Behind a White Mask

Much of the secret of Sleep No More is perpetuated by the dreamy and continuous soundscape that fills the space. Composed and created by Stephen Dobbie, the sound of the McKittrick is more than background noise. For Barrett, “the building is like a living, breathing organism.” Dobbie has built 17 different soundtracks for 17 zones of the McKittrick, most composed, with some sourced songs. He and Barrett want the sound to be familiar for the most nostalgic parts of the brain. The music feels cinematic, reminiscent of old movies and the glory days of film, and it sets the tempo and pace for the performance. The cinematic motif creates a primary gesture of the audience experience. “You are in your own personal film,” says Dobbie. “You are the star, and everything is happening around you.” At 10 minutes past every hour, the soundtracks repeat, and, for three minutes out of every hour, everyone anywhere in the building hears exactly the same thing.

Explaining the idea behind the single playback method, Dobbie says, “The show in NYC is the product of years of doing the shows and wanting to be able to control the sound in a much more efficient way, which opened up a lot more creative possibilities.” The decision comes from the culmination of trying many different ways to do this “instead of having people spread out saying 3-2-1 and pressing play, or having a computer with the inherent problems that software can bring,” he says, noting that it is absolutely crucial that, once the show starts, there can be no radio silence. The only intentionally silent place is the elevator, but the voice of the operator quickly fills the void. If any other space in the McKittrick ever went silent, it would feel broken, whereas if it went black, it would feel like part of the piece.

Dobbie approached the sound for each of the 17 zones of the McKittrick separately. Even in minor or liminal spaces, “All of the sound design is driven by the performance in that room,” he says. In the ballroom, for example, there are “two massive subs,” whereas the domestic spaces have smaller speakers tucked away.

Dobbie says that a lot of the experience is borne out of Doyle and Barrett’s imaginations. Sometimes sound comes first, sometimes movement. “Sometimes there is music and choreography around it, which serve to counter each other,” Dobbie says. There is a lot of found music, mostly popular music of the era. Dobbie bases his work on period research, also “making sure we have enough songs to play on the radio so you’re not just listening to a loop.” Once the team has found period pieces, Dobbie fills in the blanks with new sound that might take up the rest of the hour surrounding that three-minute clip. In the case of the NYC production, a lot of pieces have been established from the previous productions. “A lot of what I did on the most recent version of the show was improving it, making sure the sound design on each side of a piece of music was more sympathetic or more jarring,” Dobbie says.

There is no control room in the McKittrick. Everything is automated so that the ETC Ion lighting console is driven by the sound, which runs off of an ADAT hard drive setup. There is a single “go” at the top of each performance. The sequence of lighting cues loops once per hour in the three-hour long performance. The performers’ relationships to the light cues are completely set; if they end up behind, then they miss a cue. “The lighting for the show is necessarily designed to playback from a single desk,” says Maybank. “The soundtrack for the show is synchronized throughout the principal performance spaces, playing back from a central hard drive, and as such, must be in sync with a single lighting desk also.” He acknowledges that not everything in the McKittrick can be so controlled. “There are exceptions to this, where we need manual control, for example in the bar with live musicians and also in the more intimate areas of one-on-one performance,” he says. “These areas will generally have equipment tailored for the specific space.”

A long-running show like Sleep No More puts added stress on its equipment. The theatrical equipment gets daily maintenance and can be replaced if needed, but Maybank points out that there is also equipment that is aesthetically ideal for the look but perhaps not designed to be used so consistently. “Some of our smaller theatrical and vintage practical lighting fixtures, for example, will need to be replaced several times in the life of a show because of the sheer number of hours for which they are used,” he says, adding that the team opts not to share a specific equipment list. “I generally prefer not to go into too much detail on the way we run the shows, as we have built upon quite a few years of trial and error to achieve the systems we use today, and although I’m sure there are quite a few people out there who would guess immediately how we do some of it, I feel it’s probably better to keep that number to a minimum,” he says. “I hope that doesn’t seem odd.” Everything at the McKittrick is still a little bit of a secret.

Barrett builds a map out of his first exploration of a new space, identifying the way the performance could inhabit the buildings and the paths that the performances and audience might take. And not all of the spaces have to be easy or safe. “In the most dangerous spaces, we’ll put the most threatening parts of the story,” says Barrett. The team needed to give the McKittrick its own identity, separate from previous incarnations, and let the architecture drive those changes. For Barrett, “architecture of the space totally defines the show.” This is clear in the spaces of Sleep No More. The long bars already present in the architecture became features of the choreography, out of which the hotel reception and foyer area developed as a holding ground for lots of action. Not all of these architectural influences are so obvious, however. Some of it is what Barrett refers to as emotional architecture—“lines of the walls and the staircases but also the feelings and the stories contained in the cracks in the walls,” he says.

The elevator entrance, however, is a Punchdrunk standard, first used in Faust as a way to disorient the audience using an intimate, small space. The elevator operator opens the doors at will; the floor numbers are covered; no one really knows when or where to get out. Giving the audience time to absorb the rules while also making it clear that the space is in charge creates a kind of sacred space.