Wednesday, Dec. 07, 2011
Sleep No More
You enter a spooky old hotel in the dark, ride an elevator to a retro 1930s night club, then are given a mask to wear and sent off on your own. You wander at random through a maze of intricately furnished rooms: a hospital ward, a taxidermist's shop, a hotel bar, a children's bedroom where a mirror reflects the bed filled with blood. Occasionally you come across actors too, doing bits of dumb show supposedly based on Shakespeare's Macbeth. Anyone looking for the play has to look awfully hard (all I could detect for sure was the ghostly, slow-motion banquet scene), but this site-specific off-Broadway show is a masterpiece of production design, and a creepy, one-of-a-kind experience.