Lynch LARP.
The LARP bit isn't the best description. You don't have a role to play other than "audience member," but it's an active role. You're given a Venetian mask, cautioned not to remove it or speak, and then told wander through this enormous space, which they've turned into a 1930s hotel called the McKittrick, in a nod to Vertigo.
When you first enter, the entire crowd's in a club with a bar where you should really drink something with absinthe in it. Then they move you out in groups, hand you your masks, and dump you off an elevator onto one of the 5 floors, intentionally trying to split up people who came as a group. And that's when everything turns creepy as hell. The hotel space is decrepit and twisted and will thoroughly disorient you. You're left to explore, encouraged to poke around into drawers and closets and so forth, and to follow the inhabitants around as you see fit.
The inhabitants are putting on a bizarre production of Macbeth by way of Hitchcock, and doing it mostly without dialogue. Interactions with the audience are mixed; at times, characters ignore you, and at times (usually when they're insane or dead), they take notice of you. Occasionally an actor will grab a single audience member, lead him through a locked door, and shut it behind them, separating him from the audience entirely. This didn't happen to me, but apparently the actor then de-masks you and tells you a short spooky story.
They don't let you take photos, which I can understand (actors are gettin' bare-ass naked, and plus shutter clicks and flash would be awfully intrusive), but it sucks because the art direction of this environment is incredible. Every room is filled with detail, it's as symbolically dense as a Tim Powers novel. Just as one example, in this version, Duncan's son Malcolm is apparently a private investigator. In the back of his office is a darkroom, and examination of the hanging prints and the notes and books on the shelves and the various severed bird wings nailed to the walls indicate that Malcolm's really into ornithomancy. While I'm in there poking around, Malcolm comes in (followed by various audience members), types up a report, retrieves a small box from the safe, removes a scalpel from it, looks like he's going to let loose a vein, but then changes his mind and excises a single line of text from his report, only to tie it to the leg of a dead bird.
Many rooms in the hotel exist in some not-a-hotel space. There's a forest maze (Birnam wood?), with a growling wolf statue at one of the dead-ends. There's an extensive area of crumbling stone walls and statuary where Macbeth wanders in anguish for a time. Lady Macbeth's parlor lets her retreat to a space behind a large mirror while we watch.
Eeriest room I saw was Macduff's child's nursery. An empty crib, with an empty baby's jumper lying within it, and hanging from the ceiling to encircle the crib are another two dozen or so empty baby jumpers, but these are bronzed and hence have the shape of one which holds a real baby. Spookiest performance I witnessed was Macbeth's second consultation with the witches, which takes place in a nightclub (it's a duplicate of the one you enter the performance through, so it's intended to be the same but isn't the same), and turned into a drum-and-bass driven blood orgy, complete with three naked witches (one male, goat-headed, and blood-soaked) , Macbeth, and a demonic stillbirth.
You won't see everything. You can't see everything. Even though the actors repeat their vignettes several times during the course of the night, it's your pick of who to follow or where to go that determines what you get to see. I wasn't able to follow a single thread of the main plot all the way through; I wanted to see Duncan's murder, but didn't, but did see blood-soaked Macbeth enter into his lady's parlor to tell her he'd done the deed, and then later her frenzied efforts to scrub herself clean of the blood that he'd left on her. And I ended up seeing naked and scrubbing Lady MacBeth twice, but I'm not going to complain about that because, well, the actress was pretty damned good-looking even when she wasn't gyrating lithely all around her room. There's another non-Macbeth related plotline that I couldn't follow at all, and judging from the character names it's got something to do with the novel Rebecca, which I've never read. Plus a woman in a red dress credited as "Hecate" who at one point harvests tears from one of the Rebecca characters, so regarding all that I have no fucking idea what was going on.
I think it could have been better with less dance-fighting and more dialogue, I'd really have appreciated a few more anchors to the source material; I still have no idea who several of the characters were. I couldn't tell you who was Banquo and who was Duncan, for example. And what dialogue there was was almost entirely drowned out by the atmospheric (and very effective) soundtrack; unless you're right up against an actor you're not going to make out much of what they're saying; at one point I'm pretty sure I heard Lady Macbeth giving the "And damned be he who first cries hold etc" bit in low tones, but couldn't be sure. And I get a sense that if you could see everything and follow every thread to conclusion, then the plot(s) wouldn't justify the setup, that the stage is simply too big for the drama.
But despite any of those deficiencies, it's very, very cool. Then after Macbeth gets what's coming to him, you wind up back in the first nightclub again and get to party:
This guy's got some photos of the space, apparently when the setup was just about finished but before the performance started running.
The NYT's got a few official shots.