Punchdrunk Theatre Company’s American debut, Sleep No More, is a constructed reality that affects every part of your body; a sensual experience that excites and unnerves like a foreboding shiver running down your spine. It’s an interactive performance that reaches its most subtle and stirring potential, leaving the audience to alternate between chasing actors down darkened hallways, following them into their despair and madness, and freezing in horror when they turn their hollow eyes upon you.
Audience members are admitted into The Old Lincoln School one by one, pointed through a curtain and left in a pitch-black maze. The pressing darkness breaks at each turn by flickering lights. A series of turns brings you to another curtain where a flapper at Manderlay Bar greets you. You must then wait your turn to be called into the performance hidden behind one final curtain.
Once inside, this nuanced sensory experience will make you feel like you’re watching a movie from within the action, trespassing on private moments, transfixed, breathless, and deeply invested in the world spiraling around you. The other 300 audience members who wander the grounds become part of the experience. Silent and faceless, we’re hidden behind shocking white masks that reduce us to a pair of wide eyes that pierce into the Macbeths, literalizing the crushing gaze of judgment that eats away at this murderous couple....
Read the rest at PlayShakespeare.com
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