Sleep No More (2011 play)

Sleep No More
One of the audience masks used in the production.
Written by	Punchdrunk (directed by Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle)
Date premiered	March 7, 2011 (2011-03-07)
Place premiered	530 West 27th Street, New York City  United States
Original language	English
Official site

Sleep No More is the New York City production of a site-specific, interactive work of theatre created by British theatre company Punchdrunk, based on their original 2003 London incarnation (at the Beafoy Building), their Brookline, Massachusetts 2009 collaboration with Boston's American Repertory Theatre (at the Old Lincoln School), and William Shakespeare's Macbeth. The company reinvented Sleep No More as a co-production with Emursive, and began performances on March 7, 2011. Sleep No More won the 2011 Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience and won Punchdrunk special citations at the 2011 Obie Awards for design and choreography.

Sleep No More adapts the story of Macbeth, deprived of all spoken dialogue and set primarily in a dimly-lit, 1930s-era establishment called the "McKittrick Hotel": the website of which claims it has been recently "restored" but is actually a block of warehouses in Manhattan, transformed into a hotel-like performance space. Sleep No More's presentational form is considered promenade theatre, in which the audience walks at their own pace through a variety of theatrically designed rooms, as well as environmental theatre, in which the physical location, rather than being a traditional playhouse, is an imitation of the actual setting.

Contrary to what some believe, Sleep No More is not any kind of haunted attraction. However, it should be noted that in their exploration, audience members can come upon instances of full nudity, and bright lights (including strobe lights), lasers, fog, and haze. The email that guests receive upon their impending experience does note that the audience might experience "intense psychological situations" ^[1]

Overview

A prop letter from Macbeth to Lady Macbeth

Sleep No More is set in a building with five floors of simultaneous theatrical action, putatively called the McKittrick Hotel, though with many rooms and features not normally associated with hotels. Various papers, pamphlets and menus inside the performance space and at the building's dining establishments identify the indoor setting as the fictitious town of Gallow Green, Glamis, Forfar, Scotland. The name of the town and some of the characters (as seen in prop letters found in the performance space, and the souvenir program) are references to the Paisley witch trials.

The floors

The five visitable floors and the characters that frequently inhabit them consist of, from the top down:

• Floor 5 – The King James Sanitarium: an antiquated lunatic asylum devoid of patients, including cots, bathtubs, doctor's and nurse's offices, a padded cell, an operating theater, a gated forest with a small hut, and smaller rooms filled with patient records and samples. Frequent characters include Nurse Shaw and Matron Long.
• Floor 4 – The High Street of Gallow Green: featuring a two-room apartment, and shops belonging to Mr. Bargarran (a taxidermist), Mr. Fulton (a tailor), Mr. Robertson (a mortician), and Mrs. Paisley (a confectioner), though these last two employers are never seen in their shops nor the show in general. It also contains a speakeasy, a detective agency, and a dilapidated replica of the second floor's Manderley Bar. Frequent characters include the above, as well as Malcolm, Hecate, Agnes Naismith (a young woman looking for her missing sister), and the unnamed bartender of the speakeasy.
• Floor 3 – Residences of Gallow Green: the Macduff family flat, (including children's bedrooms), the Macbeth bedroom, a cemetery, a statue garden, and indoor courtyards. Frequent characters include Lord and Lady Macduff, and Lord and Lady Macbeth.
• Floor 2 – The McKittrick Hotel: the lobby of the fictitious hotel, featuring a check-in desk, rotary telephone booths, a dining section, multiple sitting areas, offices, and a small cabaret stage. Frequent characters include the lobby's porter, and occasionally the three witches. This floor also contains the hotel's Manderley Bar, where the audience begins their journey, boarding a freight elevator to the other floors.
• Floor 1 - The McKittrick Ballroom: This and the ground floor are a grand ballroom/auditorium and its mezzanine level, with smaller rooms surrounding the ballroom floor and balcony, including a sleeping quarters, a small crypt, and a large stage, where the finale takes place. Frequent characters include Duncan, Banquo, and multiple characters from the other floors.

Recorded music, either period (such as tunes by Peggy Lee or Glenn Miller), ambient (composed by Punchdrunk sound designer Stephen Dobbie), or orchestral (mostly consisting of Bernard Herrmann's scores to Alfred Hitchcock films) plays steadily throughout the entire building at all times. Other sound effects, such as thunderclaps or bells, happen simultaneously on most floors as well, though with different volumes relative to the area of the performance where the sounds originate. (A bell heard most clearly in the second floor hotel lobby, for example, can simultaneously be heard in the fifth floor asylum, albeit much fainter.)

The story

Over the course of the guests' three-hour evening, each character runs a one-hour loop, returning to their initial location at the close of every hour, repeated thrice. Sleep No More tells two (at times interconnected) stories; one being the general plot of Macbeth, though this adaptation omits several characters and many of the elements of war from Shakespeare's play. The Macbeth elements take place throughout all the floors, but primarily through the first three. The fourth floor High Street area (see above) is mostly the locale for the story of Agnes Naismith, a young woman who arrives in Gallow Green to search for her missing sister. Along her journey, she meets and interacts with many dark and sinister figures who propel her quest forward, until she comes to a final, climactic encounter.

The audience is given no programme and there is no speaking from either the actors or audience (with some exceptions). The production "leads its audience on a merry, macabre chase up and down stairs, and through minimally illuminated, furniture-cluttered rooms and corridors."^[2]

The actors

The actors and their environment all adopt the dress, decor, and aesthetic style of the late 1930s, inspired by the shadowy and anxious atmosphere of film noir. The performers (unlike the audience members) wear no masks and perform in passionate, silent, group settings; solitary scenes; and, sometimes, choreographed dances.

The audience

Audience members are instructed only to:

• Remain silent and masked at all times^[3] once they have boarded the hotel's elevator up until the time they return to the Manderley Bar;
• Refrain from using phones or cameras.

Audience members are encouraged to:

• Wear comfortable shoes;^[1]
• Move freely at their own leisure for up to three hours, choosing where to go and what to see, so that everyone’s journey is unique;
• Exit the premises at any point;^[4]
• Follow one or any of the actors throughout the performance;
  • Maintain eye contact with an actor on occasions when said actor notices them (this could lead to a private one-on-one encounter with a character);
• Independently explore the many rooms of the building; in groups or alone;
• Investigate by opening drawers, examining the numerous written artifacts and other props found throughout the set.

The McKittrick Hotel

Sleep No More takes place at the fictional McKittrick Hotel, a reference to the film Vertigo (the McKittrick's fully functional Manderley Bar is a reference to another Hitchcock film, Rebecca). According to the fictitious description on its official website, the hotel was completed in 1939 and "intended to be New York City's finest and most decadent luxury hotel." The site goes on to explain that "six weeks before opening, and two days after the outbreak of World War II, the legendary hotel was condemned and left locked, permanently sealed from the public" until it was restored and reinvented by Punchdrunk and Emursive.^[5]

The McKittrick Hotel is actually three adjoining warehouses in Chelsea's gallery district at 530 West 27th Street. The address is the former home of megaclubs Twilo, Spirit, Guesthouse, Home, Bed and more. The 100,000-square-foot (9,300 m²) space has been transformed by Punchdrunk into "some 100 rooms and environments, including a spooky hospital, mossy garden and bloody bedroom."^[6]

Outside of Sleep No More, the McKittrick Hotel hosts several other venues and events, often to coincide with or complement the theme or setting of the show. The sixth floor of the building houses The Heath, a theme restaurant made to resemble a 1930s train car. The small indoor entrance to the sixth floor represents the train stop in a station, with a period advertisement board, train schedule, and newspaper booth (which serves as a box office for Sleep No More). Gallow Green, a larger rooftop bar to compliment the Manderley, sits atop the building. In the winter months, this is often converted to "The Lodge at Gallow Green", a large, cabin-like structure put up around the perimeter that gives guests a similar exploratory experience as Sleep No More while their food is being prepared.

The McKittrick Hotel is host to a number of events, sometimes related to the story and characters of Sleep No More, sometimes not. These include SuperCinema, an occasional dance party and masquerade themed around a film (such as The Wizard of Oz or Clue); Inferno, an annual Halloween party; and occasional parties and events for New Year's, Valentine's Day, etc. In November 2016, for a 10-week limited engagement, the McKittrick Hotel partnered with the National Theater of Scotland to bring David Greig's musical The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart to The Heath restaurant.^[7]

Reception

Critical response

Critics have compared the production to other works from a wide range of media, with New York Magazine’s Scott Brown referencing BioShock, Lost, Inception, and M. C. Escher, and The New York Times’ Ben Brantley referencing Stanley Kubrick, Joseph Cornell, David Lynch and Disney's Haunted Mansion.^[3] The production is mostly wordless, prompting The New Yorker’s Hilton Als to write: "Because language is abandoned outside the lounge, we’re forced to imagine it, or to make narrative cohesion of events that are unfolding right before our eyes. We can only watch as the performers reduce theatre to its rudiments: bodies moving in space. Stripped of what we usually expect of a theatrical performance, we’re drawn more and more to the panic the piece incites, and the anxiety that keeps us moving from floor to floor."^[8]

The show has received positive reviews in several publications including, The New York Times,^[2] New York Magazine,^[3] The New York Post,^[9] and Time Out New York,^[10] as well as a critical essay in The New Yorker and the cover article of the August 2011 Vanity Fair.^[11]

Audience response

As of 24 November 2016, the show currently has an average rating of 4 out of 5 stars on Yelp, based on 1,007 reviews, with over half of all reviews being 5 stars.^[12] Many longtime fans of the show (some of whom have visited the McKittrick over 100 times) have also created dedicated blogs on sites such as Tumblr, where they share their experiences, reviews, and derivative fan works based on the show, story, characters, and cast.

Shanghai

On 13th July 2016, Punchdrunk announced that Sleep No More would make its Asian premiere in Shanghai in the December of the same year. This would be the first co-production between Punchdrunk International and Chinese company SMG Live.^[13]

The Shanghai production of Sleep No More is housed in a disused building five-stories high, renamed the “McKinnon Hotel", in the Jing'an District of the city.

The original creative team behind Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More all worked on the Shanghai production, but the company is made up of long-term Punchdrunk collaborators as well as Chinese performers working with Punchdrunk for the first time.

The production will open on 14 December 2016.

References