11/7/2022 0 Comments Sleep no more duration“If you get to see the sixth floor, it skews everything,” Barrett says. A few audience members never get past it.Īmong those who continue, wearing the required white carnival masks, an intrepid few are pulled by a cast member into a hidden room, and a?mere eight people per night are taken to an entire hidden level above, 15,000 square feet lavished with extreme attention for a mere fraction of the audience. “It’s actually designed to create darkness, not illumination.” In fact, to enter the McKittrick, you must negotiate a twisting passageway dark enough to require holding hands. “The lighting leads you around with a cold, clammy hand,” Barrett says. Lighting designer Euan Maybank plies his trade to similar effect. “My goal is to have sound be in every corner, nondirectionally,” Dobbie says. Sleep No More interiors are immeasurably heightened by what sound designer Stephen Dobbie did with the Vertigo score in addition to 1930’s and ’40’s popular tunes, some bits from Psycho, and even-in a memorable witchy orgy scene-a spot of techno, all spliced into 16 separate tracks. Playing the music, I’d see a landscape, a femme fatale, a man obsessed with power. (McKittrick Hotel-get it?) “The dense texture and timbre, the rich enveloping quality. And it was film that sparked Sleep No More in the first place, specifically Bernard Hermann’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. That’s how Barrett and choreographer Maxine Doyle see and direct. Punchdrunk members talk the language of film. In one Chelsea warehouse space, the team created a street of shops as “a long shot,” he says. Where I feel safe.” After his walk-through, Punchdrunk constructs his vision, literally-knocking down walls, building others, installing a staircase for audience flow. Interestingly, Barrett says that a building’s atmosphere dictates dramatic action and set design, not vice versa: “The first time I walk around a location is when the whole show gets conceived. Look into the glass, and a “reflection” of the children’s room appears-identical but for a suddenly blood-soaked bed. The Macduffs’ place is very domestic and cozy, softer, with muted colors.” An existing one-way mirror in the Macduffs’ apartment lends itself to a chilling twist. “Lady Macbeth’s bedroom is stark, linear, grand, with huge windows. “One important contrast is between the Macduffs and the Macbeths,” Vaughan explains. The scent of cured skins provides an extra sensory layer in some spaces others are redolent of caramel, pine, or cardboard. She’s the design associate responsible for the macro perspective versus Minns’s micro. “We always have taxidermy in our shows,” Livi Vaughan says with a laugh. As Barrett declares, “A space without detail is a character without depth.” “There’s so much paranoia around the Macbeth characters, so we researched different types of voodoo-esque things.” Resulting from that research, myriad minutia conceal meaning upon meaning: crosses made of cutlery planted in piles of?salt, parcels containing ticking clocks, locks of hair pinned on cards, session notes by Lady Macbeth’s psychiatrist, in script redolent of the 1930’s and ’40’s, like most of the furnishings. “We sit in?the space and try to make it real-go into the characters’ persona and think about how they would have felt,” she says. (Well, mine at least.) Interfering with the decor is intensely rewarding because of the insane degree of the detailing.ĭetail is the department of design associate Beatrice Minns. #Sleep no more duration license#A vital feature of the experience is the license to rummage, every interiors addict’s dream come true. Indeed, audience members often abandon the actors in favor of exploring. “Even if there were no performers, I would hope the show would stand up.” The story is inside the walls,” Barrett says. “The way we build it, every single space has a story to tell. It’s sensory overload for maximum emotional impact, and Sleep No More’s gorgeous rooms, crammed with multilayered detail, may just represent the ultimate expression of the interior designer’s art: narrative decor. The 100,000 square feet inside is the setting for Sleep No More, a near-wordless, pitch-noir Macbeth adaptation in which the buildings themselves are the stars-despite astonishing body-and-soul performances by a 30-strong cast organized by the London theater group Punchdrunk.įounded in 2000 by Felix Barrett, Punchdrunk is the game-changing pioneer of “immersive” theater, in which audiences are decanted into a set to wander at will and experience close encounters with intersecting plots. #Sleep no more duration series#The Thane of Chelsea: Sleep No More Takes Over the McKittrick Hotelįor most of this year, New York’s theater world has been abuzz with chatter concerning a series of interiors in three Chelsea warehouses collectively rechristened the McKittrick Hotel.
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