The lush installation piece by Punchdrunk is billed as a reinvention of Macbeth, occupying a warehouse space in Chelsea done up as a hotel called the McKittrick. Theatergoers don Venetian masks and wander through the multiple floors in silence, experiencing the performance as they wish.
I made three key strategic errors in re this show.
The first was to reread Macbeth before going. Although the "characters" in Sleep No More correspond to the characters in Macbeth, the plot is abstracted to the point of nonexistence. There's almost no direct engagement with the text.
I love Shakespeare so much that it's actually hard for any kind of art experience to compete with just sitting on the couch in my pyjamas and reading a play straight through.
One thing I kept noticing in the text of Macbeth was how ambition destroys both the unity of time and the unity of self. Trying to make the future happen now, trying to leap over yourself. It made me think about my own crappy ambition and how miserable it makes me.
"Welcome to the McKittrick," said the elevator operator as he ferried our group from the swanky entry-level bar to the darkened hotel rooms above. I tried to keep my eye on my friend Lisa's ponytail, but he closed the elevator door between us.
"This is a solo experience," he intoned solemnly.
The bridge and tunnelers next to me giggled hysterically behind their Venetian masks. I tried to remain calm. The elevator door slid open and I stepped out into a graveyard lined with white crosses.
When Lisa and I met up in the bar after the show, she was like, "I kept thinking of how much you must have loved the erotic dancing and full-frontal male nudity."
I was stunned. "What erotic dancing and full-frontal male nudity?"
Photo credit: EMURSIVE
What I did see was rooms: A room of bathtubs, one of them filled with pink water. A mental hospital dorm room with crosses nailed to the walls. A room with a cradle above which headless babydolls floated. A fragrant room filled with bouquets of dried herbs. A room of dead birds hanging in plumes from the ceiling. A restaurant with half-drunk glasses of wine and clever menus. Vanities whose drawers held symbols drawn in sand. A private eye office with missing person reports. A hotel desk with crumbling lounge furniture and telephone booths. Candles stuck with needles. A bar area whose floor was made of wood chips and walls were cardboard boxes. A maze of trees. A glass cabinet filled with nails.
The lighting was crepuscular and the imagery was a pastiche of film noir and torture porn. It was fun, and I was grateful for the scope of the endeavor and all the work that went into creating such a vast entertainment, but I'm not sure the details were right the way they were right in Sophie Calle's Room. Maybe I would have liked it better if I'd seen more erotic dancing.
Photo Credit: Yaniv Schulman
Every once in a while one of the actors would sweep in and do a silent pantomime of some urgent, nonsensical action (e.g., rifling through drawers in search of something they never found, sticking pins in a dead bird, pouring out glasses of whiskey onto the floor, packing and then unpacking a suitcase). This was all pretty boring.
An exception was the moment I saw in the maze of trees. A creamy-skinned Irishwoman in a nurse's outfit emerged from a wooden shack. She walked, weeping, through the maze, where she stopped before a column and wrote on it with a piece of chalk: "Wife, children, servants, all that could be found." This was surreally, quietly beautiful.
By and large, though, I didn't buy the uniformly ramped-up nature of the emotions on display, which seemed more a way to sell the thing than authentic emotional truth. Shades of Stomp.
Although maybe I made a third mistake in not purchasing the program aggressively hawked as "the only keepsake from this show that is literally redefining the face of American theater." It might have revealed the deeper intelligence at work. As it was, I thought Sleep No More was smart, but only in the sense that a little black dress is smart. I slept great afterward, and it didn't even make me dream.
