You don’t flinch, or say a word, or shift your breathing. Half a beat later and she’s stretching still further to run her fingers through the back of your hair, almost like a dare. Instead, she reaches her arms out, impossibly, and runs her hands across your shoulders. You expect her to come no further, to suddenly whisk herself away into the darkness, luring the curious into her next scene, or down to the ballroom for an all-company dance or the show’s finale, a feast that ends in death. Nothing, not even a blink, to betray her character, nothing to break the fourth wall, which suddenly isn’t a fourth wall anymore, isn’t even four walls, but hallways and staircases and ballrooms and bedrooms and mental hospitals and graveyards. Can this be happening? You’re a spectator, not a performer, after all, and yet there she is, a few inches in front of you, staring deep into your eyes without a blush or a smile or a nod or a wink.
You are frozen solid by her deep, penetrating stare. That is, until she stands up and slowly starts to approach you. It must be an illusion, surely, because she seems too distant, too otherworldly, to be connected to anything around her. But as you watch the girl in the red dress’ every movement, seemingly protected by your anonymity, you become transfixed by the idea that, this time, she is staring directly at you. You’re allowed to watch from virtually any angle, even creep up and peer over a character’s shoulder as she writes a note. She doesn’t say a word, just silently draws you toward the table on the stage, where she sits down, deliberately putting on a pair of gloves as sultry music swirls all around.īy now you’re not the only masked person in the room, but there are only a few scattered here and there, and as you approach the table, you come the closest to the girl in the red dress. Just as you’ve stepped out again into the center of the room … the girl in the red dress appears. Like so many parts of the McKittrick Hotel, right down to the drawers and chests, the telegrams and handwritten letters, the area behind the bar is fully accessible, and you rifle through it-but you can only go so far before you have to turn back. Nothing happens at first, so you decide to explore the room, trying not to bump into walls. There’s a red curtain on the far wall, framing a small stage with a table for two, similar to those spread around the rest of the club-on one of which, for reasons you wouldn’t feign to guess, lies a baby doll, naked and bloody. You walk into a nightclub, dimly lit and filled with smoke, making it tough to tell where the room begins and where it ends. You’re wearing a white, Venetian-style mask. The following is our favorite story of the night.
SLEEP NO MORE ONE ON ONES WINDOWS
Throughout the three-hour performance-which to us felt like a stroll inside a David Lynch film-we had numerous adventures, from watching Lady Macbeth standing stark naked in a mental hospital bathtub, washing blood off herself, to peering through a tiny hole in the side of a shack, deep in the woods, to see what would happen when a fellow theatregoer was lured inside-only to have the door and windows slammed shut behind her. It’s disorienting, it’s fantastic, it’s Macbeth in ’30s dress. The show is set on several floors of the fictional McKittrick Hotel, and visitors are directed only to go wherever they desire inside the building, to experience the action in any way they choose-but to remain, like the actors most of the time, completely silent. Recently, Unwinnable had the pleasure of attending Sleep No More, an immersive performance by London-based theater company Punchdrunk, currently running in New York.
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