An Infinite Stage: The Mckittrick Hotel
The Mckittrick Hotel is a “stylized mash-up of Shakespearean drama and Hitchcockian noir,” a true New York underworld like Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery or the always traumatizing Penn Station, second worlds where one does not exist as they do outside, heterotopias of the city. Free from constant iPhone notifications, blaring city lights, and the ability to enter and exit at will, the guest is able to simply wander, to rummage through drawers and coats, to just exist like one does in childhood, unconnected and available. It’s lack of outward windows and maze of an entrance trap a bizarre and thrilling world within. The building itself, located on West 27th Street, is indifferentiable from neighboring Chelsea galleries and warehouses, for its focus is what lies within those worn brick walls. Sleep No More is an immersive experience, a journey to a place utterly unknown.
Before descending into Felix Barrett's underworld, my roommate who had been many times before tried to explain the venue to me. And like explaining the underworld to a mere mortal, I arrived at The McKittrick with this abstract idea of what the performance space would be.
I found each aspect of the hotel extremely detailed and thorough, from the handwritten diary on the altar in the towel room to the array of forceps in the hospital. I wondered through, wandering throughout the hotel like a post-apocalyptic looter, how all these objects made sense in the context of Macbeth or rather what they added to the experience. And would Shakespeare approve?
As Shannon pointed out, the lighted pine trees in the ballroom were references to the lines:
Macbeth shall never vanquished be until
Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill
Shall come against him. (4.1.91-93)
Clearly these pines were deliberately placed, as much a part of the story as the actors. So what other details are nods to Shakespeare's text? Production designers like Alexandra Schaller must scour Macbeth's pages along with Punchdrunk for inspiration. Another example of this comes with the lines:
He has no children. All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop? (4.3.218-221)
On the fourth floor, in the town of Gallow Green, is a taxidermists office where I spotted a stuffed chicken, perhaps a nod to these lines. “Each room has a back story that has been painstakingly detailed and designed," reported the New York Times in 2011 upon the completion of the space. These backstories, often connections to Macbeth, sometimes not, deepen the plot of Macbeth and build a history behind it that doesn't have to be a true one.
Your castle is surprised; your wife and babes
Savagely slaughtered. To relate the manner
Were on the quarry of these murdered deer
To add the death of you. (4.3.206-209)
These lines, spoken by Ross to Macduff, are perhaps the reason for the bloody baby dolls in the "Hecate's replica of the Mannerly Bar" on the fourth floor.
Ultimately, the set of Sleep No More enriched the narrative and made for a vastly detailed adaption. Like Conor and later Shannon noted, in the same way that Dante is a combination of Virgil and the Bible (amongst other things) Sleep No More is a mix of Shakespeare and Hitchcock, drawing connections to both as well as veering off beyond the bounds of each. In this way underworlds are all linked, for instance borrowing the idea of a "rabbit hole" and updating it to an elevator ride. Because of this ever-changing sense of what an underworld can be, the concept is never lost in history.
p.s. here's a pretty funny blog of SNM reactions any McKittrick guest will enjoy
