Sleep No More

Manhattan, of course, is insular. In more ways than one. Within the closed community of Manhattan theater-goers and cultural mavins, the site-specific theater piece, "Sleep No More" has garnered many awards and critical accolades. For the inhabitants of the happy isle, "Sleep No more" seems unique, even avant garde (if that term means anything today -- and it doesn't). For those of us who have wasted hours watching cheap reality-TV shows like "TAPS International Ghost Hunters" or the even more tawdry "Ghost Adventures" with the foul-mouthed Zach Baggins, the Chef Gordon Ramsey of paranormal investigators, there's nothing too remarkable about "Sleep No More." In fact, all the hoary elements of the TV paranormal spook show are embodied in this theater-piece -- there are the dark corridors, the detritus of abandoned lunatic asylums and operating theaters, vacant boiler rooms and ghastly looking industrial debris, morose religious imagery draped in cobwebs and battered almost beyond recognition, the sad dormitories of ruined hospitals and flophouses. Your ticket, for a paltry $105 buys you entrance to a five-floors of environments constructed according to the set design requirements of reality-TV paranormal investigation shows, complete with pale spooks, some of them naked, that dart about performing eerie automaton-like gestures in the near-complete darkness while ominous music batters the ear. These are "residual haunts" to use the terminology of paranormal TV shows -- ghosts that simply repeat the same mechanical gestures over and over again. If you are in a certain mood, and have had enough to drink (the staff at the place relentlessly urge to you buy "absinthe" shots), I suppose this would be amusing enough, but the show is too high-brow to be much fun and, except for the nudity, refuses to deliver the quotidian shocks that are available at a thousand Halloween "haunted house" environments operated as local fundraisers (Austin's is run by the Jaycees) every October. I blush to say this but "Sleep No More" -- a mash-up of Macbeth as interpreted through John Huston's "The Maltese Falcon" would do better with a few leering maniacs in hockey-goalie masks, a couple of gallons of entrails, and some chainsaws: you would hope that the price of the admission would buy at least this. Briefly, here's how it works: you buy your ticket on-line and hike to a isolated neighborhood on the edge of the gallery district in Manhattan's Chelsea -- the area is old warehouses slowly being gentrified, a block to the east of the High Line. The McKittrick Hotel, where the action occurs, isn't well-marked but a black-suited guy will meet you at the door, scan your ID, and, then, direct through a bewildering pitch-black maze to a bar that is set up like something imagined by David Lynch, a womb of red-velvet where the staff hectors you to buy over-priced shots of hard alcohol. You are given a punched playing card and when your suit or number is called, an usher takes you into a freight elevator, issues some directives, and bids you cover your face in a hard plastic mask, similar to those warn by the perverse celebrants at the orgy in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. A little drunk, disoriented by booze, and your peripheral vision severely impaired, you are expelled into the black maze in groups of about ten. Then, you're on your own to explore the inky-dark, smelly labyrinth. Mostly the place is deserted except for other spectators staggering through the tiny dark corridors and often unpleasantly colliding. The maze contains innumerable small alcoves and niches with morbid displays -- lots of ancient typewriters with tear-soaked texts in them, shops were taxidermists have run riot, cases full of bird skulls and dangling eggs on strings (a reference I think to the murderer who calls Macduff's unfortunate son an "egg" before killing him.) Sometimes, you encounter the actors and actresses --there seem to be about six to eight of them: Lady Macbeth strips naked then pounds her fists wildly at plexi-glass cage, her hunky husband, also nude, takes a bath, someone gets smothered, an insane tailor (I kid you not) "knits up the raveled sleeve of care"; we get to tour Birnam Wood complete with a taxidermied wolf and one floor contains a ballroom where dancers cavort in the darkness; another floor is fantastically complex and the lighting, which is faint to none keeps changing so that the same room looks different each time you enter it -- a genuinely unsettling and confusing trick. Bernard Hermann's score from "Vertigo" pours faux-Mahler all over everything and dark figures wander around at the periphery of your vision lit by blue spotlights that are too bright to look into but too dim to give you any illumination. The effect is generally spoiled by the onlookers in their white masks. Whenever Lady Macbeth moves -- and she darts here and there in the maze -- she has a mob of voyeurs chasing her, a crowd trotting down the black passageways, art-hounds who don't want to miss any of the action (such as it is) and who feel, I suppose, that they've paid for the privilege of seeing her do whatever she's going to do -- perhaps peel off her shirt again -- and would feel cheated if she eluded them. (Once I figured out how this show works, I fled from Lady Macbeth -- every time she appeared with her herd of followers, I went the other direction, fearful that I'd be trampled underfoot.) It's disconcerting to see a single wraith hunted down by a mob of spectators and more than a bit ludicrous. This is the opposite of Brecht -- no "Verfremdungseffekt" here -- rather total sweaty immersion in the experience with no time, or occasion, to reflect on the spectacle at all. A rip-off in my view, I think the show is probably worth 35 dollars; that's what I would pay -- probably about what you have to shell-out for a reasonably scary haunted hayride or Halloween house. The show has some impressive effects and there is one truly frightening trick: the ushers have misled you as to the location of the bar from which the exploration emanates -- you think that you will encounter the bar at the base of the five-stories of labyrinth, but when you reach the cellar, there's no tavern, nothing, just darkness, and, then, a tiny passage leads you up a flight of cement stairs into the back of the Manderlay Bar where the whole thing began. Someone you have bypassed floor one and ended up inexplicably in the basement. I spent about 1 hour and 20 minutes in the maze which wss plenty as far as I could determine. On the way out, it's also scary -- a girl peddles programs and won't let you escape from the place without enduring her sales-pitch.