Still it cried “Sleep no more!” to all the house:
“Glamis hath murder’d sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more.”
–       Macbeth (II.II, 38-40)

A site-specific Hitchcock-Shakespeare mash-up, Sleep No More transports its audience into a world of the unknown, where hints of Macbeth’s story are scattered throughout an eerie 1930s setting. This ethereal experience takes immersive entertainment to a new echelon, with audience members following the actors through the contradictorily massive, yet sumptuously detailed, set. More like a theatrical take on the Choose-Your Own-Adventure books than traditional theater, the show’s artistic director, Felix Barrett, and choreographer, Maxine Doyle, accomplish the feat of articulating Shakespeare’s words through dance and the space alone. There is hardly any dialogue throughout the performance, nor much of a plot, so instead the show is driven by its atmosphere, with the lighting, music, and dancers’ passion setting a tense, sensual, and nearly tangible mood. Before the show begins, the audience is given Venetian carnival-style masks, and instructed not to remove their masks or speak throughout the performance (rules with which almost everyone complies). The masks successfully create a fourth wall between the audience and the actors, enforcing etiquette and serving as a constant reminder that this is the actors’ world, and the audience is only observing the private encounters they stumble upon. Occasionally, the audience is invited to enter this world, the actors’ unreservedly making eye contact, and even leading the lucky and willing into small, usually locked, closets and bedrooms to perform one-on-one scenes.

Co-produced by Emursive Entertainment and British theater company Punchdrunk, Sleep No More was originally performed at the Beaufoy Building, London in 2003, and then at the Old Lincoln School, Brookline Massachusetts in 2009. An online playbill for the Brookline production includes a cast list with bios, analysis of different props and their motifs, notes on Hitchcock’s influence in the show, and even a plot summary of Macbeth, all of which contrast dramatically with the shroud of secrecy surrounding the current NYC production. For the present production of Sleep No More, no playbills are handed out, motifs and stylistic influences go completely unexplained, and the show’s website actually gives misinformation about the location. According to the website, the performance space, cleverly named the McKittrick (a reference to Hitchock’s classic Vertigo), is a luxury hotel completed in 1939 but permanently sealed from the public six weeks before opening. In reality, the McKittrick Hotel is three adjoining warehouses in Chelsea’s gallery district. The address has been home to many megaclubs and is a massive 100,000 square feet. Punchdrunk and Emursive have rendered the space unrecognizable, transforming it into a labyrinthine time-capsule with some 100 rooms and environments, including an apothecary, graveyard, hospital, and ballroom. No map of the space is supplied, so every audience member is truly forced to explore on their own; minimal lighting throughout the set adds to the sense of discovery.

All of these elements of mystery and secrecy combine to give the audience a refreshing sense of isolation and the unknown in this increasingly technological, interconnected world. Whether you treat Sleep No More as a piece of theater or as an art installation, the actors and their world induce a childlike sense of exploration in everyone, and when it’s over and done and you’re surfing the web trying to find information and pictures of the show so you can recall every last moment, you will be sadly disappointed to the point that you question your own recollections. The virtual trail left by Sleep No More is astoundingly small, with only a few fan-made lists of songs to serve as a soundtrack, some pictures of the rooms, and a plethora of mesmerized reviews.

In addition to the brilliance of Sleep No More’s enigmatic strangeness, there is the allure of the raw emotion and personal experience of the piece. By forsaking language and communicating through dance alone, the actors’ are able to draw their audience in not through imagery or a removed plotline, but interaction and ambiance. The constant score – composed of 1930s pop songs, tampani-heavy beats, and the occasional house music – combined with the dim lighting, perfumed smell, and constant movement, makes sure the audience is always on the verge of horror, drumming up a creepier, darker environment than any single element could offer. The space is saturated with high-strung emotions, and it is this perceptible panic that keeps audience members running after actors from floor to floor. Both emotionally and physically exhausting, the use of dance compels the audience to focus more on human expression and body movement, making language seem almost distracting (as in a silent film), with the end result that the audience feels personally attached and affected by the dancers. (Hence the exhaustion: you become invested in every dancers’ movement.)

Sleep No More is a visceral experience that will overwhelm you, pass through you, and bleed into your reality. This show is not for the faint of heart; it transports its roaming audience to a deliciously eerie world of movable orgies, bloody nostalgia, and transcendent dancing, everywhere from the bathroom floor to the tops of bookshelves. Thoroughly original, defying existing genres of entertainment, it will both addict and intoxicate you with its astonishingly personalized and demurely erotic performance.  It will infect your dreams and haunt your memory with its uncomfortable beauty until you truly never want to sleep again.