Millions who have never seen him perform live, or even on television, have heard of Marcel Marceau. He’s, you know, that French guy in white face who for some inexplicable reason doesn’t talk. (Oh, but he can talk. “Never get a mime talking,” he says. “He won’t stop.”) Yet how to explain what a miracle he is. He’s toured the world with his show 40 times. He’s been in scores of TV movies, independent and feature films, including — if you can imagine it — “Barbarella,” and had the only speaking role in Mel Brooks’ “Silent Movie” (he said, “Non!”). He’s written and illustrated several books. He’s received France’s highest artist honor — the French Legion of Honor — and two Emmys. Michael Jackson modeled his moon walk on Marceau’s walk-against-the-wind techniques (today, the two are close friends). There was a day dedicated to him earlier this year: The city of New York declared March 18 Marcel Marceau Day. He’s garnered honorary degrees from prestigious universities across America. He’s had three wives, four children, survived the Holocaust, joined the Resistance and marched in Patton’s army. All this, and he has a wickedly weird and original sense of humor. “Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards,” Marceau once said, “for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.”
Even when you don’t quite get it, Marceau makes you think twice.
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I was a young girl, maybe 11, when my parents first took me to see Marcel Marceau. Under the spotlight in a Denver theater, this graceful, solitary figure in black and white — topped, maraschino cherry-like, with a single red flower — entranced me with his silent eloquence. As Marceau is fond of saying, he made “the invisible visible.” I vowed, to my parents horror, to emulate Marceau by one day becoming the world’s greatest female mime. By the time Marceau returned to Denver a few years later, I had formed a mime troupe with my neighbor Katy Burns. In hopes of meeting our one and only god, Katy and I sent a note to the theater requesting an interview for our high school paper. Unbelievably, Marceau said yes.
A few days later, I found myself standing before my hero. I was terrified. Intensely theatrical, Marceau maintained a dancer’s elegant, rigid posture and exaggerated out-turned feet, tapping the floor with his black ballet shoe — a trademark Marceau stage tic. Occasionally he’d vary his pose, gesticulating dramatically, his hands dancing in the air around his head like fluttering butterflies. His salt-and-pepper hair had a touch of Einstein’s brilliant unruliness; his thick mask of white pancake makeup and charcoal-lined eyes accentuated his wrinkles. The day I met him was his 57th birthday. To a teenager, he was ancient. I mournfully concluded that this tour would surely be his last.
Katy and I had come armed with a dozen questions, but managed only to ask one. I can’t remember the question, but I can recall that his answer, which lasted nearly 15 minutes so that the show started 10 minutes late, began somewhere with God, ended with Mozart and had an impressive number of Marceau references in between. He often spoke of himself in the third person. “It’s true, there is only one Marceau.” “In my heart, I feel that Mozart wrote his 21st concerto for Marceau.” “Even the Hollywood stars, they love Marceau.”
At the end of his monologue, he announced, “I must go.” But before walking away, Marceau gazed at me and issued a direct challenge: “Of course, you must study mime at my school.” And upon graduating from college, I went straight to Paris to audition. This second Marceau encounter was a tragicomic exercise in which I was asked to perform on a small stage before the master himself. “Allez, allez,” he said, standing below me in his school’s near empty theater, along with a panel of stern judges who would help decide my fate. There Marceau stood, holding the same statuesque pose and, naturally, tapping his foot. “Show me happiness. Show me sadness. Walk through a forest.” I grinned, I grimaced, I ducked under branches and feigned exaggerated horror at imagined snakes and long-toothed beasts. All of this I did, like so many Marceau wannabes, very, very badly. To my parents’ delight, I wasn’t accepted, which is why right now I’m writing this article, rather than tip-toeing after tourists at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf or in front of the Pompidou Center in Paris.
Now, some 20 years later, I hear that Marceau is not only still, shall we say, kicking, but performing and teaching at the same, superhuman pace that he’s managed for half a century. Stop for a moment to consider this breathtaking fact. The man is 76. So he’s pushing 80, so what? So, you try bending backwards, head almost but not quite touching the ground, as you prance about under hot spotlights, thousands of eyes fixed upon you, and only you. Or how about, night after night after night, going up and down an invisible escalator (The back! The knees!); attempting suicide; personifying all seven sins; and acting out the creation of the world, from amoeba to man, in 10 minutes or so. Now assume a relentless schedule that demands minimal sleep and maximum physical exertion so that you can perform your one-man show, up to 200 nights a year, at every far-flung corner of the planet. (Keep in mind that you have no understudy.)
And yet, despite his fame and genius, Marceau seems fated to swim against the current. There’s the irrefutable fact that some, OK many, people just don’t like mime. They find it too cutesy, too annoying, a form of corporal punishment. As with sumo wrestling, opera or bagpipes, you either love mime or you don’t. You really don’t.
In his essay “A Little Louder, Please,” Woody Allen is so confounded by the antics of a “famed international pantomimist,” that he launches into a solo game of charades. “Pillow … big pillow. Cushion? Looks like cushion …” Alas, after all these years, mime — the art that dares not speak its name — still gets little respect. Anti-mime jokes tend toward the violent (If a tree fell on a mime in the forest, would anyone care? If you’re going to shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?)
The antipathy is often justified. With the exception of a few rare talents, most are nothing but genetically inferior spawns, mimicking the one true practitioner. The trouble is that these watered-down Marceaus rarely get it right — and in so doing have made mime a four-letter word. “There is,” as Marceau says, “only one Marceau.” Yes, he’s the real thing. He has an impeccable comic sense, and knows how to make you feel, in your soul, the tragic moment. It’s no accident that children are his best audiences, because his art demands active participation, imagination. His is a world fashioned out of thin air. You see a statue, a pickpocket, a matador, a lion tamer, a soldier, a man passionately embraced by his lover. Marceau’s highly stylized, lyrical sketches can be light and whimsical or bitingly satiric and dark. “Marceau in our time,” says New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes, “remains the supremely eloquent voice of silence and poet of gesture.”
Perhaps true appreciation of Marceau requires a step back in time. Before Marceau broke out of an invisible box and stepped into millions of American’s living rooms on Max Liebman’s “Show of Shows” nearly 40 years ago, you could fit the number of people who knew or much less cared anything about the art of pantomime in a Citroen. What we know of mime — the mute theatrics, the exaggerated body language, the requisite black-and-white get-up — was essentially minted by Marceau.
From an early age, the theater seemed Marceau’s destiny. Born Marcel Mangel in Strasbourg, France, on March 22, 1923, he came from a lively Jewish family with socialist ideals and an artistic bent. His extended family included many musicians and dancers. By the age of 7, Marceau was entertaining neighborhood friends with his comic talent. “I discovered I could make people laugh and cry without speaking,” says Marceau, who wasn’t “doing mime.” He was, in fact, imitating Charlie Chaplin. (Indeed, Marceau’s thickly lined eyes and mouth and black-and-white silhouette evoke Chaplin’s silent-screen image.)
When Marceau was 15, his life unraveled. On the day France entered World War II, his family was given two hours to pack. Marceau and his older brother, Alain, fled to temporary safety in Limoges. Alain became a leader of the local French underground, and young Marcel joined in. To hide their Jewish origins, the brothers changed their family name to the solidly patriotic Marceau, a famous general in the French Revolution.
Marceau’s wartime activities presaged his later artistic role as illusionist. Using red crayons and black ink, he altered the ages of French youths’ identity cards, proving them too young to be sent to labor camps. And later, masquerading as a Boy Scout director leading campers on a hike in the Alps, he saved hundreds of Jewish children’s lives by smuggling them into Switzerland. No surprise, then, that his most affecting works — notably “The Trial,” “The Cage” and “Bip Remembers,” which recounts Marceau’s own wartime experiences — are highly political.
In 1944, Marceau’s father was captured and deported to Auschwitz, where he died. His mother headed to Perigueux, in the south of France, with the two brothers, but when the situation became too dangerous, Alain and Marcel fled to Paris. Despite the desperate times, Marceau continued entertaining fantasies of a future in the theater. “I wanted to be a speaking actor,” he insists, though most of his theatrical inspirations were silent screen stars: Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy and the Marx Brothers.
Again his career was put on hold when he entered DeGaulle’s Free French Army. Because he spoke such good English, he was appointed as a liaison officer with Patton’s army. When he returned to Paris, the city was liberated, and Marceau was free to pursue his dreams. In 1946, he enrolled in Paris’ famous Charles Dullin School of Dramatic Art at the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre.
It was at the Dullin School that Marceau found his mentor, renowned teacher Etienne Decroux, from whom Marceau would learn that there was, in fact, an art called mime. Decroux had invented an exacting physical grammar, “moving statuary,” that called for a virtuoso performer capable of perfect isolation and precise movement. Theater students weren’t lining up at the door. “In those days,” says Marceau, “mime was a tiny part of drama school study, like saber fencing. Most actors found it too tiring. But it captivated me.”
“You’re a born mime,” declared Decroux, and it was so. But Marceau soon parted ways with his mentor, who was at heart less an entertainer than an academic. Taking Decroux’s uncompromising grammar as a launching point, Marceau developed his own style, a language that proved to be more accessible to the masses — mime for the mainstream. His invention of “mimodramas” signaled the true beginning of modern mime and the end of his relationship with Decroux. Believing that Marceau had cheapened the “science” of mime, Decroux never forgave his star pupil.
This mainstream mime, however, enchanted audiences, especially starting in 1947, when Marceau created his alter ego, “the dreamy little poet” Bip. Dressed in striped sailors shirt and white flair pants, Bip was a classic underdog, a sweet loser who tried hard, and inevitably failed. First playing at Paris’ diminutive Theatre de Poche, Bip, aka Marceau, swiftly gained enough fame to take his show on tour, performing throughout Switzerland, Italy, Belgium and Holland. Over the next 10-plus years, he wrote dozens of mimodramas. In 1955, he decided he was ready to take his show overseas. If Marceau could make it in New York, he could make it anywhere.
But he was virtually unknown in the United States. His tour opened on Broadway, at New York’s small Phoenix Theater, where he was scheduled to play for two weeks. Critics raved — “Marceau is the essence of theater” — and the houses filled. His Broadway run lasted an astounding three months, and he went on to tour the country to standing-room-only crowds. By the beginning of the ’60s, Marcel Marceau had become a household name.
Which is precisely what troubles him. When Marceau is gone, we won’t say, “There goes one of the world’s greatest mimes,” but “There goes ‘the’ world’s great mime.” Marceau is mime, which is the artist’s strength and the art’s weakness. When the man who made the invisible visible has departed, will mime disappear with him?
“I’ve heard some people say I’m a ‘classic,’” says Marceau. “But time goes so quickly and people forget quickly. What is really important is to remain a classic after your life. One way is to bring mime to more and more young people.”
Marceau hopes to keep mime alive through his Paris school, L’Ecole International de Mimodrame de Paris Marcel Marceau. He wants people to remember not just Marceau, but the art form he created. “Mimes are masters of silence,” he says, “soon forgotten if they don’t appear onstage regularly.”
To ensure his legacy, Marceau, after gentle prodding from colleagues, agreed to form the Marcel Marceau Foundation for the Advancement of Mime in New York. Foundation board members are an eclectic mix of stars that include Michael Jackson, Placido Domingo, Barbara Hendricks and Dustin Hoffman — all devoted fans.
The foundation’s primary goal is to collect and record Marceau’s work. At present, he is making an educational video to teach mime to theater and dance students. And despite the naysayers and joke tellers who’ve already penned mime’s obituary, Marceau believes mime has a bright future. “I believe in the 21st century mime will enter the field of theater as a modern art form,” says Marceau. “Remember, it’s taken dance 500 years to develop. We are only 50 years old.”
One night recently, I phoned him at his country home, a farmhouse just outside Paris. The next day, Marceau would be leaving for a summer-long American tour. It is midnight, his time. I thank him for taking my call at such a late hour.
“But I keep theater hours, you know,” he tells me in flawless English.
“You must get tired, though,” I say.
“Tired?” Marceau says. “No, I would have been tired if I hadn’t played. This has kept me young. My body has kept the same weight and agility it had 30 years ago.”
Indeed, Marceau’s still as flexible as a Slinky, but time has taken a toll on his hearing, so I find myself in the unkind position of bellowing questions at the world’s only great mime. But once he understands me — just as he had when we first met — he talks fluidly. He tells stories about performing as a young boy, for Patton’s troops, about finally meeting Chaplin in an airport and David Copperfield on an airplane. “Mr. Copperfield said to me, ‘You make the invisible visible, and I make the visible invisible.’ So I ask him if he could make the plane disappear. Can you imagine? What would the world think if suddenly David Copperfield and Marcel Marceau disappear in the sky?”
I type quickly to keep up while he speaks. Suddenly, he stops and says, “Hello? Hello? Are you there?”
“Yes, Mr. Marceau,” I say, “I’m still here.”
“Ah,” he quips. “I thought perhaps you were doing mime.”
Alan Rickman appears at the curtain call for the opening night performance of the Broadway play "Seminar," on Nov. 20, 2011. (Credit: AP/Charles Sykes)
“Seminar,” a play starring Alan Rickman as a preening, acid-tongued teacher running roughshod over a group of tender aspiring writers, opened a few weeks ago on Broadway. Reviews have prompted all the usual observations about the difficulty of dramatizing both writing and reading, activities so internally momentous yet so physically inert. Why, then, do people keep doing it? And do the depictions of writing classes in stage, film and television — from “Wonder Boys” to “Bored to Death” — bear any relationship to real life?
To hash this out, I invited Ben Marcus — a novelist and an associate professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where he teaches fiction writing — to see “Seminar” with me and talk afterward about the ways writing workshops are depicted in the performing arts. His first novel was acquired by the writer, editor and teacher Gordon Lish, considered to be the inspiration for the character played by Rickman, and Marcus also attended one of Lish’s legendary seminars, conducted in private homes, like the class in the play. (Marcus’ fourth book, the novel “The Flame Alphabet,” will be published in January.)
We found Theresa Rebeck’s play amusing and pointed — right down to a reference to the bi-coastal literary magazine Tin House — despite the fact that it doesn’t bear much resemblance to any writing class we’d ever encountered. That, we concluded, might be for the best.
When characters are discussing writing in a dramatic work like “Seminar,” the things they say are so sweeping compared to the more detailed focus of an actual writing class. But what also struck me in this play is how the concept of writing and of being a writer is so intensely romanticized.
Also, the students have no ability to determine their own value for themselves. That’s the great conceit the whole play is riding on, that these people can’t begin to make a decision for themselves. That makes them funny, silly and ultimately vulnerable.
I noticed some of that with Gordon Lish. There were degrees of vulnerability around him. On one hand, it was easy for some people to blame him for his forcefulness, but with people who weren’t quite as vulnerable, I think that they thrived and got a lot more out of it. They got to listen to him talk inside and out about a piece of writing and to see that he could be deeply perceptive and that he cared about fiction more than anything else in the world.
The people who got caught up in the theater of winning his approval instead of, say, deriving their own system of self-worth, they didn’t seem to fare so well.
Would you say that some of the people who went to his seminars were like the characters in this play? Like a lot of writing students in movies and TV, they seem to be in the class for the sole purpose of getting a verdict on their work from some big-time authority figure.
In the students, I didn’t really recognize anybody I’ve ever seen. There are little bits here and there, but the thing I really didn’t recognize is the sort of blatant and publicly articulated desperation. There’s one character, the one who’s using his connection to his famous uncle, who is a very enjoyable stereotype. But anyone who behaved that way in front of any writing student I know — people would be horrified by that. Most people are self-aware enough not to behave the way that guy does.
But even if people don’t behave that way that doesn’t necessarily mean …
… that they don’t think that way, no. You could argue that it’s the play’s job to externalize that stuff because it’s funnier to see everybody acting on their demons and their craven desires. It’s more entertaining.
There’s stuff that, as the teacher, you don’t necessarily see. I once taught this class, maybe five years ago. It just never gelled. There was something strange about it. I just thought that I sucked because I couldn’t get them going. The semester ended, and I ran into someone who’d been in the class. That person then told me about this elaborate set of dramas that was going on among the students. There was a broken love triangle, someone who tried to kill someone else and they hated each other. It was just insane! I had no idea. They were consumed by their own drama.
Speaking of drama, the play takes the position that writing is a completely tortured experience.
Tortured and joyless, with no possible good outcome for anyone. One of the funny things that Alan Rickman’s character does is that he gives these predictions about everyone else’s future: This is what your life will be, in these funny monologues. The most talented one, who was writing the best work, he’s got a miserable future ahead, totally miserable. There’s no redeeming thing about it at all!
He’s going to end up like the Alan Rickman character.
A big difference that I would cite from Gordon Lish, is that he didn’t have any of the buffoonery of the Rickman character. He wasn’t self-important or grandiose, with the bragging, the travel and the overt sexual stuff. I think there was clearly a big ego there, but he was also very modest in person. His feeling was, “I will never do really great work, but maybe you will. If you think about these things, maybe you will. It’s too late for me.” The drama was about whether or not you could get behind his enthusiasms.
The thing he did that might be construed as abusive was that he was interested in pitting people against each other. Let’s say we have Smith and Dale: Smith might write something interesting and Gordon would say, “Dale, what’s your answer to that? How are you going to sleep at night knowing that your buddy here has written something so good?”
I think the pedagogical idea is that you might work harder if you feel competitive with your peers. Sometimes he would create competitions, but other times the students just weren’t biting.
What the Alan Rickman character does — his long, irrelevant, self-glorifying digressions about his adventures in various kinds of disaster tourism — well, maybe Gordon Lish didn’t do that, but I’ve certainly heard about a lot of writing teachers who do.
It struck me as a more old-fashioned, first-wave creative-writing model. The famous writer is trucked into the Midwestern university. He’s drunk all the time and he makes these pronouncements. You don’t even get your work read, but you sit at his feet and listen to these drunken tales and that counts as some kind of instruction.
I got my MFA about 20 years ago, a little more. Then, there wasn’t much of an established tradition of actual instruction. Now, 20 years later, if there are 12 students in the class, the students are getting back 11 copies of a submitted work, plus the instructor’s, with intensive line editing and one-and-a-half to two-page, single-spaced typed criticism — more criticism on this apprentice work of fiction than you get when you publish a book. This feedback machine has been created, giving students some pretty substantive criticism. That, I think, takes the spotlight away from the instructor as this Svengali figure who makes these pronouncements that are going to lead to some shattering revelation.
Enjoyable as those revelations are to watch on stage! Another thing you don’t see in the play is the idea that there are different types of literary traditions, each equally valid, the idea that good writing can be something other than opening a vein on the page. One of the characters writes a fake memoir about a transvestite Cuban gang member that completely deceives them all until she tells them with great amusement that she’s the one who wrote it. They all think it’s fantastic before that, but it’s still presented as a debased thing for her to do.
Well, she’s taking a sort of superficial bait by going for this supposedly gritty, real-world authenticity that the teacher wants. There’s a little bit of satire in there, right, because she can actually ape this form perfectly and she makes a successful piece of writing. It says something about how we value the personal stories behind the writers. If it’s a book about the streets, we want the writer to be …
… of the streets.
Yeah. You see that when you’re promoting a book. No one’s interested in talking about the actual book. They want to talk about the person who wrote it. What bad things happened to you that we can talk about? So the play does some funny satire about our desire for the “real” by also showing that someone can fake it. It’s just a style. It’s artificial and anyone can do it.
Then there’s the figure of the young woman who writes a lot about sex, and she’s very pretty and fully prepared to capitalize on that, and this generates a lot of bogus interest in her work. Now, that’s not an unfamiliar kind of writer, but sometimes the writers who fit that profile are actually really good writers as well.
They are.
They’re more mediagenic, and many people resent them for that, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be talented, too. In the play, that character is sympathetic, very grounded. But she’s also a slapdash person who isn’t committed to doing good work. She’s likable, but she’s supposed to be a contemptible writer.
She didn’t have any gravitas at all. But then gravitas is often an awful thing to encounter when you’re teaching. It doesn’t correlate to anything. When it’s attached to really poor work, it’s torture.
Each of the students had to play a certain type, right? They all play really well. There is the glib, competent, self-promotional one. And there’s the sullen genius who refuses to show his work to anyone — but that’s where it all starts to fall apart. He, in the end, is immune to the praise that he’s so covetous of.
It’s meant to show his integrity, I guess.
Yet he was still there, still soaking it all in.
He’s the character who dissents from the seminar and has a distance from it in a way that the audience shares. He’s a skeptic about everyone else’s shtick, recognizing it as shtick, which is what the audience is doing, too.
It’s funny to see these types, but it would have been funnier if their writing didn’t correspond to their type in such an obvious way. Because, too often, the self-important, brooding genius type — that guy is bad. He’s so bad.
Yes! In real life, the guy who is melodramatic and idealistic and angry about the importance of writing, and just so grandiose about it, is also the person who lacks the subtlety or wit or humor or perspective to be a really good writer.
There’s really the biggest myth of all that’s propagated by the play, which is that somebody’s persona has a lot to do with the quality of their writing. That’s just never true. Sometimes, it’s the dull, plain person who turns in totally killer, electrifying writing. Sometimes the really dynamic, witty, amazing person just dies on the page after the first sentence. Or, sometimes the really talented person is just a complete sweetheart. Just a really nice person. The whole notion of equating somebody’s personality with what they’re capable of creatively just falls apart very, very quickly.
One of the characters takes a job as a ghostwriter, and that’s treated as a fatal deal with the devil. Once you take a step in that direction, you are doomed as an Artist. She couldn’t possibly learn anything from it. That doesn’t take into account how Hemingway’s early work as a reporter affected his fiction, let alone the fact that a number of revered novelists — Don DeLillo, Peter Carey — started out working in advertising.
It’s really a portrait of a certain kind of idealism that you can only have before you’ve done anything. It’s of a certain age and a certain stage.
But if you’ve never gotten past that stage, or have only seen it from the outside, it might seem like the way all writers are. Which is why the play convinces its audience, perhaps.
Everybody was laughing.
Laughing in a very knowing way, too! I get the impression that the image many people have of writing classes comes from this sort of depiction.
What’s funny to me is that, as far as I know, instruction in some of the other art forms doesn’t seem as available for satire and derision. Why aren’t we making fun of people making mud sculptures and the pretensions of teaching in the visual arts world?
That’s especially puzzling because when it comes to visual arts, you can actually show the audience what the characters are making.
And, oh my God, it’s even worse. I’ve seen it firsthand. They say things that, if you wrote them down — there’s nothing there. The kind of faux theory shit that comes up is so crazy and meaningless. It should be made fun of so much more! And yet, we don’t treat the formal study of painting as if it were a joke. We don’t question that someone might want to go to art school.
Or music school.
Boy, that just seems like it would be the last subject for comedy, right? A music class in graduate school. And yet, when it comes to writing classes: “Ha, ha, ha! What morons! They think they can get together and talk about writing!”
What is that? There’s the whole “Writing can’t be taught” thing. I was once at a dinner, and at the other end of the table there was a gray eminence writer, whom I won’t name, who said, when asked if he taught, “Writing can’t be taught.” And I, a smartass 20-something, leaned over and said, “You mean you can’t teach it.” Because how does he know? That’s like me announcing, “Cello can’t be taught!” because I can’t teach it.
I think a lot of stuff does get taught and it can be talked about. I think writing is a craft. Language is the medium and you make things with it. But, you’re right. This play isn’t for people like me. It’s for people who have a vague idea about what goes on in a writing class. It’s a rough enough sketch, and it’s funny enough. It would be dour to demand realism from that play. It would be ridiculous. It would just take the entertainment away. I would never go to a play that was accurate about teaching. My God!
I lined up in the rain with friends on a Friday night outside a warehouse in Chelsea and waited for the doorman to usher us in, one small group at a time. As the doors closed behind we found ourselves in a long, pitch black hallway. Hesitantly pushing forward we discovered a desk, behind which stood a woman handing out a single playing card in exchange for each of our names. Several blacked-out hallways later, we pushed aside a velvet curtain, entering a bar plucked straight from the 1930s. A few cocktails in, slightly buzzed and still contemplating what I’d agreed to, my number was called and I followed instructions to pile into an elevator.
The attendant explained that there would be no talking during my stay at the McKittrick Hotel and that I was to wear a carnival-style mask at all times, but also that I was free to explore the space as I saw fit. As the elevator lurched to our destination and the doors opened, he offered these parting words: “this experience is best had alone.”
Unbeknownst to me, I’d stepped onto the blood stained set of “Sleep No More”, an innovative concoction dreamed up by site-specific British theatre company Punchdrunk. For this immersive theatre experience, they’ve mixed two parts Macbeth, one part film noir, a healthy splash of stage blood and just a pinch of drug-fueled techno orgy, shaken vigorously and served unapologetically.
First staged in Boston before coming to New York City, “Sleep No More” is a choose-your-own-adventure play extrapolated across six floors of three abandoned warehouses. Audience members are free to walk, run and rifle through over 100 rooms in the labyrinthine space and its elaborately designed sets, each with their own unique sights, sounds, smells and even tastes.
Punchdrunk has created a type of entertainment medium mash-up that is wholly immersive in ways all other forms of entertainment aspire to but rarely achieve. In a medium that hasn’t changed much since Shakespearean days, “Sleep No More” stands apart as a true innovation in immersive theatre.
The storyline of “Sleep No More” is a wordless reimagining of Macbeth told largely through dance. Characters rush in and out of rooms, tumbling and pirouetting around and on top of each other, disappearing as quickly as they came. The key to following the story is to chase after the characters as they literally run up and down multiple flights of stairs and hallways, another reason it’s probably best to split up with anyone you came to the show with.
As a detail-obsessed designer, I was so enthralled with the environment that I got very little of the narrative of the play the first time through. (I later went back to see it a second time.) I spent the entire time rifling through drawers and stacks of papers and exploring the different spaces including a hospital, candy store, cemetery, apothecary, detective agency, photo studio, pine forest and taxidermist’s shop. The environment is so completely immersive and transformative that it even becomes disorienting at times. One gets the feeling that that’s exactly what the brilliant engineers of this experience had in mind.
A peculiar thing happens when you dress a group of strangers in identical, expressionless masks. By essentially inviting the audience onto the stage, the masks form a kind of fourth wall, and help maintain a division between performer and viewer. But by stripping you of your identity while maintaining such close proximity to the actors, you take on more of a voyeuristic role in an extremely intimate setting. After all, the story you’re watching unfold is rife with violence, nakedness and all manner of sexual activity. The masks free you to stare at things we might shy away from if we could be seen as ourselves. They are the final key in allowing the audience to truly immerse themselves into Punchdrunk’s lavish world.
While chasing after Macbeth late in the play, I found myself back in the bar I’d originally entered through at the beginning of the night, but it appeared to have been completely overgrown with vines and leaves. It was extremely disorienting and unnerving– what the hell was going on here? Where was everyone? We were the only ones in the room and I could feel chills creeping up the back of my neck.
“Sleep No More” does what all good forms of entertainment attempt to do: to transport you from one reality into another. But through its truly innovative format, it does this so holistically and convincingly that it’s possible to completely lose yourself into its macabre world. And if that was the goal, after chasing Macbeth into the vine-covered bar, I was utterly lost.
“Sleep No More” runs through Nov. 5 in New York City.
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“Sleep No More” is one of the hottest shows in New York right now, which is surprising, considering that I spent most of my two hours during the McKittrick Hotel production wandering around the six-story building, wondering what the hell was going on.
The British company Punchdrunk’s production is ostensibly the story of “Macbeth,” though mixed with Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Rebecca” and told in the form of an interactive maze that owes more to video games — New York magazine compared the experience with “puzzle-horror first-person video games like BioShock” — than Shakespeare.
Audiences form groups and are given “Eyes Wide Shut”-style masks as they enter the lounge area, which serves as the show’s waiting room. They are told they aren’t allowed to speak until they return to the lounge and also not to bother the actors — but nothing else is off-limits. Then you are let loose in the hotel, where every room is decorated like a spread from “Nightmare Homes Monthly,” and run into the “characters” (easy to spot because they aren’t wearing masks). They perform their wordless scenes as they race from room to room. Sometimes they dance. Sometimes they fight (also a form of dancing, with some super-intense choreography). In one room, you might find a weeping woman looking at a photograph while packing a suitcase. In the basement, there’s a dinner party where guests are either having a blood orgy or doing a sweeping waltz, depending when you arrive.
There’s even a strobe-light rave room where a naked man wearing a boar’s head simulates sex with a woman. In another, a lithe man lip-syncs to Peggy Lee’s “Is that All There Is?” while crying. David Lynch would be proud.
“Sleep No More” was beautiful, terrifying and novel. What it wasn’t, however, was coherent. But maybe that’s because I hadn’t known that in order to get the full experience of the play I would have had to spend hours unlocking hidden Internet websites and swapping clues on Facebook with other devotees. Basically, it requires turning your life into one big alternate reality game before the show even begins.
“The idea is once you’re let loose on one of the floors of the hotel, you pick out a single character and pursue him or her (though you can switch any time you want), as the performer runs, dances and vaults all over the place.”
That’s easier said than done. These actors will run you ragged through corridors and secret passageways, sometimes locking the door behind them. Audience members themselves act as another deterrent to sticking with Macbeth or one of the witches; mobs form around the actors and block you from seeing all the action. Half the time, the group divides as it tries to (silently) figure out if Macduff ran up the stairs or slipped into a backroom somewhere. Next thing you know, here’s a new character with a plot all his own. You end up watching a bartender fight some other guy for awhile before realizing that you’ve completely missed the point … if there ever was one.
Unlike fragmented films such as “Memento” or “Inception,” there’s no DVD version of “Sleep No More.” If you leave feeling like you didn’t get it, well, you didn’t get it. If only you had bothered to check out the discussion boards on the play’s Facebook page, where hyper-vigilant audience members post clues on whom to follow, where the action is going to take place, and what the hell is actually going on. It’s like a go-to guide for the uninitiated, and after the show it’s the best place to go and post your questions about the production. Say, for instance, that you wanted to figure out how to follow the character of Macbeth without losing him in the crowd. Well, here are some tips (which contain major show spoilers), courtesy of another “Sleep No More” forum:
“I followed Macbeth around pretty much all night. After the dance, Lady Macbeth takes Duncan away to another room. I followed them.
She seduces him, then after some kissing, she goes away.
Duncan undresses and then goes to the area right next to his bedroom that has pillows on the floor, and a basin with blood, and he lies down on the pillows.
Macbeth walks in and smothers Duncan with a pillow. Then he goes to the basin and covers himself in blood.
He runs to the bedroom with the bathtub, Lady Macbeth undresses him and bathes him, etc.
Then Macbeth runs to the Witch Disco Orgy, where he gets covered in blood all over again.
After that, he goes to a room with a pool table and kills Banquo.
He goes and meets Lady Macbeth again (but not in the bedroom) and they go to the banquet scene.
Then Macbeth leaves (unless you’re catching the very last go-around), and goes to the Hotel Lobby.
He beats up and tries to rape Lady Macduff, and then Macduff beats the crap out of Macbeth.
Then Macbeth runs to a balcony (we’re not allowed to follow him, we have to watch from the sides), and he jumps down to the forest.”
Don’t live in New York or have $80 to spend on a ticket? Well, there’s a reason to care about these secret clues and weird haunted-house rooms. Remember that 1997 David Fincher film, “The Game,” the one where Sean Penn buys his uptight corporate brother (Michael Douglas) the ultimate birthday present — a voucher for a live “game” from a company called Consumer Recreation Services. From there on in, every person Douglas’ character comes in contact with is part of the game, from business associates to that pretty waitress who just messed up his food order. Before you can say “Big Brother,” Douglas is running for his life, convinced he is about to be killed by this shadowy CRS conglomerate, which is everywhere and owns everybody.
Now jump ahead a couple of years and meet a man named Elan Lee, one of the founding fathers of alternate reality games (ARGs), who cites “The Game” as one of his major influences.
ARGs usually start out on the Internet (check out ARGN.com, which links to the big games being played right now). A cryptic website leads participants to a couple of clues, which quickly move into real-life scenarios. Players are expected to meet a certain person at a certain place in order to get another piece of the puzzle. The difference between “The Game” and ARGs is that you are working with a team: everyone else who is playing the game at that time. It’s a group activity, where one person’s find is quickly put up on a forum, to be compared with what someone else discovered in a different location. It’s like Fincher’s movie plus Dungeons and Dragons, with enough viral buzz to attract a cultlike following.
Even if you’ve never heard of ARGs, you’ve probably followed one anyway. “The Dark Knight” used one to give away the first peek of Heath Ledger as the Joker. To a lesser extent, it’s how J.K. Rowling revealed Pottermore as her new website, because the clues were only handed out online.
ARGs have been mainstreamed by marketing strategists for everything from the movie “A.I.” (where the game was called “Beast” and revolved around a fictitious murder) to Lee’s first corporate creation, “I Love Bees,” which was actually a viral promotion for “Halo 2.” Here’s a walk-through of how the latter worked:
The great part about using alternate reality games instead of regular advertisements is that a small group of super-fans can be counted on to play the game as quickly as possible, then post the results online. Then it’s picked up by the rest of the Internet and mainstream media, which don’t have the time or inclination to do hours of real-life legwork just to see a sneak peek of an upcoming movie. But for ARG fanatics, the results aren’t the point; it’s the game that matters. Well, the game, and the community built around it.
Which brings us back to “Sleep No More.” Yes, this play is an ARG, although it doesn’t have to be; it can start and end with your experience during a performance. But the show does have bonus material that will lead you to real-life encounters with the characters outside of McKittrick Hotel, provided you can figure out how to unlock Punchdrunk’s coded website. There have been location-based clues at Grand Central and IRL meet-ups for those who are as obsessed with solving the seemingly endless mysteries of “Sleep No More.”
Suddenly, those insanely detailed rooms filled with ephemera in “Sleep No More” don’t seem to simply mean some whimsical set designer had an unlimited budget. As it turns out, everything is a possible clue, relating to a story much larger than the ones told inside the confines of the “Macbeth” story line.
So “Sleep No More” is an interactive play that’s also a community-sourced Internet game that requires a working knowledge of Greek gods and JavaScript in order to solve it. God help all the Luddites of the world if this is the future of theater.
“Rent” is back in New York, only three years after ending its 12-year Broadway run. I take this news the same way I’d react to hearing that my parents have found the tape of my Bat Mitzvah and put the entire production on YouTube. “Rent”? Really? That show is so… is so… well, dated. Corny. Embarrassing, really: Even in a show that was so specifically about the ’90s, “Rent” was already a nostalgia piece about the ’80s, a pre-Giuliani world where Tompkins Square Park was full of singing hobos.
Many productions mark their setting with topical references, but usually the revivals happen long enough after the original that it seems quaint, not clueless. I mean, how could any actor go onstage now and sing about how tough it is to live on the Lower East Side as a poor artist? Or not feel a modicum of shame whining about the ethical dilemmas of “living in America at the end of a millenium”?
I want to tell the characters, “Wait until right after the millenium, and then come talk to me about the problems in New York.” I want to scream, “Stop singing about the different ways to measure a year!”
And to answer the titular question, “How do you pay last year’s rent?” How about getting a goddamn job?
But if I’m honest with myself, that queasy feeling I get when I hear anything “Rent”-related has nothing to do with Jonathan Larson’s show. One could argue that instead of becoming obsolete after September 11 forced New Yorkers to think about other issues than AIDS or how guitarists and filmmakers would be able to sustain their living arrangements in Alphabet City, “Rent” powered on through the aughts, refusing to conform to the changing world. It stayed true to its late creator’s original vision.
No, the reason I don’t want to hear about “Rent’s” revival is because I don’t want to think about the girl who spent weekends in high school shuttling up from Maryland to wait hours on line at the Nederlander Theatre for the cheap front-row tickets. I don’t want to remember the red, wooden “Rent”-decoupaged desk that my mother had made for me on my 14th birthday. And I don’t want to recall every line from every song on the soundtrack, which, of course, I can’t help doing as I write this.
“Rent” had such a hand in shaping my ’90s that it’s hard not to associate the musical with the beginning of the Internet: my first Instant Messenger name on AOL was RappGurl (after Anthony Rapp, who played Mark in the original production). The very first email LISTSERV I joined was “Rent”-related. That shared experience was my first inkling that the web had the capability to draw people together in a way that was never before possible. “Rent” is too personal, too close to home, and I don’t want to be reminded of the girl who was able to overlook the protagonists’ slacker mentality because the show’s message about art, love and death resonated in her suburban teen soul.
I don’t think I’m alone here. Even Ben Brantley’s review in The New York Times today seems slightly apologetic for its inability to separate the new production from the emotion and excitement of the original:
“Come to think of it, it seems like only five minutes since I saw ‘Rent’ the first time 15 years ago (more than 7,884,000 minutes), and I imagine that feeling holds true for almost anyone who was at New York Theater Workshop that February in 1996. It was one of the most genuinely dramatic — and cathartic — nights at the theater I’ve ever spent… OK, that was the moment that was, and it’s not one that’s ever likely to be repeated. And since I saw ‘Rent’ — both off and on Broadway — only with its original cast (I even passed on the 2005 movie version), it might be better to have a virgin pair of eyes check out this latest incarnation, which is also directed by Mr. Greif. “
I can’t imagine any reviewer writing something similar about “Phantom of the Opera” or “The Lion King.”
So maybe “Rent” was more than just an outlet for those stifled suburban theater kids who were a decade and a half too early for “Glee.” Despite the outdated references to AZT breaks and pre-post-millennial ennui, the spirit of Jonathan Larson’s show remains as immortal as… well… “La Boheme.”
It isn’t “Rent” that’s changed, we have: the audience and fans who bought into something sincere and genuine about the dream of New York, only to find ourselves 15 years later — jaded and hipsterfied — and totally uncomfortable with how much a Broadway musical once meant to us.
Chris Rock presenting the award for Best Musical at the Tony Awards on Sunday night.
In case you missed last night’s Tony Awards, here are clips of five of the highlights — from Neil Patrick Harris’s “Spider-Man” joke extravaganza to Mark Rylance’s poetic but baffling acceptance speech. For the full list of winners, click here.
1. Host Neil Patrick Harris tries to fit as many “Spider-Man” jokes as possible into 30 seconds:
2. Nikki M. James, winner of the award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical (one of nine total awards taken home by “The Book of Mormon”), gives an acceptance speech that is rambling, emotional, spontaneous — and delightful:
3. Mary Rylance, named Best Leading Actor in a Play, baffles the audience with a seeming non sequitur of an acceptance speech (AP explains that he was quoting a poem by Louis Jenkins):
4. Chris Rock brings down the house with his hilarious presentation of the award for Best Musical (“Come on, we know what the best musical is. This is such a waste of time — it’s like taking a hooker to dinner.”)
5. Neil Patrick Harris sums the whole evening up in a rap:
Alan Rickman appears at the curtain call for the opening night performance of the Broadway play "Seminar," on Nov. 20, 2011. (Credit: AP/Charles Sykes) 
(Credit: Sara Krulwich / The New York Times) 
I lined up in the rain with friends on a Friday night outside a warehouse in Chelsea and waited for the doorman to usher us in, one small group at a time. As the doors closed behind we found ourselves in a long, pitch black hallway. Hesitantly pushing forward we discovered a desk, behind which stood a woman handing out a single playing card in exchange for each of our names. Several blacked-out hallways later, we pushed aside a velvet curtain, entering a bar plucked straight from the 1930s. A few cocktails in, slightly buzzed and still contemplating what I’d agreed to, my number was called and I followed instructions to pile into an elevator.
"I've gotten to the secret level in Macbeth!" 
The original cast of "Rent," 1996. 
Chris Rock presenting the award for Best Musical at the Tony Awards on Sunday night. 
