So, all of the stuff for this show-some of it we kept from Boston, we shipped over from Boston, but lots of the bits of the detail and the furniture was from New York and upstate. Part of their job in the States, in New York, was actually to go shopping, kind of far afield, to all those amazing fairs that there are in the States. There’s that team, and then there’s a whole group of volunteer designers. SYMONDS: In terms of the production design, where was everything sourced? Have you started anew with each new space, or have you taken a lot of stuff with you?ĭOYLE: We have Felix, and then there’s two other designers, Beatrice Minns and Livi Vaughan, they’re associate designers. I worked very closely with the performers and the cast, to create this kind of athletic and sometimes extreme, sometimes really emotionally driven choreography. MAXINE DOYLE: I started working with the company eight years ago, when Felix was looking for a choreographer … we started to bring a real sort of physical, visual, performance language, to take the characters and the structures and the relationships and situations of Macbeth and create a physical language for that, which works very much in collaboration with the space and the design. What would you say your main role has been? Doyle’s keeping busy-Punchdrunk is opening a show for children at the Manchester International Festival at the end of July, and another show for adults in London later on-but she found time to chat from home in the UK.ĪLEXANDRIA SYMONDS: Sleep No More is such a completely different experience than any other theater I’ve seen in New York. The choreography is the work of Maxine Doyle, who with Felix Barrett directed the show, which took up residence in the McKittrick after a successful run in Brookline, Massachusetts. Audiences are encouraged to rifle through drawers, open cabinets, and fully immerse themselves in the reality of the show-and to follow the performers, who act out themes and scenes from the play in balletic, intensely physical style. It’s a site-specific interpretation of Macbeth (with some Hitchcock Rebecca thrown in for good measure) that fills every nook and cranny of the hotel’s six stories with evocative, intricately detailed sets-a mental ward, a cemetery, a ’30s-style hotel, that fateful banquet hall. Sleep No More, a production of the Emursive and Punchdrunk theater companies, is a dramatic experience unlike any other in the city. The McKittrick is a beautiful, haunting space and it’s perfect for the project that’s reopened it, 72 years later. Completed in 1939 and designed to be the most luxurious hotel in New York, it was condemned and shuttered two days after the beginning of World War II. Tucked deep into an unremarkable block on West 27th Street sits the McKittrick Hotel. All the same, stumbling groggily up and down staircases and around darkened hallways gives the night the sludgy, abstracted aura of a nightmare.A SCENE FROM SLEEP NO MORE (THOSE IN MASKS ARE THE AUDIENCE MEMBERS). The only caveat I would offer is to attend Sleep No More fully rested: You need your wits about you. A Shakespearean can walk about checking off visual allusions to the classic tragedy the less lettered can just revel in the freaky haunted-house vibe. I chose the latter, discovering a room lined with empty hospital beds a leafless wood in which a nurse inside a thatched cottage nervously checks her pocket watch an office full of apothecary vials and powders and the ballroom, forested with pine trees screwed to rolling platforms (that would be Birnam Wood). You can follow the mute dancers from one floor to the next, or wander aimlessly through empty spaces. troupe Punchdrunk, have orchestrated a true astonishment, turning six warehouse floors and approximately 100,000 square feet into a purgatorial maze that blends images from the Scottish play with ones derived from Hitchcock movies-all liberally doused in a distinctly Stanley Kubrick eau de dislocated menace.Īn experiential, Choose Your Own Adventure project such as this depends on the pluck and instincts of the spectator. Directors Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle, of the U.K.

Your sense of space and depth-already compromised by the half mask that audience members must don-is further blurred as you wend through more than 90 discrete spaces, ranging from a cloistral chapel to a vast ballroom floor. A multitude of searing sights crowd the spectator's gaze at the bedazzling and uncanny theater installation Sleep No More. To untimely rip and paraphrase a line from Macbeth: Our eyes are made the fools of the other senses, or else worth all the rest.

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