The actors (unlike the audience members) wear no masks and perform in passionate, silent, group settings solitary scenes and, sometimes, choreographed dances. Sleep No More tells the story of Macbeth, though the audience is given no programme and there is no speaking from either the actors or audience. The production “leads its audience on a merry, macabre chase up and down stairs, and through minimally illuminated, furniture-cluttered rooms and corridors.” Audience members begin their journey in a fully operational lounge, the Manderley Bar, from which they enter an elevator that transports them to the major floors of the “hotel” and sometimes ejects audience members randomly, separating them from their friends. The actors and their environment all adopt the dress, decor, and aesthetic style of the early 20th century, inspired by the shadowy and anxious atmosphere offilm noir. Sleep No More is set in a building with five floors of theatrical action, putatively called the McKittrick Hotel, though with many rooms and features not normally associated with hotels, including those which resemble an antiquated lunatic asylum, doctor’s offices, children’s bedrooms, a cemetery, indoor courtyards, shops, a padded cell, a ballroom, taxidermist’s menageries, and so on.
Sleep No More‘s presentational form is considered promenade theatre, in which the audience walks at their own pace through a variety of theatrically designed rooms, as well as environmental theatre, in which the physical location, rather than being a traditional playhouse, is an imitation of the actual setting. Sleep No More adapts the story of Macbeth, deprived of all spoken dialogue and set primarily in a dimly-lit, 1930s-era establishment called the “McKittrick Hotel”: the website of which claims it has been recently “restored” but is actually a block of warehouses in Manhattan, transformed into a hotel-like performance space. Sleep No Morewon the 2011 Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience and won Punchdrunk special citations at the 2011 Obie Awardsfor design and choreography. The company reinvented Sleep No More as a co-production with Emursive, and began performances on March 7, 2011. Sleep No More is the New York City production of a site-specific, interactive work of theatre created by British theatre company Punchdrunk, based on their original 2003 London incarnation (at the Beafoy Building), their Brookline, Massachusetts 2009 collaboration with Boston’s American Repertory Theatre (at the Old Lincoln School), and William Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
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