Thursday, March 17, 2011

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

6 comments:

  1. I think you got it, Jim. Sex and Death. What else is there? And I'm not being trite, I'm saying that maybe that's the basic message.

    But, maybe also, the larger message is that life itself is an experience too big - too full of events - to encapsulate into one observation. Life is chaotic and filled with nothing but small events linked only by the individual experiencing them, filled with tragedies and euphoria, and orgasms, and death..., and so, if you go back, you'll get more pieces, but not the whole story, because it's just too big.

    So, I say, skip it...spend the $75 on a cool pair of jeans. :)

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  2. hm. keep an eye on it and if you hear it's closing soon and you don't care, then don't bother. if you hear it's closing and you think 'oh crap' then get another ticket.

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  4. I enjoyed the show when it was in Boston so much more the second time around. The first time I missed almost all of the scenes and mostly wandered around taking in the amazing set, and the second time I ran around watching all the scenes. So I feel like I really experienced the whole thing. And I thought it was stunning, but it's definitely a sketch more than a story. I was in love with the dance/movement, though.

    I thought the anonymity was a great idea (and I certainly saw much more of the "show" when I stopped trying to stay with my friends), but the mask was just claustrophobic and sweaty to me. I'd love to check out the new version in NY (a friend of mine helped build it) and to see how the show overall is different, but I don't think I have the time, money, or patience for it before it closes.

    I will say that it helps a lot if you know what times different things happen and where so you can watch one whole circuit in Macbeth order. Unfortunately, that's not something I can tell you because it's all different in NY, but I think the show's fans are pretty obsessive, so you can probably find it somewhere on the Internet. Plus, if you know any of the volunteer ushers, they can probably slip you the info.

    ETA: You should decide sooner rather than later because it's going to sell out quickly if it doesn't extend.

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  5. Aaaah! I still can't make up my mind. Maybe I'll let it sell out (it's pretty close to that anyway). And if it does and I'm really disappointed, then I'll know I should have gone back. Right now I'm leaning towards not going.

    I have to imagine they'll extend, aelling as well as it is and considering how much they must have spent to get it up and running. Time will tell!

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  6. Looks like it just extended two weeks, to the end of April.

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