The production explicitly conjures a dream-like state. What excerpts we see are atomized into small choreographic gestures that the actor-dancers can repeat for five minutes at a time, while spectators trickle in or out of the vicinity. Presumably everybody knows the rough outline of Shakespeare’s play, but the actors don’t perform “Macbeth” from beginning to end at all. “Sleep No More” is a lot like that, on a somewhat grander scale – you can run yourself ragged in three hours, tromping up and down stairs – but the narrative experience is much less complete.
#Punchdrunk nyc sleep no more full#
Full of intrigue and melodramatic action, the play took place all over a giant house, so no two viewers would see the exact same play – by choosing to follow one scene, you’d miss out on another, so you’d have to constantly extrapolate from small bits of information or catch up at intermission with other spectators. Written by John Krizanc and spectacularly staged by Richard Rose, “Tamara” centered on the love affair between two artists in Mussolini-era Italy, Tamara DeLampicka and Gabrielle D’Annunzio. My main point of reference for “Sleep No More” is “Tamara,” a legendary theater piece that I saw when it premiered at the Toronto International Theater Festival in 1981 and later when it was mounted at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, after a long high-visibility run in Hollywood. There have been numerous similar events in New York theater in recent years that kept the audience on its feet interacting with the performance – “De La Guarda” and “Fuerzabruta,” “Tony and Tina’s Wedding,” “The Donkey Show” (an adaptation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” performed in a disco with the characters singing or lip-synching to 1970s classics). 3) Fortune favors the bold.” After that, you’re on your own to poke through the rooms (hotel rooms, apothecaries, children’s bedrooms, a psychiatric ward, a ballroom, a fabric shop, a loft-sized labyrinth with 10-foot-high walls made of sticks, to name just a few), follow characters around and witness their wordless interactions, and/or create your own intermission and meet friends in the bar to exchange notes on what you’ve seen. When you arrive, at one of three staggered entry times per night, you’re given a beaky face-mask, piled into an elevator, and dropped off at a random floor with only three instructions: “1) Keep your mask on at all times, and keep your mouth shut. For the occasion, the company took over a former nightclub space in far west Chelsea – three warehouse spaces six stories high – and built 100 separate rooms or environments to house the production. “Sleep No More,” an adaptation of “Macbeth” bounced off of images and settings and music taken from Hitchcock movies (“Rebecca” and “Vertigo”), is the company’s New York debut, and it’s a doozy. In the English theater company Punchdrunk’s site-specific productions, audience members explore a sprawling environment to create their own individual, non-linear experiences. McKittrick Hotel, New York City, through June 25, 2011
Directed by Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle
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