

Another group might have been Baptists anyway, they were excited at this chance for anonymous voyeurism and vicarious sin. I had a distinct feeling the group standing in the way of my view were from Maryland, I couldn’t say why. Among them, you could pick out all kinds of types despite the masks. Some of the people in the audience wanted to stand really close to this kid, some closer yet. They must have a warm dressing room or someone to fluff him or perhaps he fluffed himself-you’d definitely want to put your best dick forward going out among all those masks without a thing to say. I noticed his balls were shaved and his dick a touch tumid-none of the shrinkage you’d expect. He kept up his silent, naked imprecations. She pushed her way through the masked crowd and fell into a rocker. We came to a large room with a platform in the middle and a stuffed grizzly with a stuffed rat in its mouth, and suddenly here came what was certainly an actress, she followed by an actor.
TICKETS SLEEP NO MORE FULL
We found a room full of taxidermy animals and skeletons-a beaver, I think, though there may have been some skeletal tinkering. Lady MacBeth growing mad: “Out, out, damn spot!”īut this was a dimly lit and fussy installation (of some fascination, I admit). And Lady MacBeth, taken with the news, convincing him to kill the actual king, Duncan, and then mayhem from there forward, Malcolm sussing things out. The witches stirring their caldron, predicting he’d be made King, predicting he’d be killed, too. At a podium we were given hard-plastic Freddy Krueger masks with long, protruding chins and exhorted to put them on, keep them on. I reluctantly chugged my Manhattan and we joined the line moving through yet another black curtain, last people in. The singer, an ebullient African-American woman in period dress, came to the table, said we’d best hurry along-drinks couldn’t go inside. Everything flat black and a little cobwebby and like you’d stepped into a time machine and emerged in Chicago, 1932, a speakeasy. A little jazz quartet was swinging away-good musicians, too-and we found a table, not difficult as the rest of the audience seemed to be leaving. We emerged into a barroom, or, once again, “barroom,” a set, but with a real bar, where we were served a real drink each and given a real bill for $27.00. Young actors playing the roles of opprobrius hotel people, with more and less intimidating effect, some imperturbable as Beefeaters, others more gracious, small roles for amounted to a chorus. Our tickets were taken by a man in livery and we were shushed at each turn in the hallway and each landing on several flights of stars, eyed at each set of black curtains by more actors. “It’s your lucky night,” a film noir hostess said to me. At the front desk (or “front desk,” a prop), there was some muttering about our tardiness, but we were given our tickets and directed to another door. We were given no playbill or papers at all, nothing to go on but what we’d heard, and I’d limited my research so as to be open to surprise if not confusion. The coat-check people were friendly but from another era, maybe the thirties. The hallway in front of us was long and as flat black as the face of the building. A nattily dressed and fake-ish hotelman eyed us, said, “You’re not too late.

“The Hotel McKittrick?” Behind him the doors opened. We asked the men where the MacBeth performance was, if they knew where it might be. But that doorway-there was a ten-foot star above it, nothing flashy, flat-black as the building in fact, was clearly a clue, the first in an evening of clues and little resolution. We were a little late, leapt out of the cab on 10th Avenue, nothing to see on West 27 th street toward the river but a couple of closed galleries north and a wall of blank warehouse faces south, pair of huge men hanging out a little ominously under a bare bulb down there. What Bloody Man is That? (a review of “Sleep no More”) categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence Comments Off on What Bloody Man is That? (a review of “Sleep no More”)
