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.

As Ben Brantley wrote in his New York Times review:

“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.

“Ethan!” she’d yell from her lair. “Help me get up!” She might be half-dressed in her bed, or on the toilet, or on the floor, or in the bathtub.

Years before my mother’s “accident,” as we called it, my dad had moved several hours away. We saw him regularly, but he and my stepmom were largely out of the picture. A family friend had moved in to help take care of my Mom, my siblings and me. The theory was, Sara Gilsdorf might make a miraculous recovery, and the friend would move out. We eventually discovered this would never come to pass.

It didn’t take long to figure out I couldn’t tame my mother, not this beast. I knew I couldn’t save her, either. I fought with her for a while, usually battling over her inability — what I mistakenly read as her refusal — to regain her old life, be it making a cup of coffee or making a family decision. After a while, I gave up. And kept my distance. I was stuck with a mother I was afraid to love.

We began calling her the Momster.

 ——-

Coincidentally enough, the film “Super 8″ also takes place in the summer of 1979. Like the boys in that film, I armed myself with a movie camera and was determined to be the next Spielbergian blockbuster kid. I studied Disney animation books. I built sets in my sister’s bedroom where stop-motion Plasticine creatures ran amok through an HO-scale train town. I ripped apart Revell model airplane kits to make my own “Star Wars”-like space ships that I’d film, frame by frame, as they dangled from fishing line in front of a hand-painted star-scape.

As I built and destroyed these worlds, my journey through the realm of adolescence to the kingdom of adulthood began to reveal itself as a tricky maze filled with traps, monsters and dead ends, not to mention broken mothers. I longed for some safe way through that labyrinth of conflicting, constricting emotions. The Super 8 movies I shot provided one avenue of escape.

Then, later that same summer of 1979 when my mom came home from the hospital, a stranger came to town — a new kid moved into the neighborhood. And a new path appeared to me.

JP and his family bought the house across the street from me. Not a ramshackle, creaky, 19th century New England colonial like mine, but a more modern one, with linoleum in the kitchen, wall-to-wall carpeting everywhere else, and a fully present, fully functioning father and mother.

I hung out a lot at JP’s house that summer. After a few weeks of watching “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century,” listening to Electric Light Orchestra’s “Discovery,” and programming primitive video games in BASIC on his TRS-80 Radio Shack computer, JP told me about Dungeons & Dragons.

“Elves?” I said one particularly hot afternoon as he cracked open the Basic D&D boxed set’s lid. “Like the Keebler kind?”

“No. Not little ones, doofus.” JP seemed a little miffed. “Have you read ‘Lord of the Rings’?”

“I saw the movie,” I countered. Ralph Bakshi’s half-baked, but still haunting, adaptation of Tolkien’s fantasy novel had come out the year before. I saw the cartoon on a trip to Boston to visit my mother in the hospital and it blew my mind.

“Well, D&D is kinda like ‘Lord of the Rings.’ Only you’re in the book. You’re in the movie. You choose what happens. You can be an elf, or a dwarf, or a human. You can be a wizard, or a fighter, or a thief. Even a cleric.”

I wanted to ask what a cleric was, but I kept my mouth shut. “A fighter. You mean like Conan? Or Strider?”


“Strider is more of a ranger. But yeah, you kill stuff. You’re the tank.”

I didn’t know what a ranger was either. All I could picture was the Lone Ranger, and the Texas Rangers. Mentally, I thumbed through my baseball card collection that my pet cat had recently peed on, ruining it. Neither of the Wild West or Major League Baseball universes seemed to be of use here.

“OK, I’ll be a fighter.”

JP handed me a pile of polyhedral dice — not just 6-sided dice, but 4-, 8-, 12- and 20-sided. I rolled as he instructed and before I knew it I had written six numbers on a sheet of loose-leaf paper, next to six categories that JP called attributes.

“Is 14 Strength good?” I asked. “Wait. He’s only got 5 for Intelligence.”

“He’s pretty strong,” JP said. “But he’s pretty dumb. You’ll have fun.”

Strong and dumb. This sounded like exactly the opposite of me, Ethan: about 5-foot-6, 130 pounds, a predictably good, B-plus/A-minus student, and never once tested in a real fight. Fun. “So now what happens?”

“Go to the store and get your equipment.” JP said my character had a few gold pieces to outfit himself.

This whole role-playing thing was new to me, but not to JP. Using words only — and in my mind, but also in the combined words and minds of JP and me — my fighter went shopping. Once in the “store,” in the “town,” my fighter (me) asked JP (who was the gamer referee, or the Dungeon Master) if he could buy himself a sword, a suit of chain mail, some torches, 50 feet of rope, a grappling hook, food (what JP called “rations”), a throwing dagger, a shield and a helmet. JP said he could. By the time he got out of there, my fighter had about six copper pieces left. JP told me to write down all these items on my character sheet. I dutifully complied.

“So now, you need to find the other adventurers,” JP said. “I’d suggest you go to the tavern.”

Go to the tavern. This was strange. D&D felt too much like little kid’s play, too much like make-believe. But I liked where this story was headed. “OK. I go to the tavern.”

“Good idea.” He smiled. “You push open the door. Inside, it’s gloomy. A fire crackles in the corner. You hear that a ship just docked in town, and a big battle against some nasty goblins just ended, so the place is full of tough-looking guys. There’s a dude in the corner with a funny hat. You might, you know, go over and talk to him.”

“I go over to the corner and talk to him.”

“Hello there, traveler,” JP intoned, with a kind of mysterious, Mr. Roarke from “Fantasy Island” voice. “I have heard of your exploits. You are a brave warrior.”

“I am? I mean, I am.” Maybe I could be a brave warrior. Even if I felt far from brave in the real world. “Yes, good sir, very brave.”

“Well, I have been assembling a group of worthy adventurers for a task.” JP looked up from his books and dice spread out around him on his bedroom’s pale green carpet. “Oh, how rude of me. I forgot to introduce myself,” Mr. Roarke continued. “My name is Malicus. Malicus the Wise, they call me. And your name?” JP raised one eyebrow, wizard-like.

I was sitting on the floor across from him, propped up against his bed. My fingers sunk into the soft fibers of the carpet. “My name is … My name is E … Ethor.” Ethan + Thor = Ethor. It was the best I could do.

“Well, Ethor,” Malicus said, “I know an Elvish archer named Quikpuck, a Halfling thief by the name of Slyfoot, and a cleric named Fabian the Just. The four of us have been hired by Lord Rathbane to investigate some mysterious happenings in the Krog Mountains above this port town. We have been told of treasure in a dungeon there. But also many men have died trying to get it. And these parts are overrun with goblins. We need a fighting man.”

“Uh huh. Well, Sir Mal … what is his name?” I whispered.

“Malicus.”

“Sir Malicus, I am not afraid of goblins. I have slayed many a … uh … Fell beast.” I had no idea where the phrase “fell beast” came from, but I was pretty proud of myself. I raised my arm in the air. “I will join you!” I was getting the hang of it.

“Very good. A stout warrior like yourself will come in handy. We leave at daybreak. You’d best get some rest, Ethor.”

It was way past dark. I could see, across the street, a square of light from my kitchen. The TV flickered like a blue flame. Mom would be wondering where I was. “I should probably go. Can we play again tomorrow?”

JP nodded.

“Can I take this?” I held up Ethor’s character sheet.

“Sure,” JP said, his nose in a rule book, already onto the next thing. “I gotta plan the adventure anyway. Come over after dinner.”

I gathered my stuff and booked it across the street, hoping to get though the front door and sneak past my mom without her seeing me. Maybe like Slyfoot.

——-

That summer, I kept making Super 8 movies, but D&D soon took over. It quickly became more than a game: It became a vital experience that let a geeky, introverted, non-athletic kid — a kid who felt about as powerful as a 3-foot hobbit on the basketball team — take action, be the hero, go on quests, and kill monsters. Not that all guys (and they were mostly guys in those days) who played D&D were geeky, introverted, non-athletic kids, but enough were, and at least this one felt invisible. With everything going on at home, perhaps I was the perfect candidate for escape. But I was also drawn to the idea of this game. I had always sensed that something was missing from the real world. My no-budget movies were one Band-Aid. But shooting my “Star Wars” remakes and clay monster battles took weeks and resulted in three-minute movies. Entering the D&D fantasy was effortless, instantaneous and endless. Epic.

I now see it was no accident that the year I found D&D, or it found me, coincided with my mother’s return from the hospital. It took courage for a teenage boy to deal with the Momster — more courage than I could muster at the time. I couldn’t face down the creature that plagued my own house. But playing D&D let me act out imaginary, possibly symbolic battles instead, and distracted me from the prospect of facing the real ones waged within my family’s four walls. In the D&D playscape, I learned to be confident and decisive, and feel powerful. Even cocky. Some of the guts and nerve and derring-do I role-played began to leak into my real world. By the time I graduated high school, I had transformed. I had used fantasy to escape but also to gather strength for later, when I could face and embrace my mother again. Which, as an adult years later, I finally did.

But in the summer of ’79, I was but a newbie. I needed to gain experience. I had only tasted the power Dungeons & Dragons. I didn’t know that game was about to save my life.

Back to those two archetypal narrative plots: someone goes on a journey; a stranger comes to town. That summer, two strangers came to town: JP, and my mother. Three, if you count me. I would become a stranger, myself, again and again. I would play many new roles. I would go on incredible journeys to imaginary lands. And I would defeat many monsters.

When I got home that night after my virgin D&D session, after slipping past my mother, I headed straight for Webster’s. “Cleric |ˈklerik|, noun. A member of the clergy; a priest or religious leader in any religion.” The next day, back at JP’s for another adventure, I would learn that in the D&D game world, clerics weren’t just priests. They were characters who had dedicated themselves to a god or perhaps several gods. They could cast spells such as “cure light wounds” and “protection from evil.” They could dispel the undead.

Surely those powers would come in handy, at home, or in my head, or in whatever life I would choose to live that summer, or in some realm far away in the future.

If you’re still feeling overwhelmed, we’ve prepared a brief guide of the day’s must-sees, as well as what programs to avoid.

Definitely catch: “Game of Thrones” panel

Author George R.R. Martin moderates a panel featuring series executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss as well as cast members Emilia Clarke, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Peter Dinklage, Kit Harington and Jason Momoa.

I know this is going to be the hot ticket event of the first day, but I’m not sure if it’s because the show is so popular, or if fans are just going with a bag of rocks to pelt at George R.R. Martin’s head. Either way, it’s not to be missed. Bring your Flip cam.

Definitely avoid: “Battlestar”: So Say We All

Richard Hatch hosts a panel and fan discussion of the “Battlestar Galactica” universe, politics and philosophy with Hatch (Tom Zarek, Capt. Apollo), Michael Taylor (“Battlestar Galactica,” “Caprica,” “Blood and Chrome”), Dr. Kevin Grazier (BG science consultant), and surprise guests for this exciting roundtable and Q&A session.

Guys: “Battlestar” is over. Time to move on. Now, someone show me the way to that Damon Lindelof/”Lost” theory panel.

Definitely catch: “Oh, You Sexy Geek!”

Does displaying the sexiness of fangirls benefit or demean them? When geek girls show off, are they liberating themselves or pandering to men? Do some “fake fangirls” blend sex appeal with nerdiness just to appeal to the growing geek/nerd market, or is that question itself unfair? And what’s up with all the slave Leias? Action flick chick Katrina Hill (ActionFlickChick.com) asks Bonnie Burton (Grrl.com), Adrianne Curry (“America’s Next Top Model”), Clare Grant (Team Unicorn, “G33k & G4m3r Girls”), Kiala Kazebee (Nerdist.com), Clare Kramer (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”), Nerdy Bird Jill Pantozzi (“Has Boobs, Reads Comics”), Jennifer K. Stuller (Ink-Stained Amazons, GeekGirlCon) and Chris Gore (G4TV’s Attack of the Show!) to discuss whether fans can be sexy and geeky at the same time — and if they should!

I’d say that you could just watch the mashup of hot chicks on late-night shows and save yourself the effort, but since these are actual nerd girls discussing gender issues and not just Mila Kunis talking about World of Warcraft, it’s worth making time for.

Avoid:  TV Guide Magazine: Fan Favorites

TV Guide is back with an all-star panel for the fans! Moderated by editor in chief Debra Birnbaum, Fan Favorites features your favorite talent from your favorite shows — in front of the camera and behind the scenes. Panelists include Nestor Carbonell (“Ringer”), Johnny Galecki (“The Big Bang Theory”), Jorge Garcia (“Alcatraz”), Leslie Hope (“The River”), Zachary Levi (“Chuck”), Joe Manganiello (“True Blood”), Julie Plec (“Vampire Diaries”), Matt Smith (“Doctor Who”), Kevin Williamson (“Vampire Diaries”), Deborah Ann Woll (“True Blood”), and others.

What a clusterfuck … do the same people who want to see Jorge Garcia or Matt Smith really care about what “Chuck” or the guy from “The Big Bang Theory” have to say? I imagine this panel will be the real-life approximation of channel-surfing when you’re bored.

Definitely catch: Entertainment Weekly: The Visionaries: A discussion with Jon Favreau and Guillermo del Toro on the Future of Pop Culture

EW moderates an in-depth conversation with Jon Favreau (“Cowboys & Aliens”) and Guillermo del Toro (“Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark”), two filmmakers at the forefront of bringing geek culture to the masses and making blockbuster art out of pulp fiction. They will discuss their inspirations, their current work, and how they strive to put a personal stamp on blockbuster entertainment. Plus: How is new technology changing the way stories are produced and viewed? And what do they think the pop culture universe will look like a decade from now? Moderated by Jeff “Doc” Jensen.

Comic-Con is one of the first places that “cool” directors will leak spoilers and info about their upcoming features, so get a front seat and turn on your tape recorder in case Guillermo del Toro lets something slip about “Pacific Rim.”

Bonus “Don’t Miss” screenings: Mike Judge hosting the new “Beavis & Butt-Head” episodes, “Archer” viewing and cast discussion, and the exclusive premiere of “Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe.” Just kidding.

This list is far from definitive. What events are you most looking forward to for Comic-Con?

So anyone who thought Berger was going to try to backpedal from that grandiose claim was badly mistaken. If anything, the writer wants audiences to know how committed he is to doing a J.R.R. Tolkien thing for the Hasbro game. Also, how committed he is to candy:

That’s precisely, I think, why we got the job on CANDY LAND. But that’s also why we were excited about getting the job on CANDY LAND. It’s something that, on the face of it, seems like a huge challenge: it’s a board game for kids, and there’s no strategy involved. But what it does have is the opportunity to set an action movie in a world made of candy. So when we meet with the director, Kevin Lima, and he says, “I want this to be LORD OF THE RINGS but with candy,” you could either laugh at that, or say, “If you could pull that off, that would be really cool. We’d love to be a part of that because we love LORD OF THE RINGS and we love candy.”

That should just be the film’s tag line: “Love ‘Lord of the Rings’? Love candy? You’ll love this movie!”

Hey, if you can think of a better tag line … or even a better “‘Candy Land’ meets ‘Lord of the Rings’” joke, let me hear them in the comments.

But it does worry me when the movie’s creators seem to be reaching a bit. After all, what’s funny about the Candy Land game is it essentially has no plot, so I was imagining a Jumanji type of scenario here, with maybe some adorable children meeting their favorite characters.

But according to the film’s writer, “Kung Fu Panda” co-scribe Glenn Berger, “Candy Land” is aiming for a much darker vision:

“We envision it as Lord of The Rings, but set in a world of candy. We don’t see it as a movie based on a board game, although it has characters from that world and takes the idea of people finding themselves in a world that happens to be made entirely of candy where there are huge battles going on,” Berger says. “We are going for real comedy, real action, and real emotions at stake.”

Jesus, that sounds a little intense. Battles? “LOTR”? Will there be a chocolate Mordor or licorice orcs? Will characters be forced to eat their way past Gloppy the Molasses Monster when he decides that he wants King Kandy all to himself? It sounds a little gruesome for a kid’s film.

On the other hand: “One Ring Pop to rule them all” would be a great tag line.