“Of course. Of course on my 21st birthday – instead of having a nice dinner, instead of sipping wine on the top of the Empire State building – I would find myself racing through a pitch black, narrow, steel corridor, in the middle of the night, on the way to see a satanic ritual in a club with a crowd of people in white masks.”
That was probably the most complex thought to enter my head during “Sleep No More”. Other notable lines: “I wish to god everyone else I know was here to see this.” And also that line that Edward Norton keeps muttering in "Fight Club": “Was I asleep? Had I slept?” Most everything else I felt was visceral, a heightened awestruck wonder, delicious thrills of dread. I didn’t think in sentences; my mind moved in a daze, lingeringly. It was a dream come to life. I was wandering through a dream. Time periods and settings and references melded into each other (Elizabethan meets 1930s mansion meets Alfred Hitchcock movie meets Catholic church), doors in dark hotel corridors opened to cemeteries, to forests.
We showed up at the McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea at 7pm. Before being allowed in we were each given a playing card – mine was the 9 of clubs – and ushered into a barroom decked out in red velvet with all the dim haziness of a 1930s jazz club, complete with stage and crooner. After sitting in nervous anticipation and sipping sangria, the maître d’ assembled us in stages by card number, handed us white masks and ushered us into an elevator. We were let out variously at the 5 different floors of the hotel, and from there the fun began.
Brief introduction: “Sleep No More” is a loose adaptation of "Macbeth" – very loose. It's almost completely wordless, for one - what little narrative there was expressed fully through movement, more performance art than acting. The actors moved individually through the space and the masked audience members were free to follow whomever they wanted at any given moment, or not at all. Characters were vaguely identifiable: there was the guilt-ridden, haggard Macbeth, his glamorous, pretty wife clad in luscious black ‘30s gown, the pregnant Mrs. Macduff who was fed poison by a solemn icy blonde unofficially named Mrs. Danvers (see Hitchcock’s "Rebecca"). The trio of witches was terrifying: a bald lady with staring eyes, a cropped-haired Chinese lady with a dancer’s bony sinuousness, and a man… well, more on him later. Anyway, these characters often encountered each other in what Punchdrunk calls “situations,” in which gracefully balletic, sensual battles would take place, choreographed with writhing, aggressive, acrobatic precision. Some were sad, some were savage – I saw 'Mrs. Danvers' leap onto a door that lay flat upon a man’s back. Some felt very cinematic – the final scene had all characters seated at a long dining table, Last Supper-esque, twisting themselves around in slow motion to witness Macbeth’s death. Some were just fucking crazy – I witnessed what I can only describe as a satanic ritual in a club setting (extended strobe light!) where the 3 witches presented Macbeth with a bloody newborn baby and the male witch put on a giant goat’s head mask and stripped completely and the other witches mimed going down on him.
Yeah. Well. Being me, I was more interested in the set than the performances, so I spent a lot of time breaking away from groups for dedicated exploring. The big chambers are most of what people talk about, and justifiably so because they are wonderful: a taxidermy room (lavishly stuffed birds and deer and… weasel? looking straight out of the Natural History Museum; I picked up a little sparrow and felt its cold soft feathers in my palm), graveyard (in the misty far corner, a black shape, which on closer inspection proved to be an empty baby carriage a la "Rosemary’s Baby"), apothecary (huge bouquets of herbs hanging down from the ceiling, boxes replete with dried mushrooms, peculiar bones, powders, the air thick with spice). Rooms covered floor to ceiling with crazed chalk scrawling. A long room with 2 rows of old-fashioned white bathtubs filled with bloodied water, in which Lady Macbeth had her famous guilty meltdown. Another long room lined this time with empty hospital beds, which I found myself in completely alone to my terrified delight (I made my way through the chill to the dark end of the room, in which I could just make out the shadowy shapes of tiny children’s rocking chairs, rocking. When another audience member came in behind me I jumped about 5 feet). In the basement, the forest of Birnham was a cluster of crisply smelling pine trees. Walking through them towards the end of the play I saw the trees moving out of the corner of my eye, then realized they were on wheels (doesn’t "Macbeth" have the loveliest imagery?). Then there was my particular favorite, a snowy wood on the top floor – a maze of wintry trees bathed in blue moonlight, with a stuffed white goat in a clearing (which my dad identifies as a devil symbol) and in another clearing, a locked, glowing thatched hut. A lovely, silent, magical place.
I also found a special pleasure in stumbling into the tiny, but still lovingly designed, rooms off to the side of the main setpieces. Maybe because they were small and I’d often be the only person in them (so I could really pretend to be in a dream, walking the halls of my own mind) but because the design in such small spaces made a statement in one quick, breathtaking second of apprehension – more immediately dramatic, then, than having to meander through twists and turns, only viewing a fraction at once. I’m thinking of the little baby’s room I found, with a cradle in the center and a single lightbulb dangling over it, and a flock of headless baby dolls suspended around the bulb as if frozen in orbit. Their silhouettes swayed ever so slightly on the walls. Or the padded cell I discovered in the asylum section of the top floor, conspicuously cramped, the stuffing of the walls ripped out and strewn all over. One of the best rooms was indeed a little one: a seemingly innocuous children’s bedroom with a single bed and dollhouse; until one turns around to face a two-way mirror reflecting the same room completely bloodied after a massacre.
Not having read "Macbeth" previously (Yeah. What a loser. I had to force my brother to give me the cliff notes summary version in the subway on the way to the play) I suppose I missed out on a lot of the more subtle literary references (eg. why was there a book called “The Golden Lure” in the Macduff children’s bedroom?). But I did manage to get a couple more general inside jokes, especially when I took the time to examine my surroundings in more detail – the record in the record player in the music room, for example, was named something like “That Red-Haired Female Fox”; similarly all the food on the restaurant menu was Scottish. Afterwards that night we talked about it for hours. Every one of us, of course, had a different experience – my mother saw the actress playing a nurse pick an audience member and bring him into the thatched hut in the wood to drink tea (“Isn’t that the most nightmarish scenario ever? You’re in a little hut, in a dark wood, drinking tea, with a nurse?! The poor man!”).
It’s ostensibly called theatre, and of course I understand why, but to me the experience felt most like film in its particular immersive quality. Like the film camera, wherever I turned I encountered a new space, a continuous world that expanded beyond the limits of a proscenium frame. It’s basically a hybrid: film plus the immediacy and wild unpredictability of live performance, theatre plus complete submersion. I urge everyone to try their damnedest to watch a Punchdrunk production if it’s at all possible. Previously they did an acclaimed adaptation of “the Duchess of Malfi”, which pains me so to think about – that’s why the theater (and live music, and anything live, really) remains so inescapably sad to me, especially in this day and age of streaming and replay and documenting. No other art forms make me so horrible conscious about, to borrow a phrase from “Arcadia”, “what Time means”: things happen once, then they’re gone forever, leaving you gasping at the overwhelmingly fleeting present. The end is always waiting.
this is brilliant. every blog post you have (or most of them at least) is like an A+ essay.
ReplyDeletecan't wait to hear about the other parts of New York!