We had already come back twice in the month of April (my best friend and I) and I had tracked down and experienced my first 1:1 – Banquo, and the key prop in that 1:1 had proven to be the first major collision point with my previous academic pursuits. But I still had not had nearly enough and I booked my first solo ticket.
That was a big deal for me – who would I talk to in line and at the bar? How would I bide all that time alone but surrounded by strangers? Somehow this already was less intimidating to me. As I stepped away from the check-in desk an entirely unfamiliar voice called out to me.
“You come here a lot, what’s your deal?” – this is how I met Jenny Weinbloom, then the marketing intern who had worked on the Gallow Green ARG, now one of the most formidable people in the entire immersive industry. I don’t even know what I answered! But we talked briefly about love for this show – she ditched school to work on it in Boston – and our mutual enthusiasms were complementary.
I had seen the Banquo 1:1 (and saw it a third time again that night) but was determined to discover others - first, Malcolm with Rob Najarian, which began a long love affair with that character that dominated my first year at the show; and then Fulton with Jeffery Lyon. I couldn’t describe the intense fever that built inside after all these discoveries.
But something strange was happening. I felt a slight tug at my back pocket – I couldn’t see who had done it, but I found a cryptic note had been put there. Some time later it happened again. Stooge that I am, I reported the peculiar behavior to the stewards, who said they’d check with the house manager. This isn’t part of the show, I swore, someone is messing with me.
Soon enough I was distracted by something else: I witnessed an absolutely horrifying scene, the murder of Lady Macduff. And as her bereft husband (Luke) placed her on the couch in the lobby and stormed off, most of the gathered crowd went with him, But I was transfixed, and when she came to she looked up at me and there was a profound moment of recognition. So I stayed with her through the rest of the loop, leading to her 1:1, which devastated me. I wept through the end of the performance.
I came out to Manderley and saw Matt there – he was the one leaving notes in my pocket. John had brought him in and the staff were in on the gag.
He left shortly thereafter but I stayed at the bar, feeling uncharacteristically calm and at home. And as the cast began to file in to the bar, as they regularly back in those days - a woman walked up to me. “You – you were great to work with,” she said – it was Alli Ross, who had played Lady Macduff. It struck me as odd to be addressed like I had also been performing – but, in a sense, I had.
“You had a great energy and I could tell you were really interested in my story and I knew the moment I saw you that I’d take you for the 1:1.”
I stayed very late that night. In the old days, there was no Sunday show, so the 11pm Saturday performance that ended at 2am rolled over into a bit of a staff party that cleared out around 4. I met a bunch of other cast members – starstruck as I was – and found my anxieties about strangers and bars were entirely gone. I began to realize, yes I was playing a role here – not the part of myself but as an active participant in the production, a necessary source of energy or a willing touchpoint to play off of. Recognizing this was the beginning of realizing that in every place we show up, we choose what role to play. If I could be this version of myself here, in the safety of a scripted performance; if I could be a version of me who flirts, who cruises, who does not shy away from eye contact, who is ready with a witty reply to Maximilian – why would I not choose to be that person, all of the time?
Anniversary thoughts from the dark year.
I moved to New York City in August 2010. My life before New York was something I’d grown completely unsatisfied with: I had moved to Connecticut for graduate school in 2001, had weathered two recessions in the relative security of academe but could see the writing on the wall for the doom of that profession and so had, via my teaching assistants union, begun to work for our international union as a communications staffer. This had given me a way out of Connecticut, though escaping the cultish environment of the union would still take a few more years.
The person I was back then was very unlike the person I am now. I wasn’t very much fun those first nine months in the city because I was just so afraid of everything. Bars scared me; too many strangers. Clubs scared me; too dark and too many unknowns and unpredictable scenarios. I was happy to be in a new place but petrified by what that freedom actually meant, and I had yet to find any place to belong or feel at home in.
I worked on 7th Avenue back then, around 27th Street. I remember sitting in my dreary cubicle that Monday, when I got a message from my best friend Matt, asking me if I wanted to go to a show that evening. No, I said, I really just want to go home and hide from the world. It’s the show John (O’Malley) is working on, he said, and he got us comps. Well what kind of show is it, I asked? “We’re gonna, like, chase sexy dancers around a warehouse.” Oh god that sounds so stupid, do I have to? “Just come with me, if you hate it you can leave.”
So around 7pm I walked over to 10th Avenue and the block was so dumpy back then – junkyards, warehouses, not much else. I saw a small line of people gathered at the address I’d been given, so I approached and was handed this card:
I don’t remember anything about checking in or what it was like seeing Manderley for the first time, though I do remember Maximilian being there, giving a short speech and then we were taken to the elevator. I remember getting off the elevator on 3, and taking far too long to explore an empty Macbeths bedroom before, I suppose, figuring out I should investigate the other floors.
I’ve told this story often, though: at some point I came across an extremely attractive man moving quickly, so I did what it seemed like many others were doing: I followed him. We were in the 2nd loop by now, and I had realized it was a loop; but my target soon was running down High Streeet and through a darkened door and it slammed in my face and, to my surprise, was locked.
Oh, there are secret things all over here, aren’t there?
So I picked up his trail again as soon as I could, and stuck as close as I could. Including when we stumbled down all the flights of stairs and I wondered, should I call for help? Is the performer injured? But I stuck to him like glue and when he again approached that darkened door I was close enough to get inside.
And so the highlight of my first show was seeing Luke Murphy in interrogation.
After the finale I reconnected with Matt. We had, of course, seen completely different shows. As we exited we saw John. “Did you get any one on ones,” he asked? One on whats? “Well, I had one where the man in the lobby took me into a room and started putting on makeup.”
No we hadn’t seen anything like that. We immediately set about buying tickets for later in the six-week run. And we wandered the streets for a couple hours after that, comparing notes, feverishly reconstructing what we had just experienced.
Obviously I did not sleep that night.
So much of the time you don’t know when everything has changed. You realize it long after the fact and in retrospect. Not this, this I knew was a fundamental shift. I’d never felt my senses at full alert like that, my mind racing trying to make sense of something so visceral. The music rang in my ears for hours, days later, and I knew when I came back, I’d need a plan.
3/7/2011
5/14/2011
12/7/2011
2/20/2012
4/1/2012
5/15/2012
5/24/2012
8/13/2012
10/24/2012
2/16/2013
8/2/2013
5/20/2015
6/19/2015
4/12/2019
3/7/2020
4/1/2022
A week or two after Sleep No More announced its intent to close in January 2024, I had one of my very, very vivid dreams about the McKittrick Hotel. I’ve had quite a few of these over the last 13 years – remarkably consistent in that they capture a lot of the details of a place I’ve spent so much time in, plus a few exaggerations like dreams do (a pirate ship in the basement, a rotating, levitating pine tree in the ballroom, the usual stuff). This one was no exception. I was at what I dreamt was the final performance of the show, and because the hotel was closing, most of the props had been stripped away already. A lot of former cast were back filling in for the end, including William Popp as the Taxidermist, despite his never having played that role. I got a 1:1, and he performed the scene in a very barren, stripped down Taxidermist bathroom, and of course I got emotional. As the 1:1 ended I started to cry and I whispered to him, “thank you.” At this, Dream-William looked down at me and said, in that dopey Calloway voice:
“Don’t ruin the moment with your vanity.”
As prophetic dreams go, that’s quite the warning to heed.
Of course, now it is January 2024 and the show is not closing next weekend like we originally expected. Elaborate plans to see friends for one final, burn-it-to-the-ground celebration of this unique place are all out the window, and quite a few hundred dollars are floating in the nether as the closing date slips ever further into the future. I suppose it’s fitting that it’s ending like this, milking every day for every dollar, and defying, at least for the time being, the proper memorialization that will eventually have to come.
For my part, I’m still grieving something vast and vague about this change. I’ve joined the fan Discord just to feel connected to the rest of the community that is, similarly, grieving something vast and vague that’s about to change in our lives. For as overdue as the end of Sleep No More seems to me, I know I’m struggling to imagine what New York will be like without it. Opening just nine months after I moved here, I spent years taking the show for as granted as a fan could. I’d book a last minute ticket some weekends and then wander the performance looking for cast members I was eager to see. If I found none - or if I was tired - I’d sit down in the lobby restaurant, pour a cup of tea and eat the prop toast. After so much time, and with so much familiarity, of course I, and others, acted like we owned the place, and that it would always, always be there.
But it couldn’t have been further from the truth, and the closure is now going to hit us all like a ton of bricks, isn’t it?
So I’m mindful of Dream-William’s words as I plan out how to commemorate this epochal shift in my New York life. How do I do justice to what it all meant to me, without going overboard? I’m going to write about some key dates in the 13-year relationship I had with Sleep No More, just a few little episodes to try to hint at the bigger picture I am slowly drawing out of all of these memories. The good news about the postponed end is that I have more time to write these – I’ve barely started yet. I hope someone is planning a good book, or a big oral history. The past couple months have been an archaeological dig, and there’s just so much that I never wrote down, or wasn’t right to write down, that I hope we can record. We’re going to miss it all so much when it’s gone.
What never became of all the things we played with in the MIT Media Lab expansion at SNM.
Hi everyone, we’re back for one last round.
As someone who for the past year or so has not so silently expressed a wish for Sleep No More to conclude its incredible run… I confess now that it’s happening I am in shock and grief. And I know it’s going to be okay, but for now there is a lot to work through, a lot to remember and celebrate and cherish as we say goodbye.
This was a special place and time, and we have to ensure the world remembers. That was, ultimately, the original point of this blog, to document and record the life of the hotel for posterity and for those in absentia, which will soon be all of us.
I’m a mess of emotions, thinking on the good times we had, the friends we made, the love we grew and shared. So I’ll be posting through it as we come to the final end. There’s going to be lots to share and say – both here and privately.
I just want everyone to know how grateful I am – for all of it. For every kiss, every hug, every tear shed, this place made my decade and beyond.
No I’m not “blogging” again, we are so past that moment, so past tumblrs. I just need a place to post this that I can link back to with some permanence (haha Tumblr permanence? Have you learned nothing?)
Remember, Scorched is a pedantic, academic prick, so you’ll get that here. Mild spoilers probably.
Hey it’s your old pal, Scorched. Been a while, hasn’t it?
Theater has been shut down for 13 months and our friends need our help. Please give generously to The Lost Garden! This week, I am matching donations dollar for dollar up to $2000. Let’s work together to help immersive theater workers and ensure when reopening comes that this part of the creative economy can bounce back.