Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

286 Chapter 10 Global Theatre Today
Sleep No More, presented in New
York in 2011 by England’s Punchdrunk
company, is a radical reconstruction
of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The
production requires audience members
to don identical masks, then invites
them to follow—and occasionally
interact with—individual actors as
they move from floor to floor and
room to room in a bizarrely decorated
five-story “hotel.” The fascinating
action—impossible to follow in its
entirety—climaxes in a scene where
the spectators are herded together to
see Macbeth and Lady Macbeth wash
the murderous blood from their bodies
in a basement bathtub. © Sara Krulwich/
The New York Times/Redux
of the twenty-first century, the New York Classical
Theatre has staged Shakespearean and other dramas in
Manhattan’s Central Park, with the audience gathering
at a designated point and following the actors as they
move about the trees, park benches, and rock outcroppings.
The company has recently expanded their performance
venues to include Battery Park, the World
Financial Center, and, in a 2011 production of Henry
V, on a ferryboat across the Hudson River to Governor’s
Island.
The notion of site-specific theatre has clearly
caught on. The 2011 Romanian production of The
Cioran Temptation, written and directed by Gavriil
Pinte, was staged in a streetcar traveling from the city
of Sibiu, Romania, to Rasinari, where the actual Emil
Cioran (a twentieth-century Romanian philosopher)
was born: as the play progressed, the character of Cioran
escorted the audience to and from his hometown,
sharing his reactions to his town, his country, and his
life. This style of performance is called site-specific,
as the actual site of the performance is where actions
described in the play are considered to take place. But
it is increasingly being described as immersive theatre
as well, as the audience is immersed into the same
“site” as are the actors.
One of the biggest recent immersive hits in New
York has been Sleep No More, an imaginative work
inspired by Macbeth. Staged by England’s Punchdrunk
company in three interconnected, long-abandoned
Manhattan warehouses, the audience was invited to
wander wherever they wished among some 100 rooms
in the six floors of the building, which had been converted
to resemble a 1930s hotel right out of a classic
detective movie. Audience members wore masks and
wandered wherever they wanted—to follow an actor,
sit in the chairs, lie on the beds, type on the typewriters,
and open the cabinets and study their contents. Without
producing a straightforward version of Shakespeare’s
play, Sleep No More remained true to its core themes.
As Macbeth is a tragedy with ghosts and witches, Sleep
No More is both brooding and blood-soaked, with ominous
music, occult images, and violent, semi-naked
sex. The power of the production, however, is that you
are not just observing it, you are in it. This sense of
co-participation between actor and audience has led to
the immersive genre in today’s dramatic repertoire.
Other such productions have followed in its footsteps,
including Then She Fell an adaptation of Alice
in Wonder land that takes place in the ward of an old
hospital; and The Ghost Quartet, a minimal and haunting
musical in which audience members sip whisky
while the actors and musicians wander in their midst.
Theatre Today:
Where Can You Find It?
Theatre happens all over the world: in villages, campuses,
prisons, resorts, and parks; at local and international festivals;
on ocean liners and at suburban dinner theatres;