{"id":18908,"date":"2011-08-04T12:01:46","date_gmt":"2011-08-04T16:01:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=18908"},"modified":"2018-12-17T11:34:55","modified_gmt":"2018-12-17T16:34:55","slug":"scene-and-heard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/08\/04\/scene-and-heard\/","title":{"rendered":"Scene and Heard"},"content":{"rendered":"

It wasn\u2019t my plan to get thrown up against a wall by Macduff on a Monday night. Only hours earlier, I\u2019d found myself innocuously waiting in a long line, on an otherwise deserted Chelsea corner, in a crowd wearing a sheen of sweat under cocktail dresses and collared shirts.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t believe they\u2019re making us wait<\/em>,\u201d a man in very short shorts in front of me said. It was seven-twenty outside the McKittrick Hotel, a hundred-plus-room Chelsea warehouse currently playing host to one of New York\u2019s most immersive theater experiences, but no one had seen any of the gore, sex, or fun our tickets promised. \u201cI hate <\/em>lines,\u201d a girl in a halter top moaned to her friend.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s the name of this?\u201d a woman passing by asked me.<\/p>\n

\u201cSleep No More<\/a><\/em>,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the name of the club?\u201d<\/p>\n

We were waiting, in fact, to see a free-form staging of Macbeth<\/em>, in which the audience wanders through a maze of lush rooms decorated like Hitchcock\u2019s version of a boutique hotel, including a gruesome taxidermist shop and a candy store. I\u2019d heard that actors climbed up walls, had orgies, and went ballroom dancing, but I\u2019d decided to ignore the freakish distractions in hopes of sifting out something less fleeting from the thousands of documents, photos, and files that decorate the convoluted set. If my wallet was going to be nearly a hundred dollars lighter by the end of the night, I wanted to leave with more than just the experience of a naked, wordless rendition of \u201cOut damn spot!\u201d I wanted to walk away with some small, new understanding of Shakespeare.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When I was finally admitted to the dark interior of the building, I was handed a ticket in the form of a playing card: a joker. I fumbled down a pitch-black hallway and emerged into something reminiscent of a speakeasy. Champagne flutes shimmered in the glow of low red light (and were passed off to hands wielding credit cards for the ten-dollar-plus drinks) and very attractive hosts danced between tables.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo we have any queens here tonight?\u201d one such host called, herding groups of people into the show based on their cards.<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah we do!\u201d another man said, greeted by squeals. Anxious, and unwilling to find out what my joker card meant, I snuck into the group. We were loaded into an elevator and instructed to put on ghoulish white masks. Someone pointed out an obvious speed bump to donning our atmospheric accessories, remarking, \u201cThis is really awkward with my glasses.\u201d On our way up, the elevator operator leaned towards me and whispered, \u201cI think you\u2019ll have good luck tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n

My first stop was a witches\u2019 lair on the fourth floor, strewn with hair, leaves, and crumpled papers scrawled with spells. I found my first hint of Shakespeare: a cut-up copy of Twelfth Night<\/em>, with a greasy ponytail sewn inside. Some sonnet fragments had been tacked to the walls, too, but the bass shaking the room made it difficult to focus on them.\u00a0In a chamber outfitted as a detective agency I found a page of a psychiatric evaluation: \u201cSubject\u2019s fears and phobias: her boyfriend.\u201d I was about to leave when a man in a bow tie went at the typewriter like he\u2019d just taken an Adderall (perhaps the real secret behind the show\u2019s title). He opened a tiny box that held a dead bird tied together at its feet with a piece of paper that read \u201cBlood will have blood.\u201d If only I\u2019d known these would be the only words of Shakespeare I\u2019d see all night.<\/p>\n

In fact, the only plot I\u2019d find over the several floors was the one created by the audience members, who frantically ran after whichever character looked coolest. A woman in a sparkly dress with bloody lips temporarily attracted attention, but then it shifted to a mohawk-sporting acrobat in a tux, a bald woman in a cocktail dress, another shadowy figure.<\/p>\n

In a doctor\u2019s office, I found a nurse in the midst of a demonstration, unlocking a box with a knife inside and intricately carving into a book. On closer inspection, the book turned out to be a volume of Shakespeare\u2019s. The only thing that she had created from it? A pretty picture.<\/p>\n

I wandered into a gazebo in a graveyard where Lady Macbeth was drawing a crowd to her bathtub. I\u2019d heard that the letters scattered around her feet would be a treat to read, but by the time I got to them, they were soaked with water and fake blood. I found the sharpest reference to the Bard in \u201cThe Shakespeare Threading Kit\u201d at an infirmary: here were the playwright\u2019s seams, undone.<\/p>\n

Still, there was a moment of thrill when, at the end of the show, after Macbeth had been dealt with, Macduff locked eyes with me. He grabbed my arm, then my waist. He led me up the winding maze of stairs to the bar. He pushed me against a wall. He took off my mask and stared into my eyes. Then, just when I thought he might kiss me or bite me, or both, he was gone.<\/p>\n

I was left alone at the Mandalay Bar, where a cabaret singer had begun to croon from the stage. Here, unlike in the theater itself, there was dialogue: Who had seen what? Did someone else see something stranger, more unique?<\/p>\n

\u201cMy friend got locked in a room with some guy who started touching her on \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey should buy this shit up when they\u2019re done and turn it into a club.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was a once-in-a-lifetime experience,\u201d a girl said sagely to her friend. Nearby, another member of the audience gushed, \u201cI saw so much more than the last two times.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was the end of the evening, and I had learned little about Macbeth<\/em>\u2019s scenes, either from the d\u00e9cor or from the macabre, silent exchanges with actors. In fact, there really were no \u201cscenes\u201d at all in Sleep No More<\/em>, at least as Shakespeare understood the term. There was only a \u201cscene,\u201d as jazz slang reclaimed the word, after the fabled McKittrick Hotel shuttered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It wasn\u2019t my plan to get thrown up against a wall by Macduff on a Monday night. Only hours earlier, I\u2019d found myself innocuously waiting in a long line, on an otherwise deserted Chelsea corner, in a crowd wearing a sheen of sweat under cocktail dresses and collared shirts. \u201cI can\u2019t believe they\u2019re making us […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":217,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[1922,330,3075,3076,3073,948,3072,3074,3077,3078],"class_list":["post-18908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-chelsea","tag-jazz","tag-macbeth","tag-macduff","tag-scene","tag-shakespeare","tag-slang","tag-sleep-no-more","tag-the-mckittrick-hotel","tag-twelfth-night"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nScene and Heard by Alexandra Pechman<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"August 4, 2011 \u2013 It wasn\u2019t my plan to get thrown up against a wall by Macduff on a Monday night. 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