(If you plan on seeing it, I’d advise you to bookmark this now and come back afterward. In effect, we were to be passive ghosts in a haunted house. The only rules were to wear the mask and become mute for the entirety of the performance–meant to highlight the anonymous voyeuristic nature of theatre–and to not initiate touch with an actor. I knew very little of Sleep No More before I attended except that it had murder as its central theme: a mash-up of Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the action takes place within the McKittrick Hotel (actually three connected warehouses in Chelsea), where over 100 decorated rooms provide the setting for the actors to move about and perform, the audience given a freedom to choose whom, where, and when to follow. One example will thrill fans of AMC’s The Walking Dead, as Zed, an immersive take on a zombie apocalypse, is set to open in our city late this year. The success of Sleep No More, no doubt, will encourage more artful immersive experiences to come: in fact, NOW forecasted a 2012 trend of up-close and personal” performances. Often it can come off as gimmicky–think mainstream examples that involve solving murder mysteries or cheering on pretend knights. The concept isn’t new (as Michael Coveney of Prospect notes, the Living Theatre of America in the 1960s held shows where the “actors and audience copulated on stage together,” and Toronto in the early 1980s had a show about Naziism called Tamara that was set in a house) but isn’t widely attempted because of its complexity to execute. Sleep No More is the most prominent example of bringing interactivity into the theatre. For much of 2011, a plastic beaked mask sat on a shelf in my house–a souvenir from a summer trip to Manhattan with a good friend, during which we had seen Sleep No More, the big ticket “immersive theatre” show that recently landed on year-end top-ten lists for Time, New York, and Entertainment Weekly.
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