Is that a goat head, or are you just happy to see me?

chuckro and ivy03 and I went to Sleep No More last night. It's an experimental/experiential theater piece loosely based on a Macbeth updated to the 1930s, with bits of Hitchcock (especially Rebecca) and possibly a 16th century witch trial thrown in. They gutted a hotel and filled every room with things. You're masked and set free to wander for three hours as the actors run through the hotel playing out their nearly-wordless scenes (with a couple loops). You can follow one character (if you can keep up), stay in an area and wait for things to come through, or explore the contents of the rooms, including rifling through drawers, reading files, and touching everything. The mask completely covers your face, so the audience is a flock of silent, voyaristic ghosts. The best description I've seen is that it's like being inside a David Lynch film. It's creepy, fascinating, erotic, touching, unsettling, deeply weird, and breathtakingly amazing.

If you have the resources to go and don't think you would be too weirded out, you need to go get tickets right now. They keep extending the run and selling out, and each time they extend, they apparently raise the price.

If you do go, a couple of notes:
- Wear contacts if you've got them--the mask is more comfortable without glasses, and you aren't allowed to take it off.
- Wear comfortable shoes. There's almost nowhere to sit down, you'll be walking the whole time, the floors are a bit uneven, and if you want to keep up with Macbeth or Lady Macbeth, you're going to have to run.
- Follow a minor character for awhile. When they see you're following them, if there's no one else around, they may take you by the hand and lead you off to a private scene. There's at least several possibilities, all of them that I know of are unsettling, but nothing bad will happen to you so just go with it. But be aware it's going to push right up against your boundaries.

( If you think you might go, don't read this. It's better not to know too much, and find it out for yourself. )

The entire thing is distinctly unnerving, an out-of-body experience that forces you to interact with the performance in a way that's almost never possible. You are a ghost haunting these people and every once in awhile, they can see you and you wonder if you're the one being haunted. It's amazing, completely breathtaking, and utterly unforgettable and impossible to remember in sequence. The weirdness--seeing events repeated, out of sequence, being able to follow one character out of a scene and then circling back an hour late to see the scene again and follow a different character, the repeated surrealist Gothic imagery, the wordlessness, the intersecting storylines--is dreamlike. It's emotionally compelling without making logical sense. It's a little scary and occasionally very uncomfortable, and you will not be able to stop thinking about it.