>MacBeth hath Murdered Sleep

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It was a dark and stormy night. 
We walked the gray streets of Chelsea under a steady drizzle of rain as we gazed upon the generic building fronts hoping to arrive at our destined address sooner rather than later.  It was just cold enough for the rain to be unwelcomely chilly, like little specks of recently-melted ice oozing upon us.
We arrived at a warehouse attended by two men clad all in black.  “Are you looking for the McKittrick hotel?”
Upstairs, a gay lounge decorated with an eye towards thirties glamour is hopping.  A four-piece jazz band plays while a singer lovingly croons period music, a bartender dressed in spats serves up cocktails, and a woman in a blue sequined gown slinks around from table to table asking if you are ready to join the party yet.
By now, anyone even remotely connected to the theatre has likely at least heard about the Punchdrunk theatre company’s immersive theatre experience “Sleep No More”.  The New York revival (currently playing at the McKittrick Hotel on W. 27th street) is a re-make of the phenomenon which hit Boston in October of 2009 (ran Oct. 8, 2009 – Feb. 7, 2010 at The Old Lincoln School in Brookline).  To support the sheer amount of space required for the endeavor, Punchdrunk has taken over three conjoined Chelsea warehouses.  According to the New York Times, 200 unpaid volunteers spent approximately four months meticulously putting the over-100 rooms in the hotel together.  And believe you me it shows.
As you enter the hotel, you are given a white Venetian mask which you are asked to keep on during the duration of the production (my comrades with glasses reported that this made things a little difficult for them).  You are asked not to speak, and (as usual) to silence your cell phones.
You are then ushered into a large freight elevator where a porter randomly assigns chunks of the party to begin their journey at different floors.  We held hands to keep from getting separated (by the by, if you do go, go with a very small group or decide that you will get separated and agree to meet at the bar afterwards – it’s difficult to keep track of people in the dark when everyone’s wearing the same white mask and nobody is allowed to speak). 
You enter a veritable labyrinth of rooms (environments really) where you are permitted to touch, move, examine and explore.  We found everything from a foggy London street, to a taxidermist’s shop, an apothecary with dried herbs hanging from every available surface, a hedge maze, a ballroom, a Victorian hospital, a Victorian asylum, Macduff’s children’s rooms, to a large room with a bathtub filled with bloody water (I take this to be the Macbeths’ room).  In every room there is something to discover (some of my favorite discoveries were hand-written letters strewn about the place including the famous letter which MacB writes his Lady Wife – “They met me on the eve of ascension…”). 
As though the living museum aspect of this weren’t enough to sate the rampant voyeur, there is a human aspect as well.  Actors dash about around you (easy to spot – they’re the ones without the masks) and you can choose to follow them and watch them meet up with other actors to portray wordless scenes in various environments of the hotel.  Amongst some of the scenes we saw were the famous Macbeth banquet, a couple dancing in the ballroom, the Witches’ first encounter with Macbeth (complete with shot roulette), and the murder of Duncan.
I really can’t describe to you how wonderfully creepy the entire experience was.  Imagine floating about darkened rooms, not knowing where you will end up when you turn a corner, constantly meeting with white-masked individuals who are somehow comforting rather than terrifying, and occasionally being grabbed by actors who seem to appear from nowhere.  Perhaps the highlight of our time in the hotel came when we were attempting to find our way out.  We had reached the stairway and were trying to follow an actor one way (at the back of the white-masked cloud) when a woman’s scream echoed through the hall.  We all looked at each other, about-faced, and (like good heroes) ran towards it to find Macbeth standing over the body of a very pregnant Lady Macduff.  Somehow, the knowledge that we had just missed the murder (even if there was nothing we could have done about it) sank sickly into my gut.  Had there even been anyone there to observe her last moments?  Had she expected to see him coming round the hall?  Had she greeted him or did he surprise her?  And did she try to fight him off or gracefully accept her fate?
Now this is theatre.
The experience jostled me.  As we explored the different rooms, there was no doubt that I was moved; to tears, terror, laughter, excitement, suspense, pity and everything in between.  Being able to touch and be touched by what was going on brought the story home to me in a way that I’ve never experienced before.  Of course, there isn’t really a cohesive story.  There is no set path for a visitor to explore, there is no pre-determined way to experience the hotel.  Proprietors estimate that each guest only sees 1/16th of the total experience.  And I won’t say that at times I wasn’t left wondering “so what does this have to do with Macbeth?”  But even in those times, I was too enraptured with what was going on around me to mind too horribly much.
Some reviewers find that Shakespeare haunts the attraction rather than is the attraction.  I don’t entirely disagree with them, but I find it difficult to lend their argument full credence.  Certainly liberties were taken with “Sleep No More”, and there are things which still don’t make sense to me.  That, however, is what I think holds the greatest appeal.  The entire thing is a puzzle which can be solved one of ten billion ways and it is up to each individual to determine her own experience and what that experience means.
When I left the hotel I was exhausted.  I felt like my mind was going to leak out my ear.  I had a difficult time forming coherent sentences, and we drove home through the now-torrential thunderstorm in almost complete silence.  As I collapsed into my bed that evening, all I could think was “Macbeth hath murdered sleep.”
…for that… I slept like a baby.  Despite having bizarre blood-soaked dreams with figures in white Venetian masks and random time-traveling with an eye towards steam-punk style globetrotting antics. 
Go.  Seriously.  Find some way to get there.  This is a veritable revolution in the way audiences experience Shakespeare and I can only hope that this cutting edge cuts deeply into the fabric of American Theatre.  I don’t think that saying “I will cheat on the bard” works here because technically I didn’t really…. it’s more like having a tryst with his similar-yet-different twin brother.

>Puerto Rican Love

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As the winter break winds draws to a close, I’m busy attacking the Common Reading Exam List with a vengeance.  Last week, I got through passages from the Bible, three Nathaniel Hawthorne short stories (“My Kinsman, Major Molineux”, “The Minister’s Black Veil”, “The Maypole of Merry Mount”), and Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”.  This week already, I veritably blew through Jesus Colon’s A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches.
This is miraculous in several respects: the first being that I had absolutely no inclination to read the book based solely upon the title.  Criticism founded in any singular nationality is not something that I do, it’s not something that I’m comfortable with, and overall it represents a plethora of literary fields that I just do not connect to in any way, shape or form.  The closest I’ve come to any nationalist reading has been Irish literature, and that’s only because of a summer spent living in Dublin and my deep-seated adoration of Wilde and Yeats.  The title of this piece put me off; I have found by and large that any book based in a precept of national identity is just something I simply cannot relate to.  As a result, I find such books drab, boring, and perhaps not pointless but certainly without a point that I care to read about.
This book was gifted to me for my birthday, so even more than the other items on my CRE list, I felt obligated to read it.
And I have to say, I’m so glad that I did.
Jesus Colon came to New York from Puerto Rico as a stowaway in 1918.  He weathered some difficult times as one might imagine, but for that (if his writing is any indication of his actual temperament) never lost the spark of intellect, humor, and national identity that this book is steeped with.  It is noteworthy in that it is the first book-length work on the subject of Puerto Ricans in America to appear in English.  The vast majority of the book was written during the 1950s and it wasn’t published until 1961.  It is written in a series of short sketches (ranging in length from one page to seven pages), some of which appeared in print in various periodicals which Colon wrote for but most of which were never seen in print until the book’s publication.
Noteworthy to me is the amount of wit and humor in what could easily turn into a sob fest (not without reason, mind you, I’m not trying to trivialize the plight of the immigrant worker).  Colon’s style is light and quick.  Like a fencer, he never beats a point over the head.  He will touch and go, leaving you understanding, but still thinking.  He is subtle while remaining explicit and that is another part of what I love so much about this book.  I don’t feel talked down to, I don’t feel preached at, rather I feel taught.  He is educational without being didactic and entertaining without being trivializing.
I also connect with Colon as a person.  Colon paints himself as an educated man caught in a world set to minimize him.  He lovingly embellishes details of himself as a reader/writer/man that any not-so-closeted literary geek will connect to.  Things like feeling not fully dressed without a book tucked under his arm, his love for reading in the bath (and his method of doing so), and being able to recite Don Quixote because of his nostalgic childhood connection with the text appeal to me as a book nerd.  Things like his sneaky usage of his wife’s decorative bathroom towels, his examination of the practice of singing in the shower, his propensity to spend his day off riding the bus lines to their very last stop then journeying back on another bus, and his hesitancy to liken a woman to “a goddess” because he has never seen one appeal to me as a human being. 
Perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of the novel, to me, is entrenched in an incident which occurs at the book’s very beginning.  In Puerto Rico, cigar-factory workers would hire a man to read to them as they rolled cigars.  This man, called the Reader, would often be more of a performer than a straight reciter.  He would act out important passages of the books, commit them to memory verbatim, and perform them for the workers throughout the day.  Colon admits that, despite the years which separate him from his childhood in Puerto Rico, he can still hear the voice of the Reader reciting key passages to him from famous works of literature.  These books, these recitations, seem keystones in Colon’s interest in literature.  They are his first exposure to books (at least as presented in A Puerto Rican…) and he admits, “I can still see that window and listen to that voice reading from the adventures of Don Quixote or the miseries and persecution suffered by Jean Valjean, books and characters that will be remembered many years after the latest ‘whodunit’ has been read and forgotten” (12).  The performance, suffused in Colon’s bones, stayed with him over any contemporary work he read for himself.  It made the literature longer-lasting to him and provided scaffolding for the rest of Colon’s literary career.
To me, this is utterly indicative of the power of literature in performance.  You can read a book, certainly, but how long will that book remain with you?  How long will that reading be called into your memory?  Unless you are among the lucky percentage of the population with photographic recollection, chances are it is not that first reading which will stick but rather subsequent readings and conversations that occur from it.  On the other hand, you can go see a play.  A performance.  Something that can (and will) never be repeated in exactly the same way again, and how long will that remain with you?  A truly memorable performance is easier to digest, more suffusing, and easier to remember than a truly memorable read.  Colon’s experience stands testament to this. 
Overall, if you are at all interested in old New York, equal rights, Puerto Ricans, the labor movement, writing, reading, or just good literature, you should really give this book a go.  It’s a two-hundred-page-slip-of-a-thing divided into perfectly digestible bite-size bits, so it’s an ideal commuting buddy, bed-side book, or on-the-go-waiting-for-random-things read. 
Rating: I will cheat on the bard.
Works Cited
Colon, Jesus.  A Puerto Rican in New York And Other Sketches.  New York: International Publishers (2002).  Print.