Exposition 2 - What is SLEEP NO MORE?

What exactly is SLEEP NO MORE?

That is actually difficult to say.  In generalities: it is a pastiche of many familiar things (peppered liberally with unfamiliar things) combined in an evocative, absorbing, utterly unconventional way.  It is highly calculated, structured and precise, but with elements of spontaneity and surprise (for the spectators and, potentially, the actors as well!)

It is part

·   contemporary dance

·   performance art

·   theatrical drama

·   haunted house walk-thru

·   experimental/avant-garde theatre

·   Disneyland - only, metaphorically, you can get off the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' ride and walk around in the world, touching things, and actually living there for a few hours

·   Laser tag environs

·   rave

·   orgy

·   ballroom elegance and grace

·   cabaret night club(s)

·   Bacchant revel

·   a 'choose your own adventure' book

·   a film set - art deco, Golden Age of Hollywood, noir, macabre

·   the most psychotic reveries of Hitchcock, David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick

·   simultaneous nightmare, erotic fantasy, emotional catharsis, and intellectual query

·   Dante's 'Inferno' with multiple 'circles of hell' (and their inmates) to explore

·   a scientist's rat maze, only you're the rat and not the scientist

·   voyeur paradise

·   voyeur HELL, because sometimes they return your gaze!

·   religious rites/pagan rituals

·   feast of sensual arousal - there are smells, temperatures, rains/winds, things to touch and be touched by, things you can taste and eat, all in addition to the usual aural and visual senses typically employed by spectators at a play

You don't "go see this show" in any casual, conventional sense of the terminology.  You jump (or are shoved) down the proverbial rabbit hole or into the 'deep end' of the pool, and you are invited/exhorted to sink or swim.  Your experience will be unique from anyone else’s, if you follow their advice and travel the paths alone, and it can be unique each and every time you ‘go see’ SNM.  It’s largely up to you and your choices.

How’s that for specificity?  Clear as mud…. 

Macbeth and his Lady, Production still from SNM