Every few months or a year, the company would rethink a room, a way to reward repeat visits. Barrett began to seed the rooms with surprises for dedicated audience members. When rumors circulated of a secret sixth floor (the rumors are true), fans competed for that experience, too.Īfter initially resisting this approach, Punchdrunk soon relented. On return visits, I found myself being shoved as spectators fought to stand in the best spot to secure a one-on-one, an encounter in which a performer pulls you aside, removes your mask and acts out a scene just for you. Gawker published a guide to all the nudity.
SLEEP NO MORE SHOW CRACK
These spectators wanted to optimize the show, to hack it, to crack it. “I still am very confused as to how it all works.” “The puzzler in me loves the machinations,” he said. The actor Neil Patrick Harris, so entranced by the show that he has guest starred twice, found himself drawn to those elements. Some spectators, reared perhaps on video games and puzzle hunts, approached “Sleep No More” as a riddle that needed solving. The show had to hire design maintainers to check the rooms after each performance. “In America, there was an enthusiasm to ransack the place,” Barrett said.
“Nothing in my outside life existed when I was in the hotel,” she said.įor others, immersion wasn’t enough. Sara Gaynes Levy, a freelance writer, described her first experience at the show as complete immersion. After failing to secure a space in Manhattan, they moved their search to Boston, where Weiner’s wife, Diane Paulus, had recently taken over the American Repertory Theater. He wanted to bring their extravagant adaptation of Goethe’s “Faust” to New York. Randy Weiner, a co-owner of the nightclub The Box, first saw Punchdrunk’s work around the same time. The wardrobe hid a secret passage that let out into a fireplace (unlit!) and as I crawled out, I remember feeling that I had wandered into my own dream. At one point, I wandered away from “The Fall of the House of Usher” and into a room with a wardrobe. That show, “ The Masque of the Red Death,” repurposed the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. I first ran across the company in 2007, in a former town hall in the Lavender Hill neighborhood of London. It “absolutely creates a quality of encounter that is unforgettable,” she said. Josephine Machon, the author of “The Punchdrunk Encyclopaedia,” argues that Punchdrunk’s command of the art form is unsurpassed. If you came with friends, each of you might piece together an entirely different experience, then meet at the bar to debrief afterward. Spectators can chase after the actors, enjoying wordless, dance-heavy scenes, or linger alone in luxuriant rooms - reading letters, sniffing herbs. A typical Punchdrunk show plunges masked audiences into sumptuous spaces and lets them choose where to go and what to see. Barrett had founded Punchdrunk in 2000, pioneering a type of environmental theater that transformed deserted buildings and disused factories into strange new worlds. It sounded mostly like a promise and a little like a threat.Īs Barrett tells it, “Sleep No More” first arrived in New York almost by accident. “Nothing’s going to wake you from the dream,” Felix Barrett, a co-creator of “Sleep No More,” told me during a recent video call.
And after two years of a pandemic, will New Yorkers really want to come back to something this macabre? Knowing New Yorkers: probably. Even at that sparsely populated rehearsal, there were rooms that didn’t permit standing six feet apart. “Sleep No More” is a Hitchcock-inflected version of “Macbeth” and walking through its Highland noir rooms, uninhabited for nearly two years, I thought of Sleeping Beauty’s castle, then, ridiculously, of Pompeii.ĭistance can be difficult when you are one of dozens of attendees chasing Lady Macbeth down a dim hallway. On an evening in late January, I arrived at the McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea for a rehearsal visit and a tour. 14, for those who prefer their Valentine hearts still bloodied, “ Sleep No More,” will reopen, with new masks, new protocols and a fresh commitment to total immersion. Performances were to resume last October the Delta variant changed those plans.įinally, on Feb. The March 2021 date that would have marked its 10th anniversary came and went. “ Sleep No More,” the dark and dreamlike show that reshaped the landscape of participatory theater, left its performance space intact when it closed the doors on its dozens of rooms in March 2020. So have the lamps, the cards, the dolls, the crucifixes, the trees, the mounded salt.