NYC List: Sleep No More

How does this sound for a great birthday date?

Let's go to an old creepy hotel, grab a drink at a swanky bar that looks an awful lot like the Black Lodge on Twin Peaks, throw on some masks as we're whisked away from the bar into a cramped elevator, become separated from each other somewhere in the sea of a hundred other people wearing identical masks, wander alone up and down five stories, chasing actors we stumble upon to watch them play out a variety of violent, sensual, and passionate scenes, and then meet up outside two hours later to discuss what we saw.

Yep, that is what we did for my birthday at Sleep No More.

To describe it as concisely as I can figure out how to, Sleep No More is an interactive theatre experience that immerses the audience in an alternate universe in which you explore (or really just run around) a 5-story building (through hotel lobbies, asylums, a cemetery, an orphanage, a banquet hall, an apartment, a street lined with shops) in search of a dozen or so actors whom you occasionally stumble upon in various encounters with one another.  To say any more would give too much away, though I will say this is now high on my recommendations list for NYC visitors.  It isn't for the faint of heart (both in content and the fact that I went up and down so many staircases I was actually sore the next day), but if you can brave it, you won't be sorry.

Plus you get to leave with these sweet masks.

Sleep No More has been on my "Things We Must Do Before We Leave the City" List, so here's to another activity checked off!  Our clock is ticking....