22. Go to 'Sleep No More'
With some authentic experiences (sexual harassment).
I dressed up for Sleep No More, and I’m now pretty sure that the people working in the bar serving as a holding cell for guests are instructed to comment on people’s outfits. Three different employees said something about the sparkles on my shirt, in a very similar tone. It made me hopeful that once inside, the same shirt would attract a performer and I’d get to have one of those elusive one-on-one performer interactions I’ve heard so much about. Sadly, this was not the case.
Both the people I went with had them, however, though I didn’t know that until after the show three hours later. I am still horribly jealous.
If you have somehow never heard of Sleep No More, a New York theater institution soon to close, it is an interactive play set up in the McKittrick Hotel. Guests wear masks and wander through many floors of rooms with different themes, and sets that change as the performers follow their pre-determined routes up and down stairs. Also following the routes are crowds of people trying to understand each character’s storyline, the performer at front leading the group like a mother duckling. You can go dozens of times, more probably, and see a different part of the story, which is loosely based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Unfortunately, I somehow managed to not see any storylines. Readers, I do not know what is wrong with me, but for almost the first hour I saw no one except other masked guests. I fell asleep for a little while on a bed in a big room decorated like a psych ward. Sometimes a group would rush past me as I wandered, but it felt beneath my dignity to run after the the train of joggers. Later, my friends told me that this night was far more crowded than they’d ever seen, probably because the show is about to end next month. Yes, I’d not gone all these years and like everyone else I was rushing to catch it before it was too late.
A lot of my experience of Sleep No More was like walking through a touchable museum of the macabre. One room I visited several times, a place hung with plants and filled with boxes stacked with jars, a Witch’s apothecary. I imagined living there, and being that witch and I enjoyed it. My own little play.
Bored, I kept going into darker corners. The first time I walked through a pitch black hallway, my heart was pounding, anticipating a jump scare like on a Haunted Hayride. Nothing happened over and over, so soon I was walking casually into doorways and around corners filled with nothing but the sound effects of ghosts moaning.
The first “performance” I saw was through the holes of a shed. Inside, a nurse character was with someone I thought was a guest who had their mask removed. I couldn’t see the nurse’s face, only the guest as she listened. The guest was very beautiful, with big dark eyes and long hair, perfect skin. She was almost too beautiful and the words the nurse was whispering to her played vulnerably across her face as I watched like a creep from outside. But she was dressed in a very modern outfit, and even had the telltale strap of a locked phone purse that many of us were wearing. Then the nurse stood and the way the guest reached out to her read as fake to me, like she was an actress as well. And I felt disappointed, like the thing I’d witnessed on her face that I thought was real was not, which should be expected at a play. Yet it was sad that it was fake anyway, somehow.
But then later, my friend Paris told me they had a one-on-one interaction with the nurse as well and they described more or less what I’d seen through the shed wall. So what was real? And maybe that’s the more interesting part of the show, and rare to see.
We were initially escorted to the play via elevator, where the operator warned us that not everything is “as it seems.” There are rumored to be many secret rooms, which quite a few people have seen. But there are also not-so-secret rooms that people don’t seem to enter much because of traffic patterns. I walked down an empty staircase and then through a door marked “Electrical.” It was indeed another complicated set piece inside, leading to a huge empty ballroom. I was standing there alone when it flooded with people chasing some of the cast. The actors enjoyed a scene up on a stage that was set with a banquet table, moving in slow motion through a bacchanal, covered in blood.
It went on like this.
Before my performing energy started going towards improv (sorry! It’s true!), I did a lot of experimental theater. I don’t talk about it a lot unless I’m drunk, but it was a bizarre social circle. Some of the men were predators, as you’d expect, some of them I still see in the occasional role on critically acclaimed TV shows. Everyone was very self-important and charismatic. There were a lot of frequently employed tricks to make something art instead of behavior. Flashing lights, long waves of music that lulled you past tedium to hypnotic ecstasy. But the best trick of performance that anyone can use and that I think is relevant to all life is that giving an action your complete undivided attention makes it compelling to watch. Attention is so powerful which is why in the past 20 years there has been such a social project of siphoning it away from people, fraying it, dividing it, stealing it. If you want to change your life, take your attention back. Track where you are putting it, who you give it to, who you want it from. Much of my attention goes into my phone and that’s a big problem for me. It’s a joke how much we are on our phones, but it’s also really not.
Anyway, at a play where your phone is locked in a bag, your attention is necessarily elsewhere and many of the actors at Sleep No More are putting their whole attentionussy into the smallest behaviors. I watched a hotel clerk carefully fold a playing card into a paper boat and it was enthralling. I wanted to be in the shed with the nurse, I wanted to have a hand reach out and sweep me away from the crowd because I wanted some of that gorgeous attention that only a theater actor working one of the greatest NYC gigs available in 2024, and who is about to be out of the job, can give.
By hour three, I was running out of gas. My strategy became going to places that were empty with comfortable seating and then waiting for whoever filled them. Back in the ballroom, a couple was dancing to the song “Moonlight Becomes You” by Bing Crosby, and the woman was obviously a trained dancer and the man was obviously not. As they finished and parted ways, the groups with them split in either direction and I stayed sitting against a column. A man in a white t-shirt, jeans, and a guest mask approached me at the back of one line. His arm reached out towards me, slightly to his side. The gesture was like you might make to tease a friend, so I thought for a second he knew me and I just hadn’t recognized him. His hand got closer and closer to my body, my chest, and alarmed I swung my own arm up to block him, hissing, “Get the fuck out of here.”
His hand dropped before we touched and he kept trailing forward, then turned and whispered, “Sorry!”
What the hell was that? I don’t know, but I didn’t like it. It was not welcome attention.
Shortly after #MeToo became a national issue, the performers at Sleep No More attempted to have a reckoning with the widespread sexual harassment at the show. Though I didn’t catch them, there are scenes with nudity throughout the play, and there are a lot of isolated corners where performers are absolutely susceptible to creepy guests who get off on having their faces covered. Theater is itself an institution that is ripe for abuse. And the world is full of people who are not turned on by sex, but by the power rush of taking advantage of others against their will for their own gratification. I’m not sure if anything changed after some of the brave employees came forward about their experiences, but I did feel like I was catching strays as a random female guest, so I’m alarmed for them.
The play is ending, so the matter is theoretically resolved. There are rumors of a similar production taking its place. Would I go? I think the ticket price is high and for the production values it should be. It’s also still lower than a lot of Broadway shows where you sit in one spot the whole time. I don’t know if I’d say that it was worth the cost in terms of actual fun, at least for me. On the other hand, my friend Amanda shared that she’d been taken to a secret room by the Taxidermist, who fed her a sugar pill shot full of green dye. If that had happened to me? I might be a convert.
Here’s the report from 2018 about the harassment and alleged assaults.
It me:
This experience has made me want to go to more theater, especially the weird stuff, so any recommendations are welcome. Seen anything you loved lately?
I saw this recently and it was fantastic—their Exponential Festival run is over but if they perform it again you should see it, it was very funny and sweet and strange. https://www.theexponentialfestival.org/twosisters