Sleep No More

100,000 square feet of New York City space. 101 rooms all designed decorated and fully realized. An audience in masks roaming about in white masks, groups forming and dissipating, people breaking off from crowds. The instruction that besides keeping your mask on and not speaking, there were no rules.

Sleep No More is a theatrical experience. I'm not prepared to call it a play or a dance piece or an installation or performance art. It's somehow more and less than all of those things. Groups are taken into the building, a massive space on the far West side that used to be megaclub Twilo once upon a time. An elevator lets people off on various floors, and you're told to just enter and...experience.

The show/piece/whatever is heavily informed by Macbeth and Rebecca. There is no dialogue, things are happening in several spaces at once, and try as you might (and I tried) you will not see everything in one go. I'm pretty sure that's impossible. And I'm even more sure that's intentional.

I spent the first hour wandering about in a mask reading letters found in cupboards, peeking under beds, debating whether or not to take staircases. And then suddenly there was action, and I hurried off to see a tableaux in the "ballroom" that seemed to be Macbeth and Lady Macbeth on either end of a dining table. Maybe Duncan was at the head of it. Maybe Banquo was there? Or maybe, um, well, shit, it's been a long time since I read or saw Macbeth.

Up and down stairs, around trees, across rooms, through a bunch of pushy people who used silence as an opportunity to slam into people without saying "excuse me," I chased people, lost threads, discovered new rooms, and watched really stunning individual dance performances: an acrobatic number in a luggage room, a dance of guilt in a crumbling statue garden, an erotic murder scene in some phone booths, and a deeply astonishing interrogation dance while closed into a teeny tiny room with about seven other people.

I wandered through beaded curtains, looked at crime scene photos, browsed the taxidermist, got my shirt ripped open in a smoky bar, watched someone nail cards to the walls of a room, and tried desperately hard to figure out what the fuck was going on.

I found pieces of this show/piece/experience/whatever to be breathtaking, and the opportunity to explore this enormous and incredibly designed space was incredible. That said, I felt real frustration not being able to follow any terribly well-defined thread. With so much going on, I left with the feeling that I had a very incomplete experience. Surely there were more letters hanging around that I should read, a ton of individual performances I didn't catch. They say there's no right or wrong way to experience it, but I had a hard time giving myself over to it. A fascinating experience and part of me does want to go back, but I'm still trying to find a larger meaning in all of it and worry that what it had to say was actually quite a bit smaller than the actual breadth of material and size of its execution. Am I alone in this? I might be. Buzz is tremendous. I was there and on the move for the full three hours and still felt like I just...missed something.

This piece in the Times confirms that I certainly missed some stuff. I never saw the hospital or the children's room. I suspect I might have missed an entire floor. I still suspect, based partly on the fact that I know more about what was happening based on a newspaper article than I did based on the entire experience itself, that it's simply too unstructured to really add up to anything. I just saw a lot of small pieces about sex and death, death and sex, that never really added up to anything bigger. But maybe I need to give it another chance? Or maybe the experience is enough and I need to give up this need for meaning and coherency.

Dear Reader,
Do I drop another $75 to go back in order to find out?
Best,
Jim