'Sleep No More,' Naked Women, and Stubborn Twenty-Somethings

Last Saturday, I experienced something amazing. A woman I have never met came up to me in a run down hotel, grabbed my hand, and forced me to run with her up two flights of stairs before stopping in front of her bathtub and undressing to complete nudity. She then said I smelled odd and noted my soft skin before falling backwards in the tub and washing off blood from her body, (she claimed the blood had come from two recent murders her husband had committed). Being gay, I was a bit shocked to have a naked woman inches away, telling me how soft my hands were. The blood and murders, however, were not shocking at all: her name was Lady Macbeth.

Punchdrunk, a British theater company, has transformed three abandoned New York City warehouses into "The McKittrick Hotel" for an avant-garde rendition of Shakespeare's Macbeth in a production entitled Sleep No More. This piece of interactive theater has been widely praised by most everyone who has seen it, and I couldn't agree more. The theater company, made up of one speaking actress, (my own captor, Lady Macbeth), and about a dozen other dancing actors, races around the five floors carrying out the scenes of Macbeth, anachronistically and simultaneously. No single person will see the entire play from beginning to end, it's designed specifically to avoid that, but, by repeating the production three times over three hours for each audience, each participant in the string of murders can see enough to piece together the great Shakespearean tragedy.

Audience members, which, as I have used above, are more like participants, must wear masks and choose which rooms and haunts they wish to view. Some may spend three hours perusing the 1920's era books in the library, others may spend the majority of their night listening to old time jazz. Still others will witness Macduff's prophesied birth in a naked blood orgy accompanied by witches, warlocks, strobe lights, and house music. You decide. That's why it's genius.

Beyond the novelty that each participant must actively engage in their viewing in order to fully enjoy it, the production is simply beautiful. Because the production avoids speech for the most part, the actors rely on their settings, dance, the audience, and simply facial expressions to move the play along. Some of the most satisfying moments come when one off vignettes conflate into beautiful scenes such as a waltz of eight characters on the ballroom floor, or the murder of Banquo in an old saloon. A working knowledge of the play is beneficial, given very little dialogue occurs, but not essential. The play relies fully on emotion, mood, and insanity to convey the tragedy. If anything, after viewing the production, you will run to the closest used book store, purchase a copy of Macbeth and try to understand why all these trees kept getting closer and closer to the castle.

After my viewing, which ended in me breathless, (both by the performance and the endless running), I had the opportunity to meet a friend of a friend who had also seen it. His views on the play were much different than mine. He despised the use of the term 'revolutionary' to describe what he had seen, as many professional critics had done in their reviews. The play was nothing more than a farce of theater, he claimed, abandoning chairs but not actually involving the audience into the plot as he felt true interactive theater should do. We went back and forth on the issue, each of us unwilling to concede our points, until finally we compromised on alternative definitions of "interactive." I felt interactive was anything that put the audience past the fourth wall, he felt interactive was anything where the audience became an additional character in the production.

In any case, Sleep No More, has become somewhat of a phenomenon. It has been extended multiple times and has drawn in well known celebrities as participants. Lured by the requirement that all must remain masked, the production has become a sort of masquerade ball of old times past where all different walks of life partake in the same entertainment, no one knowing who is there sharing the experience. I hope to see more productions follow suit. Who knows, maybe it will even move over to the West Coast so I don't have to take a plane to see it.

For more information on purchasing tickets, click here: http://sleepnomorenyc.com/