![]() The whole experience is so intense, and the conventions it creates and exploits serve to create a uniquely theatrical event “theatrical” in the sense that it can only be done as live theatre, with any attempt to transform it into film, text or interactive digital inevitably falling far, far short. ![]() The “gestalt” of the piece, however, is something which not even pictures can describe. The pictures give you a better sense of the “look” of the place than I can describe. You really have to click through to the interactive feature where you can view a photo slideshow with audio commentary on a few of the hundred rooms in this piece. The New York Times has a wonderful article on Sleep No More. If it sounds like a lot of work went into this, it has a team of artisans, shoppers and dozens of interns spent almost six months working non-stop on the physical production. You can wander into a room which looks like an office, open a drawer in a desk, open a book, and find a scrap of paper with a note written by one of the characters. Hundreds of rooms have been created with literally thousands of props, with excruciating levels of detail. The audience is given white masks to hide their faces, brought up an elevator in small groups, and set loose to explore the world and pick up pieces of the story. In other words, it’s “Shakespeare in the Dark”. For Sleep No More, Punchdrunk has taken a set of three connected warehouses and lofts in Chelsea (former site of one of the super clubs back in the day) and transformed all six floors into a noir-ish world straight out of Hitchcock’s Rebecca, with many of the story elements from Macbeth. The actors are interspersed throughout a venue, and the audience is free to walk around and watch whichever scenes they wish, or just explore the space on their own. Punchdrunk is a British theatre troupe known for their immersive brand of promenade theatre. I do not normally write about productions I see, but this was such a unique experience with a heavy reliance on props, so I thought I’d share.įirst, some background. This week, I took a chance to watch Punchdrunk‘s current New York City production of S leep No More. You may remember I previously wrote about Punchdrunk when I showed some Art Deco footlights I constructed for this production. The lobby of the McKittrick Hotel, where "Sleep No More" is set
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