Entertainment
We are living through peak immersive experiences.
To understand the phenomenon, I went to the play that started it all.
Another man in black tie sprints up a flight of stairs chased by two dozen people in plague masks.
A couple simulate sex or a fight?
in a room strewn with hand-written letters.
But demand remains high, and the run keeps getting extended.
The current closing date is July 7; who knows if itll stick.
What did the show represent?
Why did it endure for a decade-plus, when most shows close much faster?
This could explain why people seeSleep No Moreover and over.
He tells me he does not even feel he saw the entire show until his 20th viewing.
He didnt even take a stab at understand.
Sleep No Morewas createdby choreographer Maxine Doyle and Punchdrunk artistic director Felix Barrett.
I said: Cool.
Thirteen years in, more than 2 million people have seen the show.
My friend Caro went to see it immediately after Hurricane Sandy.
My friend Tim has been twice.
He added that the first time hed gone, one of the actors handed him a woman.
When I asked what this meant, he mimed receiving an inert woman into his arms, Pieta-style.
I have not gone myself until now because, in general, I am not drawn to immersive experiences.
I think this is partly due to taste but mostly due to skepticism.
Is being immersed necessary to the experience of art?
Also, the ticket price always seemed like too much to pay for a sexy haunted house.
Today, it costs $160.50 on the low end.
Oz as in the Wizard of Oz?
Oz as in the abbreviation for Australia?
It never becomes clear to me.
I go on a Wednesday evening in late May.
The diehards are extremely forthcoming.
The fans I meet in line tell me that I must eat the candy at Paisleys sweet shop.
They scoff at my Birkenstocks.
They tell me to just feel it.
Our hands are stamped, and were admitted into the building.
I order the latter why not?
and talk to two other fans, one who has attended 12 shows and another who has attended 60.
To do this, I have to walk past the line of people who have not yet been admitted.
In my embarrassment, I have forgotten that Im still wearing the plague mask.
you’re able to take the maskoff, whispers an exasperated stage hand behind me.
Lady Macbeth (spoiler to a play from the 1600s) eventually kills herself.
This is the basic plot ofSleep No More.
But then, ah, nope, thats not Lady Macbeth.
Because I find the real Lady Macbeth moments later, on a higher floor arguing with her husband.
I am trying to immerse, but mostly what I am doing is booking ass.
(The fans were right about the Birkenstocks.)
The actors move at a sprint.
They seem to be trying to make it difficult to follow them.
I am often in a pack the crowd thickens as more people are admitted and cant see much.
Later, I see someone being handed a woman, just as Tim described.
At Paisleys sweet shop, I help myself to a mint.
I offer the jar to two other people in the room and they back away shaking their heads.
When this fails, I whisper, I promise its fine, but they still dont take one.
Maybe I should have told them to just feel it.
What are people afterwhen they attendSleep No More?
The sex is part of it.
Actors simulate sex with almost comic gravitas, and theres full-frontal at close range.
On the Internet, there are guides to finding all the nudity in the show.
In 2018, aBuzzfeed News investigationconfirmed 17 incidents of sexual misconduct or groping of performers by audience members.
In the performance I attend, both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are often nude.
(A reference to the sign in Cat Womans apartment inBatman Returns?)
It involves two female witches, one male witch, and Macbeth, who is covered in blood.
The male witch is the one in the goat head.
There is a moderate amount of humping.
So yes, voyeurism is a factor.
But many of the people I talk to do not seem interested in that.
The sets are interactive.
Youre allowed to touch things pick up a discarded letter, sit on the furniture of the hotel lobby.
Maybe the sex gets you through the door, but the details are what hook you.
There is something unexpectedly pure about the fandom.
The people I meet at the show are lawyers and programmers and administrators.
They are from New York, New Jersey, Boston, elsewhere.
Most of them have been many times.
Another says she likes the set decoration and design.
They tell me they find new things in it constantly, new layers.
They are keen to have it speak to them personally, to where they are in their lives.
The third loop wraps up,but my night is not over.
I have a dinner reservation at Gallow Green, theSleep No More-themed restaurant a few doors down.
But the illusion frays: Hes stowed his orange Aquaflask in one corner.
Upstairs, the space is decorated like an Epcot Center version ofA Midsummer Nights Dream.
Fairy lights twinkle overhead, vines climb the walls.
I order a mezcal cocktail called the Summer Coven that looks like brown milk and tastes of undiluted mezcal.
I am trying to understand.
If and whenSleep No Morecloses, it takes its era with it.
Its cash-hungry imitators have co-opted the spectacle and jettisoned the richness the fans love.
I dont want to give myself over to it.
But I can see what people like.
I exit Gallow Green into the immersive experience of New York City on a beautiful spring evening.
Its amazing how it looks just like a city street.
The hot wind coming up 10th Avenue feels like a hot wind.
Theres honking and talking, passing music.
I walk to the train taking it all in.
Its fleeting it wont be performed three times for my benefit.
The details are perfect.
