Alicia Anstead: Awoken by Sleep No More 6/3

My friend and I recently had a conversation about a show we saw last year – the wildly popular “Sleep No More,” which American Repertory Theater produced with the English group Punchdrunk. “Sleep No More” combined the tragedy of “Macbeth” with the creepiness of Hitchcock. Actors performed on several floors of an abandoned Brookline high school. Classrooms were converted into medieval chambers, or a Scottish heath or a 1940s noir hotel lobby. Scrums of audience members raced to follow actors in character or stumbled upon the ghostly Banquo dinner scene. And sometimes you felt like you were walking into someone’s bedroom. Because you were. The Macbeths, for instance.

My friend and I argue passionately about shows but mostly we argue to argue because in the end we seem to agree on nearly everything. But in this particular instance, we disagreed about the take-away you get from a work of art. He liked the show when he saw it. I admired the imagination of “Sleep No More,” but I get the jolt my friend did. I’m not really into audience participation. I like the fourth wall, and “Sleep No More” didn’t have it for me. It was fine, but I wasn’t powerfully moved standing there in Burnham Wood.

I did have to admit that while “Sleep No More” didn’t shake me in the moment, it forever changed the way I perceive not theater but real life. I saw the show alone on a spooky rainy night, and when I left the old school, I suddenly had a heightened awareness about the world on the street. “Sleep No More” had awakened in me a voyeurism for human activity, and everything I saw that night on the way home seemed like the stuff of drama: the couple making out on the subway, the mother screaming at her baby, even a machine shop eerily lit after hours. “Sleep No More” gave me permission to stand in the middle of humanity and see it as a love story, as a family saga, as a set waiting for its actors.

When does art happen? In the theater? Or later: out in the real world? My friend and I could argue that one endlessly, but I suspect we’d finally agree on this point: Art happens on its own schedule. That may not be when you’re in the museum, or in the theater, or when you finish a poem. It may be later, when art sees that you’re ready for it. But watch out: Art can sneak up on you months later, ambush you like an argumentative friend, and change you from a regular person walking down the street to an audience member in the middle of life.