Sleep No More

Soon, audiences will find themselves wandering aimlessly through the halls of an abandoned school, following a variety of characters as they wander from room to room, presenting scenes along the way. At one point I found myself on the sidelines of a Bacchic-style orgy, watching alongside a group of others as a naked man wearing a satyr mask was covered in blood from his head to his nether regions. At other times, I found myself strolling contemplatively, wandering from room to room with an eye on the details contained within.

There is no script when it comes to Sleep No More. In fact, the actors don't speak much if at all, and there isn't any sort of linear storyline to keep an audience following along. Rather, forewarned theatergoers must strike out on their own and thread together their own interpretations as to what's happening around them.

The overall experience, as such, ends up being somewhat aimless despite the astonishing production design involved. And the design is sumptuous. Room after room presents strange discoveries - a grand hall replete with towering pine trees, a room entirely filled with soil, rows of bathtubs filled with blood and even a live eel. But still, for all the amazement involved, I found myself wondering what to make of what seemed to be fairly threadbare attempts to make Sleep No More at least superficially story-based.

By the end of the evening, I'd felt at times as if I'd found myself in the same room a bit too frequently (namely the tree-lined ballroom), and I certainly was never able to quite decipher who any of the characters were (though, in the program, characters like Macbeth and Banquo are listed). In addition, the show seemed to end without much of a bang. Whereas Masque of the Red Death had its culminating masked ball scene, Sleep No More, following a brutal hanging, seemed to peter out without presenting audience members with any sort of final unifying scene.

There's no replicating the kind of theatre Punchdrunk creates, and there's no possible way to sum up in a few mere paragraphs exactly what interested theatergoers are in for when they step into Old Brookline School, but there's also something lacking at the core of this particular production, which kept me enthralled for three hours but ultimately left me cold.

In the show's production notes, the directors express their desire that an audience experience their work as if inside a film. "Screen dialogues," they claim, "become intense physical duets between characters." Unfortunately, these duets never amount to much in the way of storytelling. There's plenty of movement within Sleep No More as actors bend and whirr about but not much to clue an audience in as to how it ought to view the piece as a whole.

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