Sleep And Water

Over the holidays, I decided I’d heard enough raving from my friends in Boston about Sleep No More, and I booked one of the last tickets to the sold out extended run of the show. I didn’t know what to expect, but it turned out to be one of the single best theatre experiences I’ve had.

Because of the immense expense and local buy-in involved in creating the show, it’s hard to predict if and where it might re-open again. If you really want to go to this one, there are some tickets on Craigslist, but they go for a high price.

Here are some of the sights and sounds I observed in my time in the immense four-story abandoned school building that Sleep No More takes place in, in no particular order. If you go, you’ll probably see very different things; my friends have seen and experienced things I wish I had, and if I could I would go again. My best estimate is I saw about 30% of the scenes, and 80% of the rooms, and I’m listing only the most easily distilled fraction of the things I remember.

• I’m alone in a small room that is simply a hill of sand, leading up towards a blank wall. Illuminated in strange blue, feathers and rib cages jut out of the dune floor in a pattern I don’t try to discern. It is beautiful and I can only remember its outlines. I try to find this room again before the end of the evening, but I’m too late; all paths except those to the exit are blocked by people in black masks.

• In the center chamber of the basement, the ceiling is a loose latticework of rope, with a spotlight above it providing the only illumination. By adding fog to the room, the shadows cast by the spotlight hitting the ropes become sharp black lines streaking through midair that appear and disappear as you walk and look around. I have never seen anything like it. It was as if lines of dark power resided within the air itself, and became visible only briefly and from the right angle.

• Wandering alone deep in the basement, I find a small room at the end of a small room, with a shallow chamber holding a metal tray table. On it amidst grey dust lie torn scraps of anonymous bone, dry eggs, and a magnifying glass resting askew on top.

• Ten of us are in a small dressing room watching a visibly upset man change his shirt for sleep. He has finally achieved a semblance of relaxation when he hears a persistent rattling from the adjacent chamber. We notice it at the same time, and as I tip around the corner I’m drawn from movement at the edge of my vision to notice a pregnant woman in a narrow space between the top of a bookshelf and the ceiling, feverishly polishing a statue of the Virgin Mary.

• Later on, as people file into the room and watch, we observe the pregnant woman laid by her husband into their baby-to-be’s cradle, which sits beneath approximately 100 hanging figures of headless babies.

• At all times, in all of these rooms, the light is extremely dim, and when a 1940’s Hitchcock song isn’t playing, a seething electronic melange plays from sources not always visible.

• A room lined with bathtubs, filled to different heights, many with blood spattered through them. A dark-clad nurse hurls her possessed body to and fro throughout the room and over the bathtub rims, and I am splattered with water. I lean down to read parchment on an endtable whose writing is too faded to make out. In a bathtub at the end of the room, there is a snake.

• A dance occurred in the main ballroom, and a fiery redheaded girl eventually began to draw most of the attention. We started to lock eyes every few seconds from my position on the sidelines, and as I watched her begin to dance more like animal than person, and the light dimmed from red to blue, her entire head of hair came freely off of her skull.

I’ve left out the more intense scenes.