A Review of Sleep No More

“An event” and “an experience.” I would have to agree with these two succinct descriptions of Punchdrunk’s extended production of Sleep No More at the McKittrick Hotel (which reminded me in a way of the final lines of the Eagles’ eponymous song, “Hotel California,” “You can check out any time you like/but you can never leave” more than the oft-referenced Manderley of Rebecca.)

First, if you’ve read the reviews, and scanned the internet for its textual buzz, then you know it’s not your traditional theatre-going experience. Confined (a choice word!) to 5 or 6 floors of an old building, the spectators roam and prowl with their plague doctor-esque masks, choosing to investigate the rooms on any of the floors, follow “actors”, and remain silent all the while. (We got busted in the stairwell by one of the shadow-enforcers when failed to understand my companion’s finger-spelling.) When I say the hallways and rooms are dimly lit, it is an understatement. Hallways’ corners are only noted with a candle in a corner to show the contours of your path, which was not as disorienting as it could have been (i.e., a twenty-year old on some kind of chemically altering substance might beg to differ). The graveyard and other spaces gave the impression of fog with the music industry’s chalky-scented smoke. In the crafted room-sets, sometimes the only light one has are those flameless tea lights, which make snooping in drawers, poking in boxes, or reading book spines more of a tactile experience than visual. Event-go-ers are encouraged to engage the senses, particularly touch, even when certain senses are imposed upon as with the meager lighting and compulsory soundtracks of electronic and swing. As for taste? Behind a reception desk/bar, I confess to opening a decanter and pouring a glass of its contents. Secretly hoping for whiskey, I tasted discolored, tainted water. (No, I did not follow through with downing that first swig.) Moments later, performers and voyeurs came on the scene of my crime.

For me, the theatrics of setting and design appealed to my intrigue with art installations and the use of space. I liked the collages and wall art that involved book pages and egg-imagery. There was an interesting “witch’s” herb-drying room whose contents emitted their earthy and musty odors. An odd mobile of dozens of headless dolls loomed over an empty crib. A hotel reception area was replete with the front desk, room keys (bolted!) on their hooks, the telephone booths, a lobby, and a valise storage area. Predictably, this space became the site for more wordless drama between the “actors” whose main genre of action revolved around the bodily-magnetics of attraction and repulsion.

I keep putting “actors” in quotes because I likened them to a modern dance troupe with their athleticism and interpretive movements. There was a meant-to-be intriguing dance between two actors and a door. We commiserated later on (adhering to the rules of silence) that we were more worried about the door. An actor feigned sleep in a large bed, while another one would gyrate and roll around her bed for the masked peeping masses. There was scene that mirrors what I call the “rape shower” of film: a nude male performer huddled in the corner of a shower stall with one lone male onlooker. One of the best scenes was at the ballroom banquet table, where the diners moved in slow, fluid motion as if in some 1940s tableau vivant rendition of the iconic Last Supper. Were there more scenes like that? We could not know. Otherwise, these “actors” did quite a bit of running and stomping to entice the herd of masked sheep to follow them. As tempting as it was to “baaaaa” when they passed, I kept silent. I may sound jaded when I write that nothing shocks me in the realm of art, fiction, or theatre anymore when the goal is explicitly to shock us.

So it is an event for those who participate in what they might perceive to be the elite-hipster circle of voyeurism. If interaction is what you seek, you can be one of those spectators who hover around an “actor,” waiting to be pulled in to some kind of drama. As herds stampeded by, we watched a few masked peers do just that. Watching other masked go-ers interact was part of the experience. The spectacle of looking down from a balcony into the ballroom of masked visitors proved more interesting than watching the “actors.”

Conceptually, the success of the phenomenon that is Sleep No More is a result of its manipulation of space and time. Without knowing the precise square footage of the production, I would say the troupe’s business and social acumen acknowledges the antsy, attention deficient nature of its pleasure-seeking-mobile audience and offers an illusion that there is just “not enough time” to see everything. There is no narrative, but instead a collage of scenes (human and inanimate) to experience. Experience is the key here because it celebrates the self and its affective navel-gazing tendencies. The repeating taxidermy, the repetition of beds and tubs, the variations on altars, the abandoned offices, the maze of thin branches, and other elements of design create a dream-scape where each room presents itself as new landscape for exploration. Design combined with the “actors” anguished interactions serve the mood, engage the senses, and trick the naïve mind into thinking it all must mean something. That’s the gimmick of Sleep No More: reviewers and goers want to believe there are “real” parallels to Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Hitchcock’s Rebecca, so they return to the McKittrick and (their wallets!) to figure it all out. But these days, things don’t have to mean anything.