Starting before 6pm six nights a week, a line forms on a warehouse-filled street on the far west side of Chelsea in New York City. In a neighborhood long known for its nightclubs and galleries, the eclectic mix of customers, young and old, dressed in business attire, evening wear, and jeans, comes as no surprise, but these aren’t club kids or art connoisseurs. These are guests at the McKittrick Hotel, waiting for their allotted entrance time.
Guests to the McKittrick leave their belongings at coat check, pick up their “keys” (playing cards each with a different number), and find their way through a nearly pitch black labyrinth into the nostalgic, late 1930s-era Manderley Bar, where they are welcomed by musicians, costumed servers, and an MC.
Groups of guests, summoned by card number so that members of the same party are generally separated, are handed white mouthless masks, taught the rules (no talking, masks must stay on at all times in the hotel, and you can always come back to the Manderley if you need a break), and ushered into an elevator with a mysterious, and mischievous, operator.
The elevator goes up. The door opens. Someone, or everyone, gets out. Welcome to Sleep No More: Fortune favors the bold.
Full disclosure: Some might consider me a fan of Sleep No More. I have been to the show three times in the last 18 months and would happily go back for more. It’s not just the emotional high of being in the dark with a lot to explore. It is also the seemingly endless puzzle it presents to me as a theatre maker. How does it all work?
Inside the hotel, nearly 100 rooms are ripe for exploration. The performers roam throughout, never speaking, conveying what story there is via choreography and movement, aided by moody lighting and an incessant soundtrack. Visitors can touch anything, open any unlocked door or drawer, and see a nearly infinite combination of scenes, empty spaces, and private moments. Every object has been addressed, from the minute detail of the letterhead on a file buried in a drawer in the office, to a specific antique wheelchair around which entire choreography has been created. The machinery of such an event boggles the mind.
The New York production of Sleep No More is a culmination of years of exploration and two previous productions. First produced in 2003 in a Victorian era boys’ school in the United Kingdom, the original production ran for only 10 performances, each of which accommodated 40 audience members (versus the nearly 400 audience members for each performance in New York, which includes six evening performances and two late-night shows a week, each lasting up to three hours). While working with the American Repertory Theatre to find a Boston venue for the Punchdrunk production of Faust, artistic director and creator Felix Barrett found the Old Lincoln School. According to choreographer and associate director Maxine Doyle, the school was full of “character and history and [reminded us that] everyone has an association in an audience.” The architecture, especially the long corridors, large windows, and altered feeling of perspective really spoke to the ideas of Sleep No More.
Barrett builds a map out of his first exploration of a new space, identifying the way the performance could inhabit the buildings and the paths that the performances and audience might take. And not all of the spaces have to be easy or safe. “In the most dangerous spaces, we’ll put the most threatening parts of the story,” says Barrett. The team needed to give the McKittrick its own identity, separate from previous incarnations, and let the architecture drive those changes. For Barrett, “architecture of the space totally defines the show.” This is clear in the spaces of Sleep No More. The long bars already present in the architecture became features of the choreography, out of which the hotel reception and foyer area developed as a holding ground for lots of action. Not all of these architectural influences are so obvious, however. Some of it is what Barrett refers to as emotional architecture—“lines of the walls and the staircases but also the feelings and the stories contained in the cracks in the walls,” he says.
The elevator entrance, however, is a Punchdrunk standard, first used in Faust as a way to disorient the audience using an intimate, small space. The elevator operator opens the doors at will; the floor numbers are covered; no one really knows when or where to get out. Giving the audience time to absorb the rules while also making it clear that the space is in charge creates a kind of sacred space.
Read Stages Of Sleep No More, Part 2: The Lighting and Stages Of Sleep No More, Part 3: The Sound.
Natalie Robin is a NYC-based lighting designer, the associate producer and production manager of American Realness Festival, a founding company member of Polybe + Seats, an associate artist of Target Margin Theater, and an adjunct faculty member at NYU and Brooklyn College.