Sleep No More

And here is another shot of the mask used in my last post's light painting. The mask itself deserved its own post! (click on to make creepier. I mean, bigger.)

The mask is from an off-Broadway play called "Sleep No More," which I saw with Doug, Brian and Dianna in New York last June.  "Sleep No More" is a very peculiar experience of immersive theatre set in a 5-story warehouse in Manhattan.

When you enter the theatre, you are entering the world of the McKittrick Hotel, and are given the rather stern and foreboding instruction to "Not Speak" for the next several hours, and to never remove the mask. Everyone is given a mask, and set lose in the McKittrick Hotel, to wander its haunting rooms and stumble upon disturbing actors and performance.

In the hotel, you can rummage through drawers, sift through old mental hospital chart records, propped against rows and rows of bathtubs, set up dormitory style.   The rooms are labyrinthine  one leading to a ballroom, one to the hotel front desk, another to a graveyard that was needed to deal with the outcome of the various experiments performed in this former hospital turned hotel. There may or may not be a plot to this "play" but the actors appear often abruptly, interacting with one another, and frequently fleeing scenes inviting observers to follow, or leaving the audience on the other side of locked doors.  There are hints of a plot, or not, depending on your own subjective interpretations.  Throughout the 100 or so rooms, music adds to the haunting, jarring, images, and a combination of the music, and the actors, manages to direct the audience to the final, ghoulish scenes, after three hours, in the main ballroom.

This is a play that can be seen more than once, each viewing likely to create its own unique experience as pieces of the puzzles fit together, or dissolve.

And you get to keep the creepy masks at the end!