The cinema fell through, but Barrett eventually found an empty parochial school in a Boston suburb. But it was a perfect spot for “Sleep No More,” which the company had first staged - briefly and minimally - in 2003. It wouldn’t work for “Faust,” Barrett thought. After failing to secure a space in Manhattan, they moved their search to Boston, where Weiner’s wife, Diane Paulus, had recently taken over the American Repertory Theater. He wanted to bring their extravagant adaptation of Goethe’s “Faust” to New York. Randy Weiner, a co-owner of the nightclub The Box, first saw Punchdrunk’s work around the same time. The wardrobe hid a secret passage that let out into a fireplace (unlit!) and as I crawled out, I remember feeling that I had wandered into my own dream. At one point, I wandered away from “The Fall of the House of Usher” and into a room with a wardrobe. That show, “ The Masque of the Red Death,” repurposed the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. I first ran across the company in 2007, in a former town hall in the Lavender Hill neighborhood of London. It “absolutely creates a quality of encounter that is unforgettable,” she said.

Josephine Machon, the author of “The Punchdrunk Encyclopaedia,” argues that Punchdrunk’s command of the art form is unsurpassed. If you came with friends, each of you might piece together an entirely different experience, then meet at the bar to debrief afterward. Spectators can chase after the actors, enjoying wordless, dance-heavy scenes, or linger alone in luxuriant rooms - reading letters, sniffing herbs.

A typical Punchdrunk show plunges masked audiences into sumptuous spaces and lets them choose where to go and what to see. Barrett had founded Punchdrunk in 2000, pioneering a type of environmental theater that transformed deserted buildings and disused factories into strange new worlds. It sounded mostly like a promise and a little like a threat.Īs Barrett tells it, “Sleep No More” first arrived in New York almost by accident. “Nothing’s going to wake you from the dream,” Felix Barrett, a co-creator of “Sleep No More,” told me during a recent video call. And after two years of a pandemic, will New Yorkers really want to come back to something this macabre? Knowing New Yorkers: probably. Even at that sparsely populated rehearsal, there were rooms that didn’t permit standing six feet apart. The ventilation system received an update, too.ĭistance can be difficult when you are one of dozens of attendees chasing Lady Macbeth down a dim hallway. But beginning in the fall, the space had been thoroughly rehabbed and redecorated. “We joked that the ghouls looked out for us,” Carrie Boyd, the director of performance and production, told me. “Sleep No More” is a Hitchcock-inflected version of “Macbeth” and walking through its Highland noir rooms, uninhabited for nearly two years, I thought of Sleeping Beauty’s castle, then, ridiculously, of Pompeii. On an evening in late January, I arrived at the McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea for a rehearsal visit and a tour. 14, for those who prefer their Valentine hearts still bloodied, “ Sleep No More,” will reopen, with new masks, new protocols and a fresh commitment to total immersion.

Performances were to resume last October the Delta variant changed those plans.įinally, on Feb. The March 2021 date that would have marked its 10th anniversary came and went.

“ Sleep No More,” the dark and dreamlike show that reshaped the landscape of participatory theater, left its performance space intact when it closed the doors on its dozens of rooms in March 2020. So have the lamps, the cards, the dolls, the crucifixes, the trees, the mounded salt.

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