Unveiling Liminal Worlds: A Dive into Alternate Realities at Sleep No More NYC

Portals and the Other Worlds in Between

Now, we’re going there. “There” being the “great beyond”. We’ve talked spaces. Real brick and mortar buildings in Seattle. (Read about our search here). We’ve talked places. Inspirational attractions from East Coast (here) to West (here). We’ve talked games. Cracking puzzles that change the narrative. Now, let’s talk alternate realities.

“Imagine a crack.

A carefully scratched jagged line in polished stone.

A peeled and stained curl in a formica desktop.

A crumbling split in dusty concrete at your feet.”

There are portals. They come in many forms. There are natural ones like harbors and caves and ones made by human hands like an arch or a tunnel. They can be unlocked and free to access or guarded and require a passport. Portals can charge a toll. That toll can be paid in money or in something more personal. They can be uplifting, transformational, and the means to a new beginning, but they can also be cloaked in shadows and marked with regret. These portals signify that something has gone forever.

Artists have managed to open portals. Once inside you become enveloped in another standard of rules and even though the outside world remains, just within the flip book of thoughts, “I need to call my mother”, “where did I leave that card”, “I need bananas for breakfast tomorrow”. The familiar fades and another sense of direction takes over. Then, we know we are somewhere else- an alternate reality.

Twice, lately, I’ve experienced this vertigo. The first...

Sleep No More. Chelsea, NYC.

I’m wandering an abandoned asylum on the 4th floor of The McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea, New York. The floor is complete with a turn of the century operating room, a collection of bloody bathtubs, and a maze of birch trees. I am standing in a small office flipping through a log book of patients looking for a clue to what happened in this place. I decide it’s time to leave and descend the stairs. But my path is blocked. A nurse in her white uniform with red piping ascends the stairs with a small crowd of masked ghosts following behind her. I stop, stand aside to let the gang pass, and do a 180 to join at the back. We crowd into the receptionist’s office where a cloud of loose pages hugs the ceiling like a cloud trying to escape. The nurse takes a seat at the desk. She opens the log book I had been pawing only a minute before, pauses over a name, makes a notation or two, and looks up with a red-lipped grin acknowledging us for only an instant as if we are only notions before closing the book, returning it the desk drawer, and heading on from the office to eventually meet another nurse in the maze of trees. They begin a silent argument of indignations and petulant gestures that turn into a dance until the nurse I followed from the office pirouettes to leave only to collapse backwards into the arms of the others and drapes to the ground. All the while we, the audience, hover on the edges staring through the branches, silenced.

We, the audience, wander The McKittrick Hotel, the site of Sleep No More, in our white masks that turn each of us into a voyeuristic ghost in search of a story. They tell us it’s “Macbeth through a Hitchcock lens” whatever that is, though I guess in some way we do know what it is and like it. We believe we know the story of betrayal and murder and ultimate hubris, and we know that “something wicked this way comes” as we wander the halls, but we do not know what portion of the story we will stumble upon at one moment or when we may be implicated. We pass from one diorama to another searching for meaning, a clue to which way to wander, a direction from a performer or a written note that clearly tells what is happening, but we look in vain. We stand amongst dried herbs and moldering taxidermy, read case files and stare at photos of murder scenes looking for the thread of a story, feeling it press down all around, whispering in our ear, “I promise you’ll get it next time.”

And this is one type of Alternate Reality. A Liminal Space. Bold and dark and dripping with passion.

The second spell of vertigo is yet to come. Stay tuned…