![]() The scenery is spooky, creepy, dark, oaky, grimy. The play is intended to recreate Macbeth, by Shakespeare, but definitely draws influence from so many contemporary and 20 th century artists and filmmakers. Through every floor you will also encounter the actors, doing a scene in random spaces and you are just a couple of feet away, can follow them through their scene, and sometimes can even interact with them. All floors are open for one to explore, search through, read and look for things, which makes the experience super interactive and inclusive. As an attendee, you are usually separated from your group in order for you to experience the play on your own. However, this is not your regular hotel, there are cemeteries, insane asylums, orphanages, doctor and chemical offices, in addition to, what seems to be the only typical part of a hotel, the lobby and hotel bar and café. The space is a 5-story warehouse that has been designed to represent a hotel of the early 20 th century, the McKittrick Hotel, as it is called in the play. In the neighborhood of Chelsea, in what seems to be an abandoned warehouse space, lays the site-specific stage for this play that takes you traveling back to the early 20 th century. I had the opportunity of attending the play “Sleep No More”, a recent addition to works of theater in New York City. The hallway itself proves a crucial transition, like a fall into the fog. From the check-in counter and coatroom, guests of the McKittrick Hotel follow a winding, nearly pitch-dark hallway to the Manderley Bar, where they're greeted by a maître d' whose mannered welcome announces their entrance into the alternative world of the production. Sleep No More likewise takes Manderley for its starting point. As the flashback narrative of the film unfolds, we come to understand the Manderley of her dream as the architectural expression of lost innocence entangled in a thorny overgrowth of homicidal violence, erotic transgression, and guilt. ![]() At once dreamer and analyst, the speaker enters the past by moving beyond the boundary of consciousness to transgress the iron gates of the estate and follow the once-distinct, but now "poor thread" that winds back to the great house: "Like all dreamers," she says, "I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me" (Hitchcock 1940). ![]() When she returns in her dream to the burnt-out shell of the estate, it is a feral Manderley that has been reforested by wild surrounds, its former civilized beauty and "perfect symmetry" flickering elusively through the thick of nature's "long tenacious fingers," which have "encroached upon the drive" that leads to the house. de Winter develops across the film's narrative first into knowledge, then selfish satisfaction, and finally complicity as she becomes an accessory-after-the-fact in her husband's disposal of his first wife, the eponymous Rebecca. The line is spoken in voiceover by the unnamed protagonist of the film, the second wife of Maxim de Winter. The opening line of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again," posits a ruined English estate as encoded dream content. The essay focuses on the production's appropriation of Hitchcock and of early modern Scottish witch trials, concluding that its most suggestive citation is of Vertigo's McKittrick Hotel, a site which, like the McKittrick frame-fiction of Sleep No More, decidedly frustrates hermeneutic closure. This essay examines Sleep No More's citationality to consider which of its many intertextual references are mere Macguffins and which, by contrast, open up substantive interpretive potential.
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