Plague masks and ambisexual witches: Sleep No More’s immersive experience leaves behind endless gimmicky imitations
The “immersive experience” is one of the defining scams of our young century, in which the content-hungry and realitystarved will pay good money to take selfies in a ball pit, or pretend to be locked in a room by an MFA candidate in a top hat.
To be “immersed” means to be inside of something, but buildings already accomplish that, so we now understand “immersive” to mean a building-sized gimmick. Immersive Van Gogh poses the question: “What if Starry Night were a giant screen saver?” Meow Wolf’s “mind-bending art installations” offer a return to the womb with their warm, EDM-hued tunnels. The Museum of Ice Cream allows adults to ride a pink slide into a pool of sprinkles.
Alienated by technology, desperate for encounters with bodily truth, we are now drowning in opportunities to gawk at, touch and crawl through a stimulating, infantilizing present.
You could do worse than pinning the genesis of the great immersioning on Sleep No More, the wildly popular, Hitchcockian modern dance interpretation of Macbeth, which will close its doors after 13 years at the McKittrick Hotel this May, barring another extension. Created by the British theater troupe Punchdrunk, it’s been rightly credited with “reinventing immersive theater”, a genre with which it is now synonymous. Sleep No More premiered in 2011. The first escape room came to American shores in 2013. Axe-throwing began to spread in 2014. The Museum of Ice Cream, 2016. Something wicked this way has come, and in its wake lies a rash of structured fun for adults.
These are activities designed for the desocialized contemporary subject, whose interactions must be mediated, scripted: you will receive a text when your experience is ready. Like the remedial thought-starters in games like Heads Up! and Cards Against Humanity, they’re built for those who fear the onus of conversation, the daunting ellipsis of the cafe table.
Sleep No More takes Shakespeare’s Macbeth, removes the dialogue and adds flapper costumes and PG-13 voyeurism into a five-story warehouse of sequined dancers and taxidermied birds. All audience members must don plastic medieval plague masks, granting anonymity and a sweaty brow line.
The actors – a simpering Lady Macduff, three ambisexual witches – run on a loop. It is your task to wander darkened hallways for two hours in hopes of seeing one of them writhe on a velvet sofa.
I first went to Sleep No More when I was a nubile college graduate in 2011, at the height of the mixologists-insuspenders era. The apothecary bottles, the evening gloves: it all seemed apropos. Many of today’s escape rooms share similar aesthetic tropes – keys, locks, bowties, gin. In 2014, the art critic Brian Droitcour wrote: “Modernism’s infancy was the period when it had the most potential, but that ended and now it’s living a dull adult life.” I imagine prohibition was thrilling; the illicit always is. But now we can find a man with a ponytail on Feeld who shares our kink for rope play and have him Ubered to our apartment in less than 30 minutes. When everything is permitted, we are parched for the forbidden. The speakeasy endures.
Five thousand performances and over 2m tickets sold since my first trip, I returned to Punchdrunk’s 1930s fantasia last month for one of their final shows before they vacate the premises. This time, I was given a press pass – otherwise, on a Saturday, it could have cost me $188.50 for a single ticket, $258 for a reserved table in the hotel’s Manderley bar, or $442 for a table with a bottle of champagne.
Entering the venue, I’m told I can either check my phone or keep it in a sealed purse. These seem like the same thing to me, so I say sure, I’ll check it in a purse? They hand me a zippered felt pouch, in which I place my phone, and then a second staffer padlocks the zipper shut. Now I have to carry the little purse around all night, signaling to everyone that I could have separation anxiety if my phone were trapped in coat check. I am rattled and embarrassed. The immersion has begun.
In the Manderley bar, the various attendants speak in the two accents available to actors pretending like it’s the 1930s: southern or British. Guests are given a playing card – magic is afoot! – and we wait to hear our number called, before strapping on our plague mask. The mask wisely serves to disorient you, and separate you from your party. I saw a straight couple naively clinging to each other near the top of the show. They would not last the night.
Macbeth is macabre. It is about murder and power, and set in Scotland, where it is cold and windy. And so macabre begets a mood board, which inevitably runs towards the Victorian, with images of bloody magnifying glasses and ravens. It is not a play we are seeing, but the vibe of a play, as defined by someone who has heard of the play. Once, when Khloe Kardashian posted a selfie from Costa Rica and captioned it “island vibes”, she was quickly excoriated by factcheckers who insisted Costa Rica was not an island. In her defense, Khloe stated: “Vibes are vibes.” Tautological, yet sound. If there’s sun, sand and palm trees then the vibes are indeed “island”, whether or not one is surrounded entirely by water. A Macbeth vibe need not hinge on interrogating notions of fate or ambition, but rather a series of spooky signifiers. To elevate spookiness to threefigure ticket price, we fold in more adult references, eg the 1930s, with its cocktails and phonographs. By the transitive property of a vibe, a performance of Macbeth need simply evoke a Jazz Age haunted house.
When I first visited, I remember being singled out and forced from an elevator on to a random floor by an attendant, separating me from my party immediately, which was exhilarating. I was also pulled into a room by an actress who removed my mask and caressed my face. These fleeting brushes with immersion didn’t happen this time, but otherwise little has changed. The scale remains noteworthy. On one floor, a city block is devoted to the ruins of a castle. On another, Lady Macbeth sleepwalks past asylum cots. Endless rooms of dusty objets d’art invite your investigation, revealing mild payoffs such as a clipboard that says “patient seen sleepwalking”. What I felt most immersed in was the feeling of shuffling. You shuffle here, trudge there, plodding through Birnam Wood, your gait stymied by the wall of tourists flanking you. Sweat pooling behind our masks, Eyes Wide Open, we dutifully trail a lithe actress down a stairwell, hoping to catch her erotic tango with a rotary telephone.
Like most contemporary dance, the choreography here tends towards the tidal – back and forth, back and forth. It’s always a convulsive seesaw, one dancer reaching out their arms to the partner, the partner recoiling, then suddenly, it reverses; the chaser becomes the chased. The loose, curvy flavor acts as an analogy for “existing” – rivers, blood flow, the feeling you are inside something – but it often is just that, a metaphor that can’t be developed. Hilton Als gushed in the New Yorker in 2011: “We cannot connect with the characters through the thing that we share: language. We can only watch as the performers reduce theatre to its rudiments: bodies moving in space.” Perhaps this is the solution to AI throttling writers’ jobs. A show with no words! Can’t fire someone who doesn’t exist.
Writing in 2011, Ben Brantley of the New York Times called the lighting “ravishingly crepuscular”, which sounds like something one of the dancers would say, if they could speak. Brantley correctly notes the show is a “voyeur’s delight”. I saw Macbeth’s dick, as he sulked in a bathtub covered in blood, presumably after murdering Duncan. Craning my neck over the throngs to peer inside the “rave room”, I saw the male witch’s dick, as he flailed under a strobe light in a simulated orgy.
On Manhattan’s east side, in the 1970s, this warehouse might have hosted a real orgy, or at least a real rave. Now it is full of sales engineers and retired schoolteachers paying $200 a pop to see a four-minute interpretation of a orgy. In the gift shop afterwards, you can buy an enamel pin of the infamous
plague mask, in a rainbow Pride edition, for $15.
The coveted, most-immersive-inits-class experience of Sleep No More is the “one on one”, in which a dancer might pull you aside for a private moment. Everyone seems to know this is a possibility, so as each dance scene unfolds, various individual audience members, including myself, conspicuously inch away from the crowd, attempting to make our bodies more ripe for the picking. Let me be chosen! For once, let a gay dancer with a ponytail tap me on the shoulder and make these other tourists jealous! This is Sleep No More’s greatest achievement: equalized by our anonymity, we must reckon with our need to be special. But Macbeth cannot escape his fate, and neither can I, as I’m herded into the next hallway, unselected.
After the show, I brag to my companion that I saw the “out, damned spot!” sequence, when Lady M appeared to wash a dress in the tub. Almost immediately I overhear a girl say she believes she saw the “out, damned spot!” scene, although she claims it was at a dining table. This is what happens when you remove all the dialogue. Everyone thinks they saw the only scene they remember from high school English class.
If the pedestrian gawks, and the connoisseur appreciates, then the fan obsesses. One thing that’s changed in the show’s decade-long run is the emergence of online communities like the Sleep No More subreddit, which is packed with Easter egg hunters, who go again and again and again, trying to catch what they missed. The show’s impressive scale allows for this. But at what point does it become lore for lore’s sake? I found one fan who, as of February, claimed to have gone 149 times. Even if we average the ticket price down to $150 over the past decade, that’s over $22,000. To see the same show.
When people bemoan the Marvelfication of culture, they often imply a dumbing down of art, pat moralizing, the prioritizing of clunky action sequences over characterization. This is fair, but fair is foul, and a tad elitist. There’s something more insidious in applying a child’s comic book taste to culture writ large. We see it in Disney adults who cover their bonus rooms in Mickey Mouse Funko Pops, or Taylor Swift fans who bring three laptops to the Eras tour concert with spreadsheets to track which songs she’ll play next. It is culture that confuses completionism for curiosity, that mistakes obsessiveness for intelligence.
Everything is this now: calling itself an experience, redundantly defended on vibe criteria, costs $200. One was just advertised to me as I write this very piece, for a midtown brasserie (three dollar signs on Yelp): “La Grande Boucherie – An enchanting journey to the Belle Époque era through the rich tapestry of French vibes. Book your table for an unforgettable experience.” Ah, bien sur! For what tapestry is richer than the one sewn with vibes? We fear reality isn’t enough, so it must be heightened, branded, projected on to a wall, pulsed through our seats.
Things are only heading in one direction. In Tribeca, we now have the dubious Inter, which promises an “intermersive [sic] … journey through the interverse [sic again].” From the photos of rainbow blobs, we can conclude the interverse is mostly trippy projections. We are now in the land of pure abstraction. We are not intermersing ourselves in anything meant to evoke reality; the interverse is just colors. Intermerse is not a word. We’ve detached from language itself.
Punchdrunk began with a production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in Exeter in 2000, before moving to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and eventually Shakespeare. They are not rubes. Getting people to explore a warehouse and see stuff happening wordlessly is definitely revolutionary for the theater, if you take theater to mean sitting in seats, watching people speak. But it has perhaps been swallowed by something it created. We are immersed now, on a downward spiral towards the interverse, awash in either Victorian references or a Day-Glo Coachella color scheme, our only options past or future. The present remains too sweaty, too loud, too crowded.
We fear reality isn’t enough, so it must be heightened, branded, projected on to a wall