Sleep No More

So, last night, I saw the most fascinating, guttural show I have ever experienced. No piece of theatre has ever done what this show did to me.
Yesterday an old friend, who I really can't thank enough, got an extra free ticket through work to the hottest show in town. Sleep No More is not on Broadway, it happens in three warehouses on W 27th where Punchdrunk (a British site-specific company) has created a fully decorated abandoned 1930s hotel. Complete with bar and live flapper music, the hotel is dark and terrifying and beautiful beyond measure. Upon entering each guest is given a ghostly mask and then sent wandering at their leisure through a pleasure trove of horrifying rooms. Floating from some of the graphic installations (a baby's room with nothing but an empty crib and a hundred headless stuffed babies flying just overhead perhaps) into bedrooms where you're welcome to open drawers, read letters, eat candy, and generally snoop, or step through a curtain and find yourself in an expansive forest, or literally chilling graveyard with dirt and statues and walls.
If the atmosphere and free range of the five floor set isn't enough, you may find yourself, as I did, turning a corner into a stairwell and coming face to face with Macbeth himself. All around you in the hotel the characters of Shakespeare's infamous play are also set to wandering. Reliving the play over and over in a series of movement and dance based scenes. Find Macbeth, follow him a while you'll watch him have a blood bath orgy with the witches and the devil, have a passionate row with Lady Macbeth, murder Duncan in his sleep, be washed by the lady in their private bath tub, kill Banquo, and so on. Follow Lady Macbeth a while and watch her spur on Duncan's murder, wash the blood from her husband, and dissolve into insanity in an institutional-like washing room with twenty stark bathtubs where the nurse puts her mad mistress in a tub to wash imagined or maybe real blood stains. Follow Duncan? See him have a restless nap plagued by nightmares and foreboding, pray helplessly in his private chapel, get a tense shave and shoe shine from his manservant, and watch the time tick down to his own death. Other characters are lurking through the hotel as well. You may stumble on the suite of who I assumed to be the Macduff's. In a small sitting area adjacent to an eerie nursery erratically dances the apparently mad with poison, very pregnant Lady Macduff and her deeply concerned husband.
The characters all join together before Duncan's murder for a silent dinner and lively dance in the main hall. Find yourself in the hall again later and notice the trees lining the walls have all moved signaling Macbeth's death. At some point I found myself one of the few masked ghosts in this hall when I was unexpectedly approached by an actor, a surprise as usually the actors looked right through the spectators as though we were truly mere phantoms. I could not see for the dark which character was speaking to me, but he came in very close to my ear so that I could feel the heat of his whispered breath on my neck and spoke some Biblical sounding verse ending in, "for the kingdom of God is holy as thou art," looked me right into my eyes and wandered out into the play. That was scary.
Actually, the whole three hours I spent wandering the play were full of fear, but also an unending amount of discovery and wonder. It was the most profoundly theatrical experience I have ever had. I will never see Shakespeare quite like this.