was Banquo’s whispered plea. I wish I could remember what else he said to me with such intensity when he locked me in that room with the simple wooden furniture. The servant’s quarters. A bare alter and a bed. I was a woman he used to know. It was so good to see me again. He anointed me with oil and assured me that I was chosen for some great purpose. I was silent, as I had been instructed from the beginning. But he lifted my mask off and I guess my eyes were big as saucers. Wide open because nothing feels as good and as terrifying as surrendering your reality.
I knew what I was getting into, or I thought I did, when I lined up outside the McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea to see ‘Sleep No More.’ I had brushed up on my Macbeth the night before. But the vibrant, violent world than greeted me inside was far more realized than I could have hoped for.
The anti-chamber helps. A winding, light-less hallway spills into the holding pen where revelers start and end their nights. This space is a functioning jazz bar where guests mingle with each other, throw off their old-worldly cares and get a taste of the new reality (absinth-flavored) before being subsumed. It is an effective transition to the surreal, because although the year is suddenly 1930, the jazz singer is a jazz singer and the champagne is champagne.
Inside, the first thing that hits you is that people can move differently in this world; there has been some shift in the physical laws. We’ve all seen dance performances before, but these people can climb walls, they can fall in and out of possessed states, they can fairly fly around the room. They have obviously been swept up in a super-human storm led by forces that are out of their control. The witches can read but not change them. It is this volatile combination of elements that makes the Macbeth story just as potent four hundred years after its birth.
The occupants of the McKittrick Hotel are tormented by guilt and wracked with lust. They hurl their bodies at walls and each other with wild abandon. The brutal percussion of all the falling, slamming, punching, shoving, growling, panting, clawing and lunging starts to keep beat in your ribcage like the baseline at a rock concert.
The question is not “Do I believe?” but rather, “How deep down this rabbit hole can I fall?”
The voyeurs are ghosts -- observing silently from beneath identical, white masks. But at least we are on the same side of the looking glass as the action and can haunt the performers at will. It is refreshing to be able to bodily respond to a physical performance, to empathize with and echo an inspiring movement, to chase down something that catches your fancy.
Once I climbed through the window of a mental hospital ward and landed in a forest. The fog that snaked through the labyrinth of braided trees was glowing ultramarine. The space was big enough so that the corners of the room could disappear in blue clouds. I wandered alone for a while until I stumbled onto a cabin where a nurse was reading quietly at the window, her hut scaled on the inside with thousands of hospital records butchered like clumsy snowflakes.
Because I’m hopelessly insatiable when it comes to dream worlds and alternate realities, I had a hard time dragging myself away from that glitzy jazz bar at the end of the night. A sultry singer with a septum piercing and a sequined gown like a second-skin was crooning. A guy was asking me to explain Macbeth to him one more time. The performers were emerging to unwind for the night.
I asked the male witch, “Have you read the night circus?” He was beautiful and willowy, with distinctive dark eyeliner. His character was the provocateur, the button pusher, the tempter, the hedonist, the spark that set stuff ablaze. I had just seen him naked with a giant bull’s head on, dancing feverishly, leaping onto tables with blood running from his belly down his stomach to the curve of his thigh. I had just watched Macbeth kneel beneath him and lick it off as a strobe light and a screaming techno beat tore threw any last remaining inhibitions or distance we had between ourselves and the soiled fabric of everything else. “Of course!” he said enthusiastically. “The author saw the show in Boston a while back. I think it gave her a lot of ideas.”
Then I thanked Banquo for the anointment. “Oh you!” He was pleased to see his silent ghost in the jazz bar of the half-alive. In purgatory. In ‘The Restaurant at the End of the Universe’ (in which the Big Bang starts over from scratch again each night). He was trying to catch the last train, so we ended up walking to the subway together, climbing down different staircases and standing across from each other on the platform. As I am physically incapable of turning away from magical potential, I watched him until he got onto his train. He walked to the window, put his hand on the glass and held my gaze until he was swallowed by the tunnel.
I swore the scented oil on my palms was bleeding into the stale subway air. Or some of the witch’s calcite clung to my hair because, the whole way home, people kept coming up to me, asking me about this or that, directions, where I was from. They could tell I’d been elsewhere. If we had all been dining at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, they would have told their waiter, “I’ll have what she’s having.”
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