Sleep No More

On Halloween night, @melissachusetts and I attended the A.R.T. production Sleep No More. This production is sort of hard to describe but imagine if Alfred Hitchcock directed an almost-silent version of Macbeth set in the thirties inside a big weird old hotel. And now imagine instead of watching it on the screen, you were like a ghost haunting the place and watching it all unfold, free to go wherever you pleased. I know it sounds weird, but it’s probably way weirded than it sounds. And awesomer.

Sleep No More is staged by a British theater company called Punchdrunk inside a creepy old abandoned high school in Brookline. They’ve converted the school into what they describe as “an installation of cinematic scenes”. And I really think cinematic is the key word here. As an audience member, you have the freedom to roam the hallways and poke around in the characters’ bedrooms, each outfitted in incredible detail. Every direction you turn your head looks like a beautifully lit scene out of some horror film noir.

Each of the characters of Macbeth play out their individual storylines all over the four floors of the building. There are secret rendevous in studies, discrete liasons in bedrooms, weird sex demons in hallway lockers and huge climactic scenes in forests and dining rooms. And that’s just the 5% of the production I know about. It’s insane.

Melissa and I were immediately split up and spent the next couple hours exploring the space independently which the staff highly recommends and I can understand why. We had two completely different experiences. Melissa’s included being abducted by one of the principal characters and whisked into some kind of secret room where this woman gave a private performance so compelling that Melissa is still having dreams that she can only describe to me as “NSFW”. Hmm…

I would highly, highly recommend checking this out. It’s a once in a lifetime type of experience (unless you go to see it twice which I am very likely to do). Thanks to IB pals Megan Goltermann and J.R. Strauss for recommending this one.