Sleep No More is on at the McKittrick Hotel through May 27.
A memorable episode of HBO’s Girls (2012– 2017) takes place during an immersive theater performance. Hannah (Lena Dunham) and co. are there to support Adam (Adam Driver), who has a part, but the self-directed roaming through rooms across an apartment complex ends up facilitating whisper-shout side conversations and dramatic revelations about the friends’ own lives, not the play. “This play is super unrealistic,” one of them decides, before turning to Hannah to ask, “Do you think I deserve all of the things that are happening to me?”
When the episode aired in 2016, the tagline “immersive theater” was having a moment, if not already approaching the end of its hype, making Dunham’s usage a perfect parody. That same season, the New York Times recommended eight productions that offered groups of strangers opportunities to bathe an actor, strategize against a fake zombie invasion, and answer the prompt “I am…” into a microphone. Active participation was taken to far limits, becoming a corny gimmick, an introvert’s nightmare, and the answer to a younger generation’s resistance to shelling out for Broadway. The final boss of this no-walls-at-all kind of theater was and is, if only for a little longer, Sleep No More.
Since 2011, the acclaimed spectacle inspired by Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) has unfolded eight times a week in a dedicated, totally massive Chelsea location. Some four hundred people chase the cast through a hundred rooms in an experience that synthesizes the vibes of an intricate murder mystery party, Eyes Wide Shut role play, and a Disney theme park. (Maybe they’re not all that different.) The production’s closing was announced late last year, followed by several “final extensions” through May.
How we got here is as convoluted as the Scottish royal family, so to break it down a bit: The English company Punchdrunk, credited as a pioneer of contemporary immersive theater, first staged Sleep No More in London in 2003. It traveled to Massachusetts and was so successful that a commercial production company called Emursive signed on to scout a spot for the perfect New York debut. What it found was a generic, 100,000-square-foot warehouse on West Twenty-Seventh Street, basically empty since the aughts, when the Giuliani administration’s demonization of nightlife and gentrification of Chelsea shut down the “superclubs” the neighborhood once housed. Emursive picked up the last of the discarded belly chains and trucker hats and pretended that the second half of the twentieth century hadn’t happened. It furnished the space with the romantic and macabre and built many a wall and secret door.
At the top of Google search results for the “McKittrick Hotel”—the moniker Emursive gave its new venue—is an old blog post. The writer marvels at the preserved bastion of hospitality that briefly served East Coast high society before closing at the advent of World War II. He drools over curtained telephone booths—“And yes, that’s a rotary”—and untouched ashtrays balanced on the arms of velvet couches. The post was an April Fool’s prank–cum–promotion for the just opened show. It didn’t need it. Sleep No More had a triumphant first run and then kept going, selling out most nights. Today, tickets start at $140. In its final weeks, first-timers cashing in on a bucket-list item mixed with fanatics coming to say goodbye. The fanatics have been many, many times. People travel from faraway states, cramming five shows into a long weekend. No live theater is exactly replicable from one night to the next; every breath will be delivered slightly differently—this is the beautiful thing about it. But Punchdrunk and Emursive have achieved something ingenious from a sales perspective. You can never get enough of the space. You might even become obsessive about what in the space you haven’t seen; there will always be another hidden sanctum that an actor can unlock for you and you alone. Only select audience members get dragged to a secret sixth floor, where a nurse character says creepy things and maybe spits up a fingernail.
Far from a rendition of the original Macbeth, Sleep No More is a case study of what people do inside a vast warehouse filled with people when neither the setting nor its inhabitants have anything to do with their normal lives.
In blogger @elderflowerchampagne’s Tumblr recap of her 163rd Sleep No More visit, she writes, “No matter what I do I can’t shake the feeling that this will end and I will somehow have never understood this place, never have done it ‘correctly,’ never actually seen what’s in front of me. … I had this overwhelming urge to hug the walls, as in quite literally wrap my arms around them and hold on for dear life. Thank you, beloved old friend, thank you.” The cast changes; the choreography stays the same; what holds infinite interest is being there. It’s a cosplay of magic and decadence that you leave at the door when your time is up (though Punchdrunk has lamented badly behaved American audiences’ tendency to smuggle out props). In January of this year, I was happy to have the rare occasion to wear a jacquard bustier in a ballroom with such tall ceilings.
Punchdrunk artistic director Felix Barrett has previously said that the “architecture of the space totally defines the show.” He calls “the feelings and the stories contained in the cracks in the walls” emotional architecture. But if 530 West Twenty-Seventh Street wasn’t actually a luxury hotel in the 1930s, where do those feelings and stories come from? After 5,000 shows, the Sleep No More experience has become self-reflexive, what was intended as labyrinthine and shrouded in darkness can now be readily found mapped out online. While “immersion” suggests being so steeped in a fiction that you’ve become one with it, the navigational reality makes for a hyperawareness of the body, a performance that doesn’t allow for the distance usually needed to help process the art we’re witnessing. When the stage is a moveable maze, the performance is a game. On my first visit just last year, I rammed into my own reflection, rattling a glass panel with the beak of my Venetian mask, and felt like I was losing. When Sleep No More debuted, I had never been to New York City. It took a shape in my mind, the way Dunham’s portrayal of New York filled me with fanciful ideas about the tropes I’d eventually encounter. Going to this show is what adults do here on a Wednesday night, was my thinking, a layering that I admit wouldn’t be there if this were a review from thirteen years ago.
There is a definite divide between newcomers and aficionados, and the expertise of the latter group defines the spatial experience for everyone. They know where to stand to get the best view of the strobe-lit orgy scene and might push past you to get there. They sprint down long corridors, tailing anyone not wearing a mask, a required accessory that creates the barrier between performer and voyeur that a stage would. Over three hours, the twenty or so actors perform mostly wordless yet zealously choreographed one-hour loops through the whole space. Common wisdom says to stick with one storyline if you’re hoping for any plot comprehension or for a coveted one-on-one interaction. But the frantic energy of the masses deterred me every time, and I preferred wandering alone through rooms stuffed with dimly lit ephemera. Call me Hannah Horvath, but I was most amused by the unscripted actions of my equals when I crossed them. You can spot sprinters by their Brooks sneakers paired with period-accurate garb (suspenders, lace collars) that rival the official costumes. Patrons say they’ve caught couples having sex in King Duncan’s bed. After Buzzfeed investigated claims of sexual harassment experienced by Sleep No More performers and staffers, “Keep a respectful distance” replaced “Fortune favors the bold” as the standard preshow disclaimer. Far from a rendition of the original Macbeth, Sleep No More is a case study of what people do inside a vast warehouse filled with people when neither the setting nor its inhabitants have anything to do with their normal lives.
Surrealist writer and actor Antonin Artaud described his vision of “total theater” as an art that “furnishes the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams.” He wanted complete, religious dedication to the ritual of spectacle. His proposal for the audience to sit in the middle of a room, the action happening all around them, is very Sleep No More. But doing away with sets and partitions is decidedly not. Artaud said, “I defy the spectator to give himself up, once outside the theater, to ideas of war, riot, and blatant murder.” Sleep No More is so contained inside its spectacle, so intensely an attempt at escapism, that it will never achieve Artaud’s intended submission to the unconscious mind. For all the flashy visuals, Punchdrunk’s most ingenious device might be the pitch-black passage that is your first step getting from the coat check to the initial jazz-themed bar. Inside the claustrophobia-inducing corridor, you can hear sounds from both sides but are totally blind, this sensory destabilization a subjection to vulnerability at a primal level. This is what I seek not from entertainment but from art.
Punchdrunk vaguely attributed the decision to close to rising production costs. Barrett and his codirector called it “the end of an era.” Emursive’s lease is up in January 2025, and while it may continue its other ventures operating in the space—including a rooftop bar and an illusionist’s dinner theater—the iconic era might not be worth reviving. According to a recent complaint, a fan’s fond memories of distinctive scents for every area in the hotel were ruined by a recent visit’s stench of farts and fake chocolate.
For all the mythmaking around the McKittrick site, the show has proved transportable. A few years ago, in the center of Shanghai’s shopping district, Punchdrunk adapted a former office building to house a version of Sleep No More that combines Shakespeare with Chinese folktales. It named this one the “McKinnon Hotel.” As I exit through the gift shop in New York, I hear an attendant comfort a mopey guest with the suggestion that they can always make the trip to China.