![]() ![]() When the McKittrick shut its doors in 2020 during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sleep No More's creators seized the opportunity to revisit the show. After being "blown away" by the experience, she auditioned for the New York opening and was cast as Lady Macbeth. It was wonderfully surprising when it when it had that same sort of reception."Īs the co-artistic director of NU Dance, Sophie Bortolussi already had experience with site-specific, immersive productions when her partner called her in tears, saying, "They're doing our dream." She had seen Sleep No More at the ART, and Bortolussi quickly followed suit. "I had sort of seen it in microcosm how I could take off in a community," Boyd, who had worked on the ART production, said. Carrie Boyd, director of performance and production, described it as a "roll of the dice" and was surprised by the show's fast and passionate reception. Sleep No More first opened its doors in London, followed by a run at Massachusetts's American Repertory Theater, but moving to New York was a risk, due to the size of both the cast and the set. One turn of a corner could lead into a bedchamber where a sensual dance of passion and violence is taking place, while another turn might lead to a hedonistic rave, complete with pulsing music, flashing lights, and flowing blood. Moving through suggestively dark rooms and hallways, people can explore independently or follow a cast member for minutes or hours at a time. Ten years later, following multiple extensions and a pandemic and an industry shutdown, it still is.Ī fever dream of Shakespeare's Macbeth à la Alfred Hitchcock, Sleep No More could be described as a shadowy, cinematic "choose your own adventure." Participants are invited to enter the McKittrick Hotel, a vast warehouse space transformed into the production's eerie environment by Punchdrunk, the British theater company known for its site-specific, immersive productions. The sweeping avant-garde production, an immersion of Shakespeare, film noir, and dance, introduced a uniquely new experience to adventurous theatergoers. “We carefully train staff regarding workplace safety, provide resources for immediately reporting any concerns and, in the rare instance beyond our control where patrons may have violated our policies, take immediate action to remove them.When Sleep No More premiered in New York in 2011, it was planned for a six-week run. “After seven years of successfully hosting two million guests and producing a critically acclaimed theater production where our colleagues overwhelmingly feel supported and inspired, it is wrong to make generalizations from a handful of incidents where patrons may have behaved inappropriately,” the McKittrick Hotel said in a statement to BuzzFeed News. The McKittrick, however, has contested these claims, and insists that the production has a healthy system of reporting complaints against audience members. “Once you gave people a mask, it was carte blanche to let them do whatever they wanted,” a former steward told BuzzFeed News. ![]() Several said they did not report individual instances of misconduct because because they did not know the proper procedure, or simply because it was so pervasive. While some employees told BuzzFeed News they felt safe in the the show, others described being groped, grabbed, and harassed by audience members, and not having their concerns and suggestions for safer policies heard by management. BuzzFeed News reported 17 incidents of groping or sexual misconduct during the show, seven of which Sleep No More acknowledged while contesting the rest. Some of the 30 people interviewed claimed that the nonunion Off Broadway production, run by the production company Emursive at the McKittrick Hotel, implicitly encourages patrons, who put on masks throughout the (simulated) sex-and-death-filled performance, to act inappropriately, and doesn’t sufficiently provide protections for performers. Current and former performers in Sleep No More, the popular immersive staging of Macbeth, described being subjected to and feeling at risk of sexual assault from audience members in a report from BuzzFeed News. ![]()
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