Methought I Heard a Voice Cry

leep no more. Macbeth does murder sleep.

I’ve wanted to write about The A.R.T./Punchdrunk production of Sleep No More for two months, but I’ve struggled with two hurdles: 1) I didn’t want to spoil the expectations of anybody in Boston who hadn’t yet attended, and 2) I could write an essay and still not capture the essence of the thing.  I went twice and wish I could’ve afforded to go twice more.  The installation is closed, now, and I need to commemorate it in my own memory.  Indulge me, those who saw it, and ignore me, those who didn’t.

I love Macbeth, as a piece of text and as a production.  I spent a whole semester of college wrestling with the staging as a member of the ensemble, and have half the play locked in my memory somewhere—so my instinct, when entering Sleep No More for the first time, was to reconstruct as many pieces of the original text as I could.  See that clever staging of the interrogation!  The witches, yes, and… ah, that must be Macduff!  Watch out, the forest is alive!  I was embarrassed to find—reading the program notes the next morning—that many of the elements I forced into the Macbeth narrative had their origins not in Shakespeare, but in Hitchcock.  I began to reframe my self-constructed narrative but, without the immersion of the installation, the details began to fade.  I had to go back, explore more, see more, be bolder, touch things, spend time with actors instead of chasing our tragic hero and his doomed wife.  Stop forcing the damn narrative, in other words.  The proposition of going to just be there was a new feeling for this jaded consumer of stories.  The world Punchdrunk built, for all its menace, was wholly seductive.

My second journey into that world was even more bizarre, memorable, and personal.  I’ll tell you about it sometime.

Everybody attends theatre for different reasons; everybody has a unique definition of entertainment.  For me, immediacy and immersion have always been the elements of theatre that keep it relevant.  So, keep that in mind when I insist that Sleep No More was the greatest theatrical experience of my life so far.  It was a masterful mix of indelible images, brutally demanding performances, and safe avenues to indulge your own voyeurism or desire to participate.

Incidentally, this Bernard Herrmann theme, a kind of welcome-mat to the installation, has trumped Vertigo in my brain’s association-map.  If my palette for Macbeth is hereafter mixed with Hitchock, I can likewise assume that the next Hitchcock film I see will stir up remnants of that haunted school in Brookline.

If you catch wind of a Punchdrunk production coming to your area, or mine, take note, and let me know.  I got the sense, dipping into Sleep No More’s history, that it takes an immense convergence of forces to make these kinds of installations happen.  Here’s hoping the good will this production garnered will drive this company to export more of their work to places we can reach.

Lastly: this installation was a photographer’s wet dream.  The small sampling of photos here barely capture it.