Exit... where?
I just took my girlfriend to see Sleep No More. Yes, that was a little intense.
For the uninformed, Sleep No More is a performance in a warehouse converted into a 200-room maze of elaborately decorated worlds. The audience, in masks, silently explores and follows the characters of Macbeth and they run around the world.
There's one aspect of it that no other performance piece I've ever seen captures:
There are no real exits. In any other kind of production you'll see, when any character goes off stage or off camera, or out of the written scene of the story, they go somewhere. Even the kid behind a coffee counter taking the main character's order still exists after the main character leaves. But in Sleep No More, the whole building was a stage, and you can follow them right out of the room to see what they'll do next.
For example, after Macbeth goes up to a bar, gets a drink and a fight with the bartender, after he left, instead of following the crowd eager to see what Macbeth does next, I stuck around to watch the bartender. He pulled out a deck of cards, did a magic trick, grabbed a masked female audience member, and gave her a drink, a dance and a kiss on the cheek. Then a guy I'm pretty sure might have been Duncan wandered in and very dramatically died.
I think more creators might want to figure out a way to pull this off. Granted, not everyone has the budget and resources of Punchdrunk (the company behind Sleep No More), but there are other ways to pull it off. Guerrilla theater maybe? I'm not sure how you'd do it, but I think it would be a fun challenge:
When a character exits, let me follow.
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