Sleep No More

From Reddit user neilk:

Some people call Sleep No More "immersive theatre" but that doesn't explain the essence of the thing. The current production in New York is performed in a multi-story hotel. The play is going on in multiple rooms according to a very complicated schedule and the audience is free to move from room to room. Many things are happening simultaneously so you have to come back multiple times to see everything.

The audience wears white masks and must be silent. The performers act as if white masks aren't there. (Usually.) Also, despite being billed as a play, the story is mostly told through physical actions and dance. There are fight scenes, ballroom scenes, seductions, murders, suicides, and some really far out stuff that you have to see for yourself.

The style is film noir, but with a surreal, macabre, sometimes gory, always disturbing atmosphere. Unsettling music is piped in everywhere. You can spend a lot of time just examining the elaborate sets, which also reveal clues about the story.

Occasionally performers will grab members of the audience and take them off into difficult to access locations. This chosen person or persons might see a scene that few ever see -- indeed where the performers outnumber the spectators.

A friend of mine compares it to entering "The Black Lodge" from Twin Peaks.

Here is the magic of Sleep No More. 

About midway through my experience, I became desperate to ditch the crowd. The building is five stories tall and each floor is full of macabre secrets to explore. I kept climbing and climbing until I reached the top of the 5th floor staircase, where a petite woman in a black mask blocked my way and shook her head at me.

I stalked through the fifth floor door and found myself in an elegant Victorian family apartment. The decor was sumptuous in a Tim Burton-eque way, lots of old toys and antique furnishings and paintings of unsmiling people. When I found my way to the youngest child's room, I saw that the mirror reflected a different version of the room. The room I stood in was neat and tidy, the reflection room was disheveled and had a large dark stain on the bed.

I left the apartment and found myself in a long, pitch-dark hallway. The texture underneath my feet changed and I realized I was standing on dirt. The only illumination in the room came from tiny blue-white lights under the floor. I realized I was standing in an area made to look like a graveyard at night. A small dark shape loomed at the end of the hallway. The eerie, discordant music swelled as I got closer. It was an old baby stroller, painted black.

I was in the home of a family whose child has died.

I've never seen storytelling done so artfully and with such innovation.

This is how Sleep No More works.

You buy an entry time and arrive at a large warehouse in Chelsea. You're surrounded by young twee yuppie types.

You turn in any bags to the coat check. No bags, no cameras, no nuthin'. The people working the door and working the coat check are well-dressed in a slightly anachronistic fashion, somewhere between 1920s flappers and Victorians.

You continue forward through a dark hallway. The reservation desk is at the end of the hallway. You check in and get a playing card (remember this, this is important) before getting instructed to head up to the bar. The path isn't obvious and you have to make turns through tight, dark alleyways. It's disorienting. In retrospect, I view it as time travel.

You arrive at the Manderlay bar. It looks like a Jazz Age club catering to vampire private eyes. Art deco accents touch every surface and the decor is rich, red velvet. The drinks are apparently amazing, but I wanted to be clear headed during the experience.

Finally, they start calling us. My friend had a King card and I had a Queen. The staff stagger their entry times, preventing any group from remaining together. Sleep No More is meant to be experienced alone.

Your ticket gets called and you're ushered into a waiting area by John Waters and Delbert Grady's illegitimate love child. He hands you a bauta mask that fits reasonably well over your glasses and opens the elevator. You ride for awhile. He says the following.

*Sleep No More is an interactive experience and meant to be explored. Don't be confined to one space and don't follow the crowd. Explore at your own pace.
*The people in the black masks are there for your safety.
*No phones, no photos, no talking, no taking off your mask.

People are let off at different floors. We get off at the basement. Some people go right, I go left. I run into a statue of an angel holding a candle. The statue's face is ruined. I shudder and move on.

The story is basically Shakespeare's Macbeth set in a nebulous film noir Jazz Age, with a few added twists and turns thrown in. Familiarity with the core story helps, but it isn't essential.  They do take a lot of liberties and add on a lot of elements.

There is no dialogue in the play. Aside from the occasional shouted "no!" the entire story is told through dance. The choreography is brilliantly done. I have an idea of interpretive dance as being histrionic and pretentious, but the actors do a beautiful job telling the story through movement and expression. 

One of my favorite little add-ons is the story of a young woman looking for her sister. She wandered onto the speakeasy set and sat across a redheaded woman in a red dress. They pantomimed an interaction and, at the end, the madam ripped the girl's bodice and put red lipstick on her.

Hours later, as I explored the hotel set, I ran into the woman again. She had a suitcase with her and she looked like all the misery in the world had been heaped on her shoulders. She was also very, very pregnant. As she crept through the apartment, she unfurled a mirror and stared at her reflection. You could tell that she'd had some rough times. Her story was told without words, with movement and facial expression.

I kind of wish I followed her more. But there's so much stuff to do.

I get weird when I wear masks.

If I have one real complaint about Sleep No More, it's that the crowd is really oppressive. The concierge tells you that you're better off exploring alone, but most of the major set pieces are in central locations and tend to draw groups. I got sick of trying to shove my way into rooms and decided to go off on my own.

I wound up in a tiny lunatic asylum. I was alone. I was wearing a bone-white mask. I've seen Jason Voorhees stalk across the screen a hundred times. I have a stocky body.

I went to the examination room, where an x-ray of a body hung over a horrible bondage chair. I went into a nursery, where a bunch of dolls with severed heads hung over an empty crib like a ghastly cherub. I went into a padded room where the fabric of the walls had been ripped and soiled.

I was a monster in a monstrous space. I liked it.

Sleep No More isn't really theater and it isn't really a haunted house. It's an experience.

I hate interactive haunted houses because I don't like people startling me, but the actors inhabiting Sleep No More don't seem to care whether or not you're there at all. The first time I saw one of the performers, I was in the photography room of the detective's office. The other audience members were rooting through his files. All seemed to be ignoring the photos hanging up on strings criss-crossing the room.

I unclipped one and saw the body of a mutilated girl. Something was carved into her back but it was nearly impossible to see in the dim red light of the office. I tilted my head, stared at the photo some more, and wordlessly handed it off to another audience member. I remember how sloppily he took the photo and the way he stared at it like a witless dog. He might as well not have been wearing the mask. 

I would have kept digging around if the actor hadn't shown up.

He was tall, handsome, and dressed like he'd stumbled out of the photograph of the New Years Eve Party at the end of The Shining. He pushed past us, collapsed against the desk, and fell through the floor clutching his heart. After a few moments of panic, he got back up and stumbled out of the office, back towards the main street of the eerie small town set.

By this point, a crowd of audience members had clustered up behind him. They chased after him as he ran. I stayed behind. Once of the doors adjacent to the detective's office lead to a funeral home. I'd slipped in eariler to flip through the client roster and found the preparation room. A large steel door was affixed to one side. I was sure that the door would open up to the morgue and I wanted to see it for myself.

It never did. Dejected, I wandered my way back to the main street in time to see another actor, similarly dressed, stagger down the street as if wounded. A crowd of audience apparitions followed him, their bone-white bauta masks making them all look like specters in Old Navy cargo shorts.

The actor staggered through the streets, falling in the center of a dim spotlight. The crowd gathered around him like silent executioners. He picked himself up and continued through the set, toward the eerie tailor shop with the rusty scissors in the window held up with red ribbon.

I watched the whole thing pass me by. The two actor's movements were almost in perfect synchronicity. One character, trapped in a panicked loop, stumbling around in the dark over and over again.

For the first time in my life, I really understood what it must be like to see a ghost.

I had a really intense emotional reaction to the ending.

You're given a couple of hours to explore everything in the McKittrick hotel before the attendants in the black masks begin funneling audience members toward the basement. You go underneath the hotel lobby, down the church staircase, and enter the grand ballroom. 

All of Macbeth's lovers, friends, and victims return to him at a big banquet. Things degenerate into a brutal squabble and MacDuff leads a grateful Macbeth to his gallows. The play ends with a very realistic hanging.

I have a difficult time with hangings. I turned my head and shuddered. We were all filed up the stairs toward the exit. I glanced back occasionally to see the body swing by the rafters, a silhouette against dark blue lights, swaying to some tinny recording of a Bing Crosby jazz standard.  

Seeing Sleep No More was one of the best experiences of my life. I'm addicted. I want to go over and over again. It hits all my ghoulish buttons, it's beautiful in a very macabre way, and it creates a world I want to continue to inhabit. I've heard people compare it to Bioshock, Inception, Lovecraft, or a zillion other old-world mysteries and horrors.

I'm addicted. I can't wait to go back. You should go, too.

New York Times review

Gizmodo article

Excellent first timer advice

Slasher: A Horrifying Comedy by Allison Moore

I had a guest from my native San Francisco stay with me last weekend. He was a big Broadway fan and wanted to check out the shows in Times Square. While we were exploring the bright lights and garish ads of the heart of America, I took him to the Drama Book Shop. It's one of my favorite book stores in the world. It's full of young, hungry actors and old thespians with bored eyes. The shelves are chock-full of plays with blank covers and evocative names and I can spend all day browsing there.

Anyway, while he was flipping through a vampire paper doll book, I found a new play on the shelves. The cover was black and featured a screaming woman, a knife, and plenty of blood. Ten bucks later, I have Slasher: A Horrifying Comedy.



Slasher: A Horrifying Comedy tells the story of a broke young woman hired to take over a starring role in a low budget horror film. This doesn't sit well with her housebound mother, an embittered old hag with a host of psychosomatic illnesses and a persecution complex. As the daughter begins her movie career under the tutelage of a sleazy director, the mom schemes with a violent fundamentalist group to stop the production by any means necessary.

I wish I saw Slasher: A Horrifying Comedy performed live. It's an engaging story with interesting characters and some fascinating themes, and I'd like to see it performed. It's not a particularly long play and it's one of those very self-aware narratives where the characters seem to be doing as much commenting on the story as they are engaging in it, and I'd love to see how it plays live.



There are a couple of interesting ideas discussed in the play. First, the mother objects to the movie on feminist principles: horror movies degrade and commodify women and the makers are little more than vile sexist pimps peddling sleaze to an apathetic audience. As the play moves along, we learn that she uses her combative attitude as a way to avoid dealing with the world, but I found it telling that she allied herself with the bright young religious fanatic who firebombs abortion clinics. It's an interesting parallels for the way seventies-era progressive groups found their goals aligned with fundamentalist groups in their opposition of pornography. While their goals were ostensibly noble, they found themselves in bed with one of the most controlling and conservative groups in the United States.

Which is not to say that the poor people involved in the horror movie come off as a saintly victim. The director of the movie is an opportunistic sleaze with a darkly violent streak and the already beleaguered production descends into chaos. I can't tell if playwright Allison Moore is a genre aficionado with strong writing skills or someone who really doesn't like the genre, but the plays asks "who watches this stuff? Why do we find images of young girls being murdered so titillating?" As a life long horror fan, I'm used to a bit of finger wagging but this one is particularly sharp. I felt a little chided.



Anyway, if you dig Scream-style self-referential horror, gender and cultural themes, and a whole lot of grand guignol gore, give Slasher a read. I enjoyed the crap out of it.

Play Dead

Play Dead: When I went to see Play Dead I was lead onstage, stuffed in a steel casket, beaten with a crowbar, soaked in sulfuric acid, and my dessicated corpse was fed into a floor grate to the ghost of Albert Fish. I apparently went mad in the afterlife when the showman attempted to contact my spirit and I began chucking furniture around the theatre. It took the spirit of a sexy nude medium to bring me back from the dead.

The experience was one of the most memorable I've had as a horror fan.

Play Dead is an off-Broadway play/performance art piece created by Teller of Penn and Teller fame. It's a nifty fusion of ghost story, seance, and magic show, where famed Coney Island performer Todd Robbins tells a series of stories about madness, murder, and the Beyond.



At first, the play is simply a ghoulishly good time. Robbins' performance is pure Cryptkeeper glee. He unfurls the tales with such captivating theatrical delight that I felt like I was around the campfire hearing ghost stories as a kid. He accentuates the tales with amazing stage effects and feats of illusion. He also brings the audience into the fun. There are moments in the play when all lights, including the exit lights were shut off, leaving the audience in pitch darkness. My weirdo friend took the opportunity to freak me out by poking me while we were sitting in the darkness and I jumped about 30 feet in the air.

All the ghost stories are all creepy fun and it's worth seeing just for the fun of it, but the second part of the show moved me very deeply.

I've always found it fascinating that the most famous illusionists are the most vocal opponents of sham mediums. They know the tricks and take great umbrage at opportunists using them to take advantage of people's grief. While the end of the show gets a little melodramatic, Play Dead's message is ultimately moving: the horror genre exists because death is a part of all of our lives. We mythologize our fears in order to explore them and ultimately make a sort of uncomfortable peace with them.

Go see this.

The Addams Family Musical

Let me tell you a little story.

I came out to New York City around the end of January. Like most first-timers, I immediately gravitated to all the touristy shit, which included several awe-struck walkthroughs in Times Square. One of my very first trips led me to a theater that was proudly announcing a new musical based on the Addams Family.

I completely plotzed. It should probably come as no surprise that I am a huge fan of Charles Addams' macabre little creation and, like many San Franciscans, I'm a sucker for musical theater. Unfortunately the show wouldn't even begin its run until after I left. I decided to stick around this town and I'd go to the theater from time to time but Broadway shows are prohibitively expensive. This past week a relative came to visit and he offered to take me to the show. I was elated.

Now, I'd heard rumors floating around that the musical wasn't actually all that good. I'm generally of the mind that where there's smoke there's fire but New Yorkers are also a cynical lot. I went to the play last night with as open a mind as possible.

I wasn't disappointed.



Okay, maybe I was a little. The first act was much, much weaker than the first one. I'm told most Broadway shows lead with their best stuff, but Addams Family saves their best numbers for the second act. Also, perhaps it's because I've been spoiled by the fantastic Marc Shaiman score for the films, but I felt like the music didn't really fit the Addams spirit. For a macabre, ghoulish family the first act's music and lyrics were a bit too peppy and upbeat.

Therein lies my fundamental problem with the musical: I felt that their interpretation of the family didn't jibe with what I understood the Addams to be. The play centers around Wednesday, who falls in love with a sensitive poet type and discovers an affinity for smiles and sunshine and icky yellow dresses. Addams Family Values had a similar conceit with Wednesday's summer camp romance to the hypochondriac, but it was clear that she was still a vile little psychopath. Here, she goes all squishy and stays that way.

That's pretty much all I have to rag on it about. Let's get to the positives.



For all the songs in the first act that didn't feel like good fits for the Addams Family, the second act contained some really strong tunes that fit the family's romantically morbid streak, in particular the sexy "Teach Me How to Tango", the touching "Happy/Sad" and the chilling "Move Toward The Darkness", which laid out the family's philosophy nicely. While I bag on the opening act, the intro song "Clandango" was a catchy tune and a great way to introduce new audiences to the joys of the Addams Family. Finally, there's a substory about creepy Uncle Fester's infatuation with the moon and all his songs are probably the best in the show. They're peppy little ballads sung by a weirdo and infused with his goofy charm.

Second, you have to see Nathan Lane perform comedy live. When I think of Gomez Addams I tend to be fixated on Raul Julia's performance, with all his suave Latin charm, bad puns, and flair for romance. Lane's performance is more flamboyant and energetic but he really plays up Gomez's punny humor to great effect. The man knows how to deliver a line and his unique inflection is absolutely hilarious. If you're even slightly a fan of the Addams clan, you have to see Nathan Lane in the role.

The rest of the family is equally stellar. Lurch lurches, Gramma cackled (and they finally address whose mother she is), and Pugsley gets up to all sorts of near-fatal mischief. Bebe Neuwirth plays Morticia, the matriarch of the Addams clan. I always thought that Morticia would be the hardest Addams character to nail down because you have to walk a fine line between imperiousness and romance and she does a beautiful job of it. Morticia is put through a sort of midlife crisis that shakes her normally unassailable confidence, and it makes for one of the more interest story threads in the piece. Uncle Fester, the family's lovable weirdo uncle, has all the best songs and Kevin Chamberlin does an awesome job.

Finally, let's talk about Krysta Rodriguez, the young thespian who portrays Wednesday Addams. I already griped that the play too out her fangs, but....aw hell, she's hot. Not the most insightful commentary, but cut me some slack. I'm not Ben Brantley.



Man, I really suck at writing conclusions.

There's a lot of stuff to like about The Addams Family Musical: it captures the family's charm, Nathan Lane is brilliant as Gomez, and there's a lot of really good songs sprinkled through it. Not everything works, Wednesday gets the short end of the stick, and there's some stuff that falls flat, but the Addams Family has a Pavlovian effect on my psyche. I'm probably gonna go see it again with a Morticia of my own...