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

[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.