So the reason that I went to New York, when I really shouldn't be spending such gross amounts of money on extravagant trips or ANYTHING, is to see a play that I had heard would change my life. So I went to see it.
It is called Sleep No More, and it is a pretty amazing experience.
Brief Encounter remains the best play I've ever seen in my life, and the best experience I have ever had in a theatre. But that's partially because this is not a play, and this is not in a theatre. This is one of the weirdest, most challenging and exciting interactions I have ever had with a piece of theatre, or a piece of art. I had problems with it, large problems that, were I not in this kind of strange milieu, were I sitting in a theatre watching it, would have meant that I didn't like the show. But the whole experience (I keep using that word and I'm going to use it a lot, but I think that's all I've got for this one, vocabulary wise), was so amazing and transcendent and wonderful in so many ways that my problems are really insignificant in light of the project in its entirety.
And it was so impressive a project that I saw it twice.
I KNOW, I KNOW, BUT I DON'T HAVE TO JUSTIFY ANYTHING TO YOU!
AND HERE IS US AFTER:
Amazeballs. If you look carefully, you can see our minds are actually blown.
I think it's best to go in to the show not knowing specifics, which is not how I went in, but now I think might be a good idea. So I'm going to give some specifics, but won't encourage you to do what I did, or to do anything, if you do decide to go. It's your own journey. You create your own version of the show, and I think that's the way to see it. You're going to miss shit, and the shit you miss is going to be awesome. But you're going to see shit, too, and the shit you see will also be awesome. You have to strangely accept this, which is hard for me, and a large part of why I had to go see it a second time: I felt like I had failed as an audience member and not done a good enough job of seeing things. Looking back, though, that's just my own hysteria and neuroses. So I'm not telling you what to do, should you go. I'm not that kind of guy, you know?
Ok. So you go here:
Which is a very large warehouse compound in Chelsea, apparently three separate buildings that used to be nightclubs.
You get in a line with other people and no one tells you anything but everyone in line is talking about it, and everyone in line is already having some kind of feeling about it. We are a combination of excited, scared, unsure, hyperactive, skeptical. Everyone's talking about what we're going into and absolutely nothing has happened yet.
You go in and are given your ticket, which is a playing card, and a mask, which you put on and will wear for the entirety of the show.
Already the show is cooler and sexier than I will ever be and, while walking through a pitch dark, narrow corridor I will feel slightly saddened by this fact.
And then you are let loose in this massive, multi-story, enormous building to chase after characters as they do a kind of extrapolation from Macbeth.
And....it's great.
There's a lot about the show that was just so inspiring. The scope of it is enormous. Five huge floors, each with room after room. Space is transformed to create a graveyard indoors, or a dead forest maze that comes off of an asylum. There are rooms full of bathtubs, and rooms full of taxidermy. Ancient ruins and woodsy cabins. Banquet halls and clubs and bars. You go through room after room and get lost. The first time I was there, I completely missed the entire top floor. It's so big....imagine being able to be lost in a set. I was. For hours.
I don't know how you think to do a show this big. I don't know how you then get enough people to say 'yes', in terms of money, and time, and work that needs to go into it. I don't know how you make theatre this big happen, but it's amazing. I feel like in the work that I do, I'm conditioned to find problems before I can find possibilities. So often I'll have an idea that makes me light up, and when I tell someone, the first thing they want to say is, 'Now, it's going to be very hard to have a cast of six', or, 'I don't know if we can do that', or 'this can't be staged'. A project like Sleep No More requires, at several levels, people to say, 'This is not possible and it will happen anyway'. 'I do not know how but I will do this'.
How is this kind of thinking possible? Why don't I have it, or, when I do have it, why don't I have enough of whatever else I need to make others say 'yes'? Where can I get it? Costco?
Can we, as a community, make a pact to just TRY thinking this way? Maybe we'd create some good shit. Or at least build really amazing haunted houses.
And what really makes the hugeness of the project so incredible is the minute detail that fills every inch of this massive space. Every room is full of tricks and ticks. There's stuff in all the drawers, there's writing on all the pads of paper. The design is beautiful and spooky, rooms made of cardboard with playing cards nailed to the walls, or a crib with headless babies hanging over it. It's an amazing juxtaposition between the very big and the very small. The dancing mirrors this, and the story. Its a huge Shakespearean tale told, in many ways, through tiny moments. MacDuff forgetting about his wife at a party, while he dances with another woman (really a witch). Banquo and Macbeth changing shirts together before something terrible possesses them both. Malcolm shaving his father before they go to Macbeth's castle. The dancing flies and scales the walls (wow, do they ever climb the walls, gravity seems just another negotiable factor), but is also unnervingly intricate and precise. It's an amazing combination of dreaming big, while still knowing the devil is in the details.
Then there's this amazing idea that you create something that the audience viscerally wants to see. This moves beyond being 'on the edge of your seat', because you can literally and physically be propelled forward, off the seat, and chasing the action up six flights of stairs or down a hallway. You can get pushed out of a room where you so desperately wanted to see the scene. I hadn't seen any of Malcolm's stuff so I was determined to follow him out of a big group scene that marks a kind of looping point in the show. He ran out of the room, so I BOLTED after him, running as hard as I could up five flights of stairs. I was the only one following him and was so thrilled that I would see all of his stuff. And then, out of nowhere, two other people in masks came out on a landing between us, and he got away. I was so disappointed. It's rare that I want to see something so badly that I chase it down (other than ice cream trucks or Pauly Shore movies). But that's what this show makes you do. I always love shows where you see the actors sweat, and I love being in shows where I get to run, or that feel like running: shows where the characters fly and move so quickly through thought that they are physically in motion, even if it's all internal to me. That's the kind of stuff I like doing. So to have that feeling as an audience member was kind of remarkable. I have never been this exhilarated when I wasn't performing.
But, of course, I was, implicitly, performing in this piece. You can watch the audience in the same way you watch the show. Your presence factors in, you're slowing other audience members down, forcing others to run (especially if you're me, I got kinda pushy), you are standing somewhere where an actor needs to be, rifling through a prop that is soon to enter a scene. You're a weird, complicit, partner, a ghost in this haunted world.
Don't worry, I already put it on my resume.
I remember once being taught that speaking Shakespeare should feel like you have a knife at your back, so great is the need to speak. This was like watching with a knife at your back, so great was the desire, the need, to investigate, to see, to explore, to understand, to discover, to win.
I see a lot of theatre and going, much of the time, feels like taking tonic, like it is something that 'I have to do' or 'is good for me'. I stand in lines with other actors and we say that we don't really want to see this play, but we felt we had to, out of devotion to our friends or our heroes, out of the desire to be seen at the theatre and therefore remind other theatre goers of our existence, out of the hope that maybe we'll see something that is beautiful or terrifying or sexy or silly or enough to remind us that we want to keep working and we want to keep fighting. This is not to say that I don't see very good theatre on a fairly regular basis, because I do. But there is a difference in having to fight to watch. In having to make choices. Here, passivity, do stay in the same room and watch the action go through you, is a choice. So is pushing to the front of a mob of people to see naked bodies, or sprinting after a witch so hard you fall down (guess which ones I did). But they are choices, not defaults.
Ok, so I didn't get the story. Not really. I got moments from the plot, but they were isolated, and I know the play very well (I am, however, very stupid and often don't get things. This amazes me, how little I get in a a given play). Big stuff is there, the murders, who is on whose side. And the invented stuff particularly with the MacDuffs, was wonderful, and felt like it did, indeed, come from the text. But I don't know a ton about dance, so, to my untrained eye, the dancing sometimes got repetitive, and it didn't help me differentiate characters or moments. Everyone is in a kind of perpetual state of either lust, or paranoia, so I didn't really see character arcs. Everyone dances in a quite similar way, to me. Sometimes, I get this a lot with physical theatre, I could see that movements were specific, but I didn't know what they meant, so they end up just kind of being 'the dance of sadness' for me. And that happened.
But I did get a very strong sense of the feel of the play. It's a huge insight into fear. How scary it is to be alone in a world where witches can appear. How paranoid you get when there's darkness all around, when everyone's face is a mystery. There's also a fascinating duality between individualism and collectivism. Everyone's time there will be different, and there's a supreme desire, at least for me, to have an individual experience, to see something no one else will, to discover something new. There's also an immense comfort in moving as a group, in outnumbering the actors and forming the shadows or demons that are in their imaginations, or maybe even their realities. I moved back and forth constantly between wanting to stand out and be autonomous, and craving the other white masks around me, to protect me.
There's also something about the voyeurism, about insatiable curiousity, that compels us to break all the rules that we've learned in years of theatre going, to rifle through papers and get close to the performance. It's powerful and intoxicating, doing what you shouldn't, and as seductive as the power of a demon or the lure of a throne. The appeal of the dark side is overpowering, toxic, and that's such a presence in the script, and manifests in a totally sensory, palpable way. All of these feelings that are in the play are made flesh, if the actions are not. It's pretty cool. It's a pretty cool way of thinking about how to communicate. I know that I've been told to stop worrying about communicating feeling and just deal with action, that you can't act feeling, you can just do things, and I always hated that because I am the type of guy who would really like to just get up and cry and laugh because I am awesome at having and showing too many feelings and not so great at getting out of bed and making decisions and conquering Rome. This made me think that there is something to all the feelings I have, and there's a way that that can be made valuable and tangible to an audience, and as satisfying as watching concrete action.
It's pretty amazing to have a show that can challenge the rules you have been taught or you have accepted or made for yourself as an artist.
And then, after, it continues to work on me. My brother and I were pretty obsessed with it (and my brother is not really a theatre person. He occasionally works in theatre as a musician, but its not his medium of choice, although because of me and some other friends, he now sees a fair amount. He loved this show). So obsessed, that we spent a lot of time comparing our experiences and then trying to piece together the whole thing, so that we had a map of the show. Which looked like this:
Each column is a character and we wrote down what we saw them do, then tried to locate it in a timeline.
This took an embarrassing amount of time. And was worth every minute, because when we went back for the second time, we had plans, and were mathematically figuring out where to go.
I've been endlessly going over not just the technical stuff, of who goes where when, and what that means for where other people are, but been - actually - haunted by the images. Of the white masks roaming around darkened halls. Of rubber rooms with stray straight jackets in them. Of the taxidermy wing and the pile of salt in the corner of a tea room, of the feeling that someone was sneaking up on me, or watching me, or that I was somewhere I wasn't supposed to be and seeing something I shouldn't. It's been a week and it's still very much with me.
Exciting. Scary. Wicked, in every sense of the word. Yup.
If you need to be inspired and confused and enlightened and spooked and charged and pushed and left alone and forcibly moved and softly caressed, get out and see this show if you can.
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