Closing the Loop
Sleep: No More
For the better part of fourteen years, I sat inside a wooden hut nestled in a forest, feeding strangers tea and crying.
Sitting inches from a stranger’s face, I told each one the same dark fairy tale— over and over and over again.
No, I am not describing a dream nor a psychedelic trip. This is a piece of live theater that changed my life and the lives of countless others.
Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More (hailed as “the grandfather of immersive theater”) opened in New York on March 7th, 2011 and closed on January 5th, 2025. This site-specific production reimagined Macbeth through a film-noir lens; staging Shakespeare’s tragedy across multiple floors of the fictional 1930s-era McKittrick Hotel.
After years inside that sumptuous playscape, there is so much I could share. I could write about the genius of Punchdrunk and the dizzying possibilities of this art form. I could share what it was like to be a merry little cog in this elaborate Swiss clock of cast members, stage managers, lighting technicians, audio engineers, PAs, wardrobe and prop artisans, carpenters, bartenders, musicians, front of house staff, security guards, and employees handling events, marketing, production, administration, facilities, finance, operations. I could write about Sleep No More as a pop culture phenomenon: featured on TV shows like Gossip Girl and Broad City and showcasing various celebrity guest performers.
I could rhapsodize (and have) about the dramaturgical richness of this work, with its wily bricolage of William Shakespeare and the Paisley Witches by way of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock, with a side serving of BioShock and Pina Bausch. (When I give the following clues: “A sought-after title and estate, an atmosphere of paranoid haunting, and a married couple attempting to cover up a murder,” I am describing both William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which converge deliciously within Sleep No More. If all of this makes your head spin, well… Punchdrunk is aptly named.)
But instead I want to write about my experience performing in this show— not in its entirety; just one tiny piece of one tiny role.
When audiences enter Sleep No More, they don anonymizing Venetian-style masks that encourage a sense of freedom and lowered inhibition. This voyeuristic dynamic helps distinguish performer (unmasked) from spectator (masked) and amplifies the show’s themes: audiences become the ghostly apparitions that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth perceive as they descend into insanity. But occasionally, a performer locks eyes with a spectator, singling them out of the crowd. The performer extends their hand and invites that one spectator into a private space to lift off their mask and perform a scene just for them.
Multiple times each night, I was fortunate enough to participate in this poetic ritual: I got to remove someone’s mask and really see them. I performed several of these one-to-one scenes in Sleep No More, but one in particular was my favorite because I got to recite a piece of text that began with “once upon a time”. These words— once upon a time— are some of the oldest and most potent human technologies in existence. We’ve been murmuring them since the 1300s at the very least. Once upon a time. How exalted! How laden with lore! How thrilling and comforting all at once!
I won’t reveal the contours of this one-to-one scene— if I’ve learned anything from Sleep No More, it’s to honor mystery— but imagine it as an exercise in sustained attention, like microdosing Marina Abramović. Here are three insights I’ve gained from this performance experience:
Every person has a beautiful and interesting face.
I cannot believe how much information is contained in a face. Within seconds of sitting across from a stranger, I felt as if I knew nothing and everything about them at the same time. Sleep No More reminded me that we have the ability to communicate with our animal selves; to meet in connection without story. Our faces and our bodies are topographies that offer themselves up for anyone ravenous enough to read them.
Night after night my eyes would promenade across each new face, determined to fall in love with whatever I found there. As it turns out, this was an easy task (to quote Lady Bird: “Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?”).
As someone who can feel critical of her own appearance, it was medicinal to fall in love with every single face I encountered inside Sleep No More. If you too have struggled to love your meatsuit— this perishable structure ferrying you companionably through the world while asking nothing in return— please know this: you are beautiful because you are a fact of life.
Your face is yours. It is true. It is an undeniable parcel of existence, laid open with its accumulated history. Each night of Sleep No More I looked and I looked. I feasted upon each face. Not once did I ever find something to fix.
When we look to see, our eyes alight upon what is, not what ought to be. Everyone is beautiful, because beauty is just information— fodder served up for consciousness to digest. I am so grateful to Punchdrunk for carving the space for us to see one another in this way, and want to engage that same depth perception (pun intended) in the outside world.
We can meet in the realm of improvisation.
In Sleep No More, risk is a synonym for trust. Each time I invited an audience member into that forest hut, we participated in an act of mutual faith. It was remarkable to experience how much two strangers could communicate without words— a gesture to sit, a shared smile— and how quickly we could establish implicit rules of engagement. Speaking only from my personal experience, I found that most audience members who “misbehaved” (spectators who started talking, or knocked something over, or tried to participate in ways that might derail the scene) did so out of confusion, not malice. In fact, I wrote a section of a PhD dissertation chapter about how Sleep No More spectators exhibited unexpected forms of care.
Within this one-to-one sequence, I needed to adhere to a set of words and gestures that comprised the skeleton or scaffolding of the scene. My aim was to leave audiences with a sense of the scene’s gravity and bereavement. However, each interaction afforded pockets of space and time in which to play and meet each spectator in their present emotional state.
For example, some spectators would enter the hut giggling nervously, perhaps feeling self-conscious about finding themselves engaged with or seen. In these moments, rather than rebuking them with a stern countenance, I would often brighten or warm my affect as if conspiring with them. Other spectators entered in states of fear, apprehension, excitement: all welcome tributaries that ultimately would convey us into the scene’s inevitable terrain.
People give us so many clues about who, how, and where they are. When audience members enter the scene, they arrive with potential trailheads: keys for affixing their present emotional states to future ones. Often I forget to harness this skill in the world beyond theater: meet people where they are before embarking on a shared journey. Rather than imposing my roadmap onto an interaction, can I see what’s right in front of me in the face of a fellow being? Can I ask them: where are you now and which colors would you like to paint with today?
Through Sleep No More, I found that improvisation is clarity, not chaos. In their work, Punchdrunk frequently draws upon literary sources that interrogate notions of linear time (the cyclical prophecies of Macbeth, the fragmented ordering of Woyzeck) in ways that underscore their shows’ looping structure (most Punchdrunk shows are one hour of theatrical material repeated three times, to give roving audiences more chances to experience scenes). In my shared scenes with audience members, I’d call upon this Punchdrunk philosophy that flouts the conventions of linear time. Inside that hut with a spectator, I felt we could shuffle an emotional deck of cards together and trust that we’d be dealt the right hand eventually, in whatever order we needed.
Sleep No More gifted me deep time, molasses time, Matrix time. We can slow all the way down and make the present as viscous and suspended— as quivering with miracles— as we need it to be in order to see each other.
We can harvest hope in darkness.
Across the nights and years of Sleep No More, I told the same doomed story over and over again, inside another doomed story told over and over again: a Russian nesting doll of tragedy. I performed in Sleep No More on and off for over a decade, which means I metabolized the chilling fact that tragedy is always relevant.
In this one-to-one scene, I sat across from strangers and told them a story about a child alone at the end of the world. I delivered that monologue after the murder of George Floyd and throughout the Black Lives Matter protests. I delivered that monologue when Trump was elected (twice). I delivered that monologue in the wake of a global pandemic, during a climate crisis, and during brutal wars that are still ravaging Ukraine and Gaza. Each sociopolitical context textured the scene anew. These external contexts reminded me how often I have failed to prevent harm and how helpless and ineffectual I feel in my desire to save those in need. Often when I recited the monologue I felt I was speaking to the earth itself: tasked with explaining to her how, in our human folly, we’d let her down and left her mutilated.
Every time I shared that story, I felt the tragedy implied in my hope that it would somehow turn out differently. This story was a doomed prophecy— Shakespearean in its proportions— that I handed over to unsuspecting listeners each night.
And yet.
Where was the glimmer of salvation? In the meeting of two souls; in the reactions of the audience. Each night at Sleep No More we performers struck a match into the darkness, slinging our feral hope. And each night there were dozens, often hundreds of audience members willing to bring their lips to that chalice of hope and drink.
The week following the 2024 presidential election, I received several emails from Sleep No More attendees with whom I had shared one-to-one scenes. One person wrote: “I'm grateful to leave the experience feeling more hopeful about humanity, dulling the pain of an uncertain future.” Another wrote: “THANK YOU so much for sharing your 1:1 with me the night after the election. That scene and that character were exactly what I needed that night without even realizing it, and it was so powerful and cathartic.” A third wrote: “It was unbelievably and unexpectedly healing. It was an unlooked for moment of human connection that gave me a bit of hope for the world. All is not dark. There is beauty and kindness and wonderful people.”
I share these reflections because our current era pummels us with daily evidence that we are living inside a tragedy. For some incomprehensible reason, cruelty is in vogue and fear masquerades as power. The centuries-old Shakespearean tale of a corrupt leader reads like a news headline, and all of us— yes, even you, even me— are encouraged to view one another with outrage and suspicion.
Inside a fictional world of foreboding, corruption, paranoia, and violence, Sleep No More performers and audience members found moments to look into one another with nothing but the expectation of art and magic. Inside the mechanics and confines of a tragic storyline, participants made room for tiny, tender miracles as they greeted one another as fellow members of this great human experiment. This how we can live inside a tragedy. Václav Havel— author, poet, playwright, and former president of the Czech Republic— asserts that hope is “not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.”
If we are to meet, then let us meet like this: in the darkness, in the mystery, in the generosity, in the curiosity, in the exploration instead of the knowing. Let us emerge not with more explication but with a shared experience, a touching of foreheads, a suspended moment of grace, and a sense of delight that our paths have crossed— ever-so-fleetingly— in this strange, dark place.
Coda
Sleep No More’s eerie beauty lay in its refusal to give up its secrets. Walking into The McKittrick Hotel was like picking up a book… only to discover that someone had read it before you and scribbled sphinxlike notes in its margins. The world of the production began before it was built— already taunting us with its taut archeology, its saltwater riddles, its rusted prayers. Sleep No More is, and always has been, a retreating figure: calling out to us from the end of a long, dark hallway and urging us to give chase. Shakespeare’s Macbeth opens with the line: “When shall we three meet again?” Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca opens with the line: “We can never go back to Manderley again.” Thanks to Punchdrunk’s dark, brambled syntax, we will never know which line was meant to answer which.
Sleep No More was a wicked church, a compressed poem, a space to hold the precarious unsayable. I suspect I’m not alone in confessing that the show lives deep in my marrow. Those of us who inhabited Sleep No More— artists and audiences alike— are still thawing out in the “real” world. Last week, I stopped by the buildings that were once Sleep No More and The McKittrick Hotel, now returned to their former shapes as a series of unused warehouses. Walking through these empty cavernous spaces, I was filled with a sense of renewed awe as I considered the intrepid gaze of Punchdrunk’s design team (Felix Barrett, Livi Vaughan, Beatrice Minns), who first looked at these vast, gaping buildings over a decade ago and saw story, suspense, adventure.
It’s a marvel that Punchdrunk first took a scalpel to a building and to a canonical text; filling those razor-sharp incisions with something deliciously pagan, plaintive, and profound. Now, gone are the teacups, the bathtubs, the lipstick cases, the dried flowers, the blood-stained cards, the scrawled letters, the taxidermy birds. It turns out that The McKittrick Hotel boasted large windows on every one of its floors, but those of us inside were none the wiser; ensconced as we were in our little tragic storyline behind wooden planks and velvet curtains and birch thickets.
The deafening absence of Sleep No More pleads its case for grief. But look— hidden beneath decades of boarded up plywood— all that light.
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Sleep No More (New York) opened on March 7th 2011 and closed on January 5th 2025. Thank you to the brilliant Punchdrunk team: Felix Barrett, Maxine Doyle, Livi Vaughan, Beatrice Minns, Stephen Dobbie, Conor Doyle, Colin Nightingale, and David Israel Reynoso. Thank you to the Emursive team and everyone at The McKittrick Hotel (especially Carrie Boyd).
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Read my other New York theater reviews here, here, here, here, and here.
Read my other pieces on endings here, here, here, and here.
Read my other pieces on hope and imagination here, here, here, here, here, and here.
What a treat this piece is! Something to read over and over again, reliving this beautiful production and the mark you and the other performers left on it
We all start naturally inquisitive. Questions and observations were the order of the day. As we age, that nature is slowly beaten of us, resulting in a shared social space where output is valued far above input despite the reality that garbage in means garbage out.
Sleep No More, and experiences like it, have reminded me of the wisdom I had as a child, and while I may not always successfully meet others where they are, my predisposition to assessing or asking others which colors we’ll be painting with together has been heartily reinforced. For that I will be eternally grateful.