Exposition

First, you must know some things about me: I hold a PhD in theatre, I am an actor myself, I am a theatrical director, and I am a professor and Theatre Department Chair at a 2-year college in Dallas.  SLEEP NO MORE, which I saw 3 times in NYC earlier this week, lambasted me on myriad levels and continues to rob my sleep, and I spend the wakefulness with ideas, images, and emotions dancing frantically and frenetically in my head.

How I came to even know about SLEEP NO MORE

One night, I was channel surfing and happened upon a PBS documentary called SHAKESPEARE UNCOVERED, and the episode was about MACBETH.  I was about to teach a segment on Shakespearean monologues in my acting class, so I watched.

What leapt out was a brief segment about this edgy, arty thing running Off Off Broadway called SLEEP NO MORE (SNM).  My arrogant first thought: "That line is from HAMLET, not 'The Scottish Play.' Goobers didn't do their homework." (Actually, I hadn't done mine. It absolutely DOES appear in MACETH: Sleep no more, Macbeth has murdered sleep.)

I watched the featured snippets of two scenes from SNM -- the sequence where Lady M encourages/seduces/demands that Macbeth kill Duncan and take his throne, and the bathtub encounter between the husband and wife immediately after Macbeth has done the deed.  I marveled at the feral energy of the scenes -- the violent yet sensual choreography, the anguish, the lust (sexual and power-lust), the longing, the loss, the regret, and more all expressed with crystal vibrancy sans spoken words.  I was in awe.

I immediately did a Google search for the SNM show.  I wanted to go see it so badly, but it was only booking through that month, and I live in Dallas and was both teaching and acting in a show at the time.  I continued to watch the official SNM web site sporadically, pessimistic that the opportunity to go would ever arise.  I gave a student Lady M's 'Screw your courage to the sticking place...' speech.  I showed the student the SNM sequence from SHAKESPEARE UNCOVERED, and she said that if I ever actually went to NY to see it, that she would love to go along.

Well, SNM extended and extended and extended, and ultimately, it was still available when I had both the time and money to go.  Accompanying me was my 'Lady M' student from the spring semester acting class (and a better partner in the experience I could not have asked for.) 

I expected to either think SNM was kind of cool, or to be utterly underwhelmed by a project seeking desperately to be barrier-breaking and profound while achieving only overly-derivative banality.  What I actually got was simultaneously caressed sensually and assaulted violently by swift kicks to the gut, the heart, the head, and the soul.

SNM is accessible on many levels -- even without an understanding of the MACBETH story or other references -- but it is a richer experience the more allusions you get.  AND it was/is absolute blissful/hellish cognitive and emotional overload for me with my film, art, acting, directing, theatre history/theory/crit, performance theory, music, and literary background. 

Simply put: In no other performance space, in my entire four-decade+ life, have I been so challenged, engaged and 'in the moment,' and emerged so full of new life, energy, hope, and thought.

In JFK airport waiting for my departing flight on Thursday, I began scribbling feverishly on a steno pad - drawing arrows, underlining, annotating - all of the things that were coming to mind regarding my SNM experience.  It continued on the plane almost all the way back to Dallas.  I paused to talk to my SNM companion and solicit some insights from her, which fed my own, and I scribbled more.  I now look at 16 handwritten pages of ideas, associations, insights, and inept attempts to describe deeply felt emotions.  Laid side by side, it sort of looks like the secret wall of paranoid, conspiracy theory BEAUTIFUL MIND guy.  (Oh, I also have two typed, single spaced pages of iPad 'notes' done in the hotel after the 2nd viewing of the show. Wow. Maybe I AM 'Beautiful Mind' gal.)

I hope to take these notes and turn them into..............something.  I'm not sure exactly what yet.  But something.  For now, this.