The Venetians of the 18th century wore masks on the streets for months, a way to protect personal identities and slip through fixed social boundaries. The bearer of the ticket will be handed a card from a deck of cards, and when the number is called, perhaps after downing a quick drink at the bar, be handed a mask to wear for the duration. 27th St, tricked out in such detail that I longed for a second visit, necessitates checking conventions at the door. The immersive experience by the UK's Punchdrunk company members, with their exquisitely precise choreography and their site-specific fictional space of the hotel on W. This is no ordinary experience, as you may have gathered, with no way easy to express in a conventional third person review. I eventually found the cool space I was looking for, the refreshingly clammy graveyard. As I made my way through a hallway of taxidermy specimens - this is the Macbeth world of nature gone awry, after all, I scared only myself as I caught a glimpse of the masked Venetian in the mirror. The mood-setting music, reminiscent of the great Bernard Hermann scores, filled every meticulously detailed space, shaping the suspense. My body vaguely remembered the location of the cold and damp room I had encountered earlier, somewhere back before the bar fight in the warehouse or that scene with the girl in the phone booth.īy then, I had abandoned any attempt to keep up with a conventional storyline from Macbeth, even after the sublime slow-motion choreography of the erotic banquet scene, in favor of improvisational explorations through this fantastical dreamscape of hotel rooms - part Hitchcock, part Kubrick, and part graphic adventure game. The atmosphere was so musty, so hot, and so itchy under the plastic plague doctor masks we were all wearing, I thought I might be forced to take off my clothes or simply pass out.Īt the end of the song, one made especially haunting in context of this personal mystery theater mashup of Macbeth and film noir, I made an escape through the dark space to the staircase in search of cooler air. Somewhere deep into Sleep No More, a site-specific immersive theatrical production at The McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea, I came upon the sight of a well-dressed crooner lip-syncing Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is?" on the stage of a dimly lit and tattered cabaret.
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