It absolutely creates a quality of encounter that is unforgettable, she said. Josephine Machon, the author of The Punchdrunk Encyclopaedia, argues that Punchdrunks command of the art form is unsurpassed. Its about really indulging the senses, Maxine Doyle, a choreographer and a co-creator of Sleep No More, said on that same video call with Barrett. This form, which came to be called immersive theater, has its origins in the Happenings of the ∦0s art world (or even further back, in participatory rituals and street theater).īut the intimacy of Punchdrunks work, the freedom and eroticism and sensuous style, made it feel sui generis. 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. Nothings 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 didnt permit standing 6 feet apart. Cut above the nose and across the cheekbones, it is intended to be worn with a white KN95 mask, which will be distributed at the door.Īs audience members enter, they will now be instructed to please give your fellow patrons and the residents a bit of breathing room and keep a respectful distance.ĭistance can be difficult when you are one of dozens of attendees chasing Lady Macbeth down a dim hallway. The new one is smoother, more streamlined. Masked audiences and unmasked performers are a defining feature of Punchdrunk, the company that created Sleep No More. The previous Punchdrunk mask was leering, avian, a variation of those worn by medieval plague doctors. The most visible difference? The white mask. I never saw an actor miss an eight-count. Dampness aside, Sleep No More looked ready. We walked for an hour, downstairs and upstairs and down again, looking in on card games and interrogations, spying on an erotic pas de deux.

(Guess the ghouls were off the clock?) In several rooms, industrial dehumidifiers added to the ambient sound.īoyd began the formal tour downstairs, in the ballroom scene, as the cast, masked and half-costumed gowns, sweats danced the night away. I had been scheduled to come a week earlier, but a pipe had burst. Literally every inch of this space has been touched in one way or the other, said Jonathan Hochwald, one of the shows producers. The ventilation system received an update, too. But beginning in the fall, the space had been thoroughly rehabbed and redecorated.

We joked that the ghouls looked out for us, Carrie Boyd, the director of performance and production, told me. 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 Beautys castle, then, ridiculously, of Pompeii. On an evening in late January, I arrived at the McKittrick Hotel in Manhattan 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.

Sleep no more