events: Sleep No More
Saturday night we went to see Sleep No More in NYC. It was amazing, and I have pretty much been talking it to death, but I wanted to get something down about it here.
Quick summary: Sleep No More is an interactive, immersive, film noir version of Macbeth in which you roam around a five-story hotel and let the play build around you. Sometimes you're in a room in which a scene from Macbeth is taking place; sometimes you're in a room with an actor and something odd is taking place; sometimes you wander around by yourself for half an hour without seeing a single actor, but that's okay because the sets are beautiful and intricate and you can sit down at a desk and read all the letters on it or explore the graveyard or any number of other amazing rooms. Seriously, I wandered around for 2+ hours, and on the way out, we walked past a room that I somehow had not seen. (It was full of dead birds hanging from the ceiling, which I *would* have remembered.) It's all very episodic and odd, and the actors don't speak, you don't speak, the choreography is intense and wild, and by the way you're wearing a white Venetian-style mask and so are all the other guests. There will be times when you'll see an unmasked actor rush past, followed closely by 15 people in masks, and it's intensely creepy like the actor is being chased by evil ghosts. The sets and scenes are creepy enough on their own but then you yourself add to the creepitude. The masks give a sense that this isn't a play, you aren't really there, you are a ghost spying on the real events. Catching a glimpse of yourself in a mirror is scary. This is all just the beginning.
A few random memories, which are going to sound incredibly dreamlike and crazy:
The first actor I saw was the woman I was calling The Maid, who I later found out was Mrs. Danvers, inexplicably imported from Rebecca. She was by herself in the graveyard. She went to a particular spot marked by a small white cross (it was one of those graveyards full of small white crosses), knelt down, picked up a bouquet of dried flowers from the grave and picked up the cross. She walked into the hotel group of rooms on the same floor and hid the cross in the hotel lobby, then walked down the hall to a child's bedroom and laid the flowers on the pillow. At this point I said, WTF?!, and left her to go exploring on my own.
There were a series of rooms set up to be the main street of a small town with little shops (on a dark stormy night, of course). There was a candy shop, a tailor, a natural history museum with lizard skeletons and things, and a funeral parlor. When I first came this way, there was an actor in the tailor shop. The Tailor was standing at his table--just standing there, hemming some pants. Other people came in, watched him for a few minutes, then went out. I stood a little longer and saw him take out a slip of paper, write something on it, fold it, and slide it into the hem of the pants and stitch it in place. Then I left.
Later on, I walked down the street and came upon the Tailor in a fight with a creepy guy. The Creep had dragged the Tailor out of his shop and was beating him up in the street while the Tailor tried to escape. They had kind of an amazingly choreographed scene, including a slo-mo moment when the Tailor, supported by the Creep, walked up the wall, across the ceiling, and down the other side. At that point he ran and hid inside the funeral parlor, locking the door and pulling the curtains on the windows. I followed the Creep out of town, down the stairs, and into the graveyard, where he stopped at the same place Mrs. Danvers had stopped, and dug something up. It was a small parcel, which he unwrapped to discover a dead mouse.
Even later, I was cutting through the graveyard and found the Tailor at that same spot. He was holding an umbrella over his head and reading from a Bible, as if he were saying a funeral in the rain.
The first big scene I saw was on the first floor, in the ballroom. I'd come downstairs and found a guy (not sure which character he was, but not MacB or Duncan) fighting with a woman who turned out to be one of the witches, in a chapel. They were acrobatically wrestling. She left, and he writhed around in turmoil for a while. He left and I followed him, down some stairs and through doors into a room that opened out to be incredibly spacious and filled with light filtering through mist, and in which trees were moving around. This was my first entry into the ballroom, and it was my favorite moment of the entire night.
I saw a dance/party scene in the ballroom. The witches were there along with most of the characters. Mrs. Danvers was trying to get the pregnant lady (Lady MacDuff) to drink a glass of milk, which she both wanted and didn't want to drink. After drinking it, Lady MacDuff collapsed and someone from the audience had to catch her and hold her up. After the dancers start leaving, the music changes and one of the witches steps into the center of the floor. She has long blonde hair and is wearing a blue velvet dress. In the throes of some sort of passion or power, she grips her head with both hands, and as she grips she pulls off her hair. It's a wig, and I realized it was a wig, but I was simultaneously thinking Oh my GOD. Well done.
When I saw the ballroom scene again later, I wasn't sure it was the exact same scene (the lighting seemed redder), so to test it I positioned myself behind Lady MacDuff, and when she fell I was the one to catch her. Mrs. Danvers came over and gave me a dirty look as she helped Lady MacDuff leave the room.
I spend a lot of time following around another of the witches, the Asian witch. She is enormously compelling. We touch several times, like for example when I am purposely standing in her way in the ballroom when she's moving trees and she has to take my hand to move me out of the way. Another time she dances with me. I catch a scene in one of the rooms upstairs where she is with a bartender and dances on the pool table. He has poured her a drink, and she hands it to me as she steps up on the table. I hold it, but the bartender is angry and takes it from me to give back to her. She hands it to another guest, who turns out to be my friend Mikey with whom I'm attending the show, and the bartender angrily takes it from him too.
Bordering the graveyard was a room with windows on two walls, so that you could see into the graveyard. The room had a bed in one corner, a pile of furniture in another corner, and a claw-foot bathtub in the center. I kept stopping by this room, waiting for something to happen, and late in the evening something did. I saw Lady MacB in the midst of a sex scene with I think MacB (I had seen them in the ballroom scene but hadn't recognized either of them as definitely being these characters until the next scene, which makes it obvious). They were all over the room, and then he left. She curled up on the bed for a while, then mosied over towards the center of the room, which is where she was when he came back in covered with blood. She stripped him naked and put him in the tub to wash the blood off, then they go lie on the bed together. He gets up and gets dressed and leaves the room, still with blood on his face; she starts to look at her hands. I follow him. He goes up some stairs to a room I hadn't seen before, where the witches are having an orgy with flashing strobe lights and techno music. The male witch (one of the witches is male) is completely naked and wearing a ram's head over his own head. The blonde witch is bald (wig not in view), and as MacB comes up the stairs he is pulled into the frenzy. The bald witch produces a bloody baby, blood is everywhere, both the female witches are naked to the waist now and MacB's shirt is smeared with blood. At the end, when things are calming down, the Asian witch pulls forth a small tree and dances it toward MacB, who takes it. Then the lights come up and people start leaving the room. It's a lounge, with tables and a bar and a stage, just like the lounge where we entered the show. The Asian witch, still half naked, flings herself over the bar. I stay to watch her, and she writhes around for a while. Eventually she turns to leave the room, taking the hand of another masked guest--who I recognize by the sweater is my husband F! They take off and I run after them, but she's just leading us back to the ballroom, where the feast scene is about to commence. F leaves the room and I stay for the scene, which is conducted in slow motion and ends with MacB being hung from a rope above our heads. End.
And this is just a snapshot of my night. Can you see why I want to go back and see it again?
::edit:: Just bought tickets--we are definitely going again, on Friday April 8. Woohoo!!!
Quick summary: Sleep No More is an interactive, immersive, film noir version of Macbeth in which you roam around a five-story hotel and let the play build around you. Sometimes you're in a room in which a scene from Macbeth is taking place; sometimes you're in a room with an actor and something odd is taking place; sometimes you wander around by yourself for half an hour without seeing a single actor, but that's okay because the sets are beautiful and intricate and you can sit down at a desk and read all the letters on it or explore the graveyard or any number of other amazing rooms. Seriously, I wandered around for 2+ hours, and on the way out, we walked past a room that I somehow had not seen. (It was full of dead birds hanging from the ceiling, which I *would* have remembered.) It's all very episodic and odd, and the actors don't speak, you don't speak, the choreography is intense and wild, and by the way you're wearing a white Venetian-style mask and so are all the other guests. There will be times when you'll see an unmasked actor rush past, followed closely by 15 people in masks, and it's intensely creepy like the actor is being chased by evil ghosts. The sets and scenes are creepy enough on their own but then you yourself add to the creepitude. The masks give a sense that this isn't a play, you aren't really there, you are a ghost spying on the real events. Catching a glimpse of yourself in a mirror is scary. This is all just the beginning.
A few random memories, which are going to sound incredibly dreamlike and crazy:
The first actor I saw was the woman I was calling The Maid, who I later found out was Mrs. Danvers, inexplicably imported from Rebecca. She was by herself in the graveyard. She went to a particular spot marked by a small white cross (it was one of those graveyards full of small white crosses), knelt down, picked up a bouquet of dried flowers from the grave and picked up the cross. She walked into the hotel group of rooms on the same floor and hid the cross in the hotel lobby, then walked down the hall to a child's bedroom and laid the flowers on the pillow. At this point I said, WTF?!, and left her to go exploring on my own.
There were a series of rooms set up to be the main street of a small town with little shops (on a dark stormy night, of course). There was a candy shop, a tailor, a natural history museum with lizard skeletons and things, and a funeral parlor. When I first came this way, there was an actor in the tailor shop. The Tailor was standing at his table--just standing there, hemming some pants. Other people came in, watched him for a few minutes, then went out. I stood a little longer and saw him take out a slip of paper, write something on it, fold it, and slide it into the hem of the pants and stitch it in place. Then I left.
Later on, I walked down the street and came upon the Tailor in a fight with a creepy guy. The Creep had dragged the Tailor out of his shop and was beating him up in the street while the Tailor tried to escape. They had kind of an amazingly choreographed scene, including a slo-mo moment when the Tailor, supported by the Creep, walked up the wall, across the ceiling, and down the other side. At that point he ran and hid inside the funeral parlor, locking the door and pulling the curtains on the windows. I followed the Creep out of town, down the stairs, and into the graveyard, where he stopped at the same place Mrs. Danvers had stopped, and dug something up. It was a small parcel, which he unwrapped to discover a dead mouse.
Even later, I was cutting through the graveyard and found the Tailor at that same spot. He was holding an umbrella over his head and reading from a Bible, as if he were saying a funeral in the rain.
The first big scene I saw was on the first floor, in the ballroom. I'd come downstairs and found a guy (not sure which character he was, but not MacB or Duncan) fighting with a woman who turned out to be one of the witches, in a chapel. They were acrobatically wrestling. She left, and he writhed around in turmoil for a while. He left and I followed him, down some stairs and through doors into a room that opened out to be incredibly spacious and filled with light filtering through mist, and in which trees were moving around. This was my first entry into the ballroom, and it was my favorite moment of the entire night.
I saw a dance/party scene in the ballroom. The witches were there along with most of the characters. Mrs. Danvers was trying to get the pregnant lady (Lady MacDuff) to drink a glass of milk, which she both wanted and didn't want to drink. After drinking it, Lady MacDuff collapsed and someone from the audience had to catch her and hold her up. After the dancers start leaving, the music changes and one of the witches steps into the center of the floor. She has long blonde hair and is wearing a blue velvet dress. In the throes of some sort of passion or power, she grips her head with both hands, and as she grips she pulls off her hair. It's a wig, and I realized it was a wig, but I was simultaneously thinking Oh my GOD. Well done.
When I saw the ballroom scene again later, I wasn't sure it was the exact same scene (the lighting seemed redder), so to test it I positioned myself behind Lady MacDuff, and when she fell I was the one to catch her. Mrs. Danvers came over and gave me a dirty look as she helped Lady MacDuff leave the room.
I spend a lot of time following around another of the witches, the Asian witch. She is enormously compelling. We touch several times, like for example when I am purposely standing in her way in the ballroom when she's moving trees and she has to take my hand to move me out of the way. Another time she dances with me. I catch a scene in one of the rooms upstairs where she is with a bartender and dances on the pool table. He has poured her a drink, and she hands it to me as she steps up on the table. I hold it, but the bartender is angry and takes it from me to give back to her. She hands it to another guest, who turns out to be my friend Mikey with whom I'm attending the show, and the bartender angrily takes it from him too.
Bordering the graveyard was a room with windows on two walls, so that you could see into the graveyard. The room had a bed in one corner, a pile of furniture in another corner, and a claw-foot bathtub in the center. I kept stopping by this room, waiting for something to happen, and late in the evening something did. I saw Lady MacB in the midst of a sex scene with I think MacB (I had seen them in the ballroom scene but hadn't recognized either of them as definitely being these characters until the next scene, which makes it obvious). They were all over the room, and then he left. She curled up on the bed for a while, then mosied over towards the center of the room, which is where she was when he came back in covered with blood. She stripped him naked and put him in the tub to wash the blood off, then they go lie on the bed together. He gets up and gets dressed and leaves the room, still with blood on his face; she starts to look at her hands. I follow him. He goes up some stairs to a room I hadn't seen before, where the witches are having an orgy with flashing strobe lights and techno music. The male witch (one of the witches is male) is completely naked and wearing a ram's head over his own head. The blonde witch is bald (wig not in view), and as MacB comes up the stairs he is pulled into the frenzy. The bald witch produces a bloody baby, blood is everywhere, both the female witches are naked to the waist now and MacB's shirt is smeared with blood. At the end, when things are calming down, the Asian witch pulls forth a small tree and dances it toward MacB, who takes it. Then the lights come up and people start leaving the room. It's a lounge, with tables and a bar and a stage, just like the lounge where we entered the show. The Asian witch, still half naked, flings herself over the bar. I stay to watch her, and she writhes around for a while. Eventually she turns to leave the room, taking the hand of another masked guest--who I recognize by the sweater is my husband F! They take off and I run after them, but she's just leading us back to the ballroom, where the feast scene is about to commence. F leaves the room and I stay for the scene, which is conducted in slow motion and ends with MacB being hung from a rope above our heads. End.
And this is just a snapshot of my night. Can you see why I want to go back and see it again?
::edit:: Just bought tickets--we are definitely going again, on Friday April 8. Woohoo!!!