Sleep No More is a form of theater as immersive setting: actors rush between intertwined stories while visitors navigate the ambient gloom. It takes its inspiration from Macbeth and Hitchcock's film version of Rebecca, but the real romance of it is getting to see a play where the backstage is just as fully realized as what is typically shown to the audience, a sort of survival horror version of the conceit behind Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. The audience members all wear white-beaked Venetians masks, ones that may startle you if seen in the mirror and that helps your fellow voyeurs fade into the background as ghosts of lesser importance.
The nominal Hotel McKittrick, location of the show, is in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. The show is up to three hours, but you may need to arrive well before your ticket time in order to get that early call to the elevator. The check-in process was pleasingly efficient; the coat check fairly mandatory if you have any bags, but it would be a good idea even if it wasn't. The hotel lounge was a fully realized velvet room that left me vaguely apprehensive that the protagonist from Bioshock would be bursting in at any moment to slaughter us all. The bar is a pleasant place to wait for your card to be called, and you do want to be called earlier. The start times are necessarily variable to avoid overcrowding but the end time is fixed. We arrived at the hotel at eleven and discovered a substantial line; I think I made it to the show itself less than a half hour before midnight.
The elevator let me off on the fourth floor, the town of Gallows Glen, and I looked around a few of the rooms before I gave chase to an actor who went flying through to the stairway. I successfully arrived at the places of rest floor (bedrooms and a cemetery), but I lost the actor. Exploring the bedrooms was an excellent consolation prize as they managed to be creepy using a variety of approaches from bizarre to insidious. Some of the advice I heard suggested treating the Hotel McKittrick as an adventure game setting (sans kleptomania): appreciate the amazing staging by rooting through drawers, glancing through books, and seeking out what is hidden. However, while I found little details like an array of letters scribed on a bedframe, I came to reject that strategy. If a letter, a mirror, or a wardrobe draws your eye, by all means take a closer look, but unless you've planned multiple trips there is far too much going on to spend time on a pixel hunt. Instead I alighted to the cemetery which soon enough led me to my first scene.
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