My friend Liz and I had the amazing chance to be a "friend" at the first running of this
play, although only now am I writing about it. My good friend Becky Elle,
along with an array of craftspeople, toiled on the details of this
mansion for hours, days, weeks, months, years meticulously painting,
arranging, building, distressing, antiquing, pinning, nailing, covering,
hiding, embellishing, and creating the vibe that is The McKittrick Hotel. Everything is legit, everything has been purchased through antique stores and the like to create a total Sleep No More is
literally something that will keep you up the night you experience it,
and perhaps many more nights following. Think Shakespeare meets Kubrick
meets Hitchcock. Only you're in the building. You hear solemn ambient sounds mixed with haunting melodies. You feel chills, and smell
earth, dust, mildew, and smoke. You see the smoke, fog or a trail of
blood drips, and follow it into the next room. That room may have
someone crying in it, wringing their hands in despair, and in a flash
they start tearing at their hair and running from the room, down the
hall, and up the stairs to the next level as fast as they can, a stream
of masked onlookers desperately trying to keep up.
At
the beginning there was a mutual respect for this experience.
Unfortunately there are some who don't understand what can happen if
they let go and feel. If you enter happily, parade around foolishly,
disturbing the effect, and leave unchanged...well then you are at a
disadvantage. Words do little to describe... this thing enters your
soul, filling the deepest, strangest memories, reverting your heart to
that point some of us have felt, when you are so wretched that you go
mad, and your skin crawls. When there is only total agony.
Only here you are on the outside secretly looking in.
On a lighter note, in this issue of Interior Design we see what few have been able to capture on film;
the interior of the haunted McKittrick Hotel...
The actors are dancers of many years, who crawl the walls, jump from cabinets, writhe and wail while they co-mingle bodies like silk rope twisting in on itself. It's erotic, daring and to the untrained eye can seem dangerous how they gracefully fall over furniture in angst. Yet the ebb and flow stay completely fluid as if each pair of dancers were born twins, the psychic connection pulsing through trained muscles.
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