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

[jethrien]

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.

I got pulled aside at one point and given a locket (that they let me keep). I also got a shot of whiskey. Chuckro, on the other hand, got crowned the king of England.

The level of detail in the rooms is amazing. There were at least fifty of them, maybe more depending on how you count. Each is fully furnished, with bizarre and Gothic details from the padded room with the pattern picked out in the wall in leaves to the study with a voodoo doll impaled with nails to the frilly pink bedroom with a small dead frog pinned to a blotter. There is a taxidermied dog hiding behind the laundry, a flowery thank you note from Lady Macbeth to Duncan, a restaurant with wall cubbies that each contain a cross made out of silverware held up by a pile of salt, a mountain of clocks wrapped in sheet music, a detective agency with a dark room full of developing photos of dead bodies, a massive mobile of decapitated baby dolls hanging over an empty crib. A bar made out of cardboard boxes with playing cards nailed to them was lit by electric candles hidden by peat moss--a single candle also had tiny army men climbing the moss. Ledgers contain entries, drawers have hidden objects, some of the phones have dial tones, some of the closets are actually hidden passageways, some of the mirrors are glass you can see through if you cast a shadow on it. You could easily spend the entire evening just exploring the rooms one by one.

There is an enormous amount of blood, violence, nudity, and exquisitely choreographed modern dance portraying rough sex. The athleticism of the actors is astonishing. It's visceral, it's pushing up against you, and it might reach out a hand and drag you up three flights of stairs at any moment. I ended up with stage blood on my pants and lipstick on my ear. (Both washed off.)

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.

Comments

[firynze.livejournal.com]

This sounds amazing. I'm mildly obsessed with interactive performance/storytelling and ARG scenarios, and this is the sort of thing I wanted to pursue when I was doing my master's, honestly. I wish I could experience something like this, let alone coordinate something like it.

Although not being able to comfortably wear glasses is a problem there.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

The amount of work that went into this production was staggering. Every character (there were at least 13) is basically onstage almost all the time. While the action repeats at least three times, that's basically a full hour of intense individual choreography for each person, each of whom has multiple costume changes (some of which has to be cleaned off before the next go 'round as people get bloody and unbloody and bloody again).

The entire hotel was gutted and turned into a massive multi-roomed set, each of which is individually furnished, with a base lighting scheme and soundscape. Then a lot of the scenes have their own lighting and sound cues. (I'm pretty sure the actors were timing things off of the music, since they were all in seperate rooms and then would have to meet each other on the exact right beat.)

There were black masked attendants to help you if you needed it, shush people, keep people out of places they weren't supposed to be, and gently move people standing in front of a wall that was about to be hit by a body.

Someone may have been watching the whole thing on CCTV in case things went wrong, but this wasn't a theater where if someone misses a cue everyone can see and adjust. The timing and coordination was just amazing. I was just completely blown away at how immersive the whole thing was.

[firynze.livejournal.com]

O_o

o_O

Seriously, this is the sort of thing I would kill to do if I had a grant and a lot of time.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

There were entire plot threads and characters that each of us missed. I'm glad I went with a group. We spent an hour comparing notes, explaining all the things each of us missed. I was the only one to find Mrs. Danvers, for example, but I completely missed Duncan being murdered every time. I saw Lady Macbeth's thank you note for the necklace, but missed it being actually given to her. I found the darkroom, but missed the candy room.

[firynze.livejournal.com]

...wow. Just wow.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

If you needed an excuse to visit NYC in the next month, this is a perfectly good one.

Don't worry about the glasses thing--the mask fit fine over my glasses, and my only problem was that my nose kept getting sweaty.

[firynze.livejournal.com]

If I had the time and wherewithal to visit, believe me, I'd be there.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

So did mine--I kinda felt like my face was going to melt off at one point.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure the price is going up. It's still $75 weeknights and $95 weekend for October, which is what it was for us.

[feiran.livejournal.com]

E and I are seeing the show, so I'm not going to read this, but I look forward to talking about it in another month or so. :)

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

I think you're going to love it. Oh, other advice--you're going to have to check you coat and any bags, so keep that in mind. I did it on the contents of my pockets.

[xannoside.livejournal.com]

That sounds massively cool. Dunno about availability on my part, but seriously intriguing...

[shnayder.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Who do I know in NY who'd want to go?

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Can't help you there. You want to see it with someone, to compare notes with, but it's intended as an individual experience. Don't try to stay with them while inside, just meet up at the bar after the final banquet scene.