scorchedthesnake

[scorchedthesnake]

:-)

[scorchedthesnake]

All There Is.

On March 7, 2011, I arrived fairly reluctantly to a dilapidated block of 27th Street and queued up for some show my friend John O’Malley was working on. All I knew was that I was going to “chase sexy dancers around a warehouse” or something like that, and it all sounded ridiculous. I couldn’t have known then that my life was about to be changed: that I was going to find the synthesis of many of my niche intellectual interests; that I’d fall in love and have my heart broken, repeatedly; that I’d gain an appreciation for an entire new wing of the arts; that I’d make friends who would reshape my heart and my life; that I’d launch into a social media venture that would secure me a major career change. What if I had known any of this would happen?

It’s incredible to me that nearly fourteen years have passed since that day. Fourteen years is longer than any romantic relationship I’ve had, longer than any job, longer than any program in a university. Longer than my time in a cult. Other than swimming, which I’ve done for 35 years, it’s the longest commitment I’ve ever had to enthusiasm for anything. And it strikes me as especially incredible because at the outset, it was likely to be a very, very temporary thing. A six-week limited engagement, to test the waters and hopefully succeed enough to fill out the first lease, so there were long-term ambitions, but by no means was radical success guaranteed. But as the Boston run had prefigured, the show indeed hit at just the right time, and just the right place, and became electric. 

Why It Worked

As we come to the end, I want to think for a bit about precisely why that happened. Over the past year, there’s been some space to debate the reasons for Sleep No More’s success versus the alleged failures, or at least disappointments, of The Burnt City; and what this might mean for the possibility of Life and Trust repeating the achievements of its predecessor. The opening of Life and Trust has also opened some debate over which entities can most appropriately lay claim to the credit: the creative partner, Punchdrunk, or the producing partner, Emursive. It’s clear that you don’t get a nearly 14 year smash hit without an extremely productive relationship, even if it is, and always has been, replete with tension and conflicts. That creative tension is probably one of the very ingredients of success, as the artistic vision must be brought into balance with a sustainably profitable operating plan.  

But to think that elements like “great choreography” or “murky narrative” or “efficient management” are really behind what made Sleep No More a phenomenon is to both drastically miss the point and bark up the wrong trees. The conditions for Sleep No More’s success, in my view, are the combination of two main elements: first, the concept of the intellectual property itself; and second, the timing of the show’s opening into a specific cultural and media environment.

When The Burnt City opened, early audiences felt like something was missing. In my review I wrote that

“desire is not a currency here. At SNM and TDM, there is a sultry suggestiveness amongst the characters and between them and the audience. At The Burnt City, everyone is too busy being dead, being robots, being dead robots or sacrificing their children to uncaring gods to have much space for suggestive glances and come-hither looks.”

It remains clear as day that the allure of Sleep No More, and its lasting value as entertainment, stems from, frankly, its sexiness. The show was unrepentantly horny from minute one – and, it has to be said: not because of its nudity. The nudity, in fact, is found in some of the least erotic sequences in the show. The atmosphere, however, is sexually charged and ready to pop: that it never really does, that the “orgy” is more violent than sexual, that the sex is mostly suggested, or suspected, is the actual magic here. 

Naturally, this has led to some real difficulties over the long run. On the one hand, audiences, well removed from just immersive enthusiasts and Shakespeare nerds, took heed of the motto “fortune favors the bold” and did some reprehensible things; management was slow to support and better protect performers from the worst of these offenses. Further, the culture of sexual expression in 2011, libertine and aggressive coming out of the preceding recession, gave way, in concert with generational change, to newer, more conservative attitudes. At launch, Sleep No More was a millennial playpen; it now lives in a Gen Z world, alongside films devoid of sex, opposition to sexual content as some sort of impediment to plot, and the anodyne world of the reiterative superhero industrial complex. 

But sexual suggestiveness is what made the whole place sizzle, whether we like to confess that or not. Sure, the worldbuilding is engrossing, the dancing frenetic, the soundscape exquisite – but this whole time, people have been going for vibes. And the vibes, especially in those crazy first few years, were laced with the possibility that sexual adventure could be right around the corner – even when, the whole time, it really wasn’t. As a byproduct of the tension between the art and the entertainment of it, it’s extremely flattering for us as fans to act like we are unmoved by our erotic imaginaries and only compelled by our allegedly higher aesthetic and critical impulses. The broad success of the show – its ability to cater to people other than us nerds – and the party culture that has accompanied it, show this to be an error. 

It’s why The Burnt City just wouldn’t last – a beautiful and meaningful show for sure, but not very fun. Not sexy. Life and Trust suffers from this a bit less, but has another problem that Sleep No More never had to contend with: it’s not cool. And this is the thing that really made it possible for Sleep No More to run and run and run: it was, and is, extremely cool.

How SNM got to be cool is the big question – it was certainly by design, but relied massively on timing, luck, and the right media mix in the launch period. First, it had novelty on its side. Very few people had ever seen anything like this (sorry Boston, you’re not people! But at least in this case, for once, you were definitely tastemakers). Second, the show relied at launch on word-of-mouth and celebrity interest, using principles that we now understand as influencer marketing. Remember, at the time: Instagram was only a few months old and not yet ubiquitous. The show cultivated a reputation as dark, sexy and mysterious, and the mask meant the famous could go along for the ride. In those early days I remember: Leonardo DiCaprio, Orlando Bloom, Paris Hilton, Matt Damon (standing in line like a normie), Elijah Wood. Lauren Ambrose walking up and inquiring about entry. It was only a matter of time until there was critical mass of celebrity exposures for it to hit headlines, and sure enough: Neil Patrick Harris’ long excited rant on Regis and Kelly marked the show’s true arrival. Smartly, there weren’t even ads. There was barely a presence on the major social media platform of the time (Facebook). This wasn’t a show for plain people, it was a show for people in the know about what was cool and unique in New York – and that mythology of scarcity and exclusivity worked wonders.

By comparison, on the day ticket sales launched for Life and Trust, there were a couple hundred immersive theater geeks lined up at Conwell Coffee House to buy them. That’s not a fault of that show – the media environment is completely different now; the Coffee House was smartly pre-launched and pitched to influencers to build interest and intrigue, but: without the novelty factor, this has all had a dull impact. Is it cool to anyone to know what “another mask show from the producers of Sleep No More” is, in the year 2025? Hardly. Whereas SNM had its wheels greased, Life and Trust has an uphill battle for cultural relevance and mindshare. At least The Burnt City had a long-cultivated community of Punchdrunk die hards in place for it, and as the creative side, a certain amount of house loyalty that Emursive now has to earn on their own.

This Fandom

The relationship of Sleep No More to its fan community, is, obviously, a topic I care a great deal about. I have never been part of a fandom before. I did not intend to create a fan community of any kind when I launched this blog, and fortunately we had other early Tumblrs that took on that role. The great beauty of the early years on Tumblr was that the platform allowed each enthusiast to create whatever kind of appreciation worked best for them. In my case, the joy in that came from curation and collection. Others showcased beautiful fan art, others wrote vivid recaps, others answered questions and cultivated community. And, importantly, Tumblr allowed everyone to do so at whatever periodicity worked best for them.

I can’t take credit for the idea of being a Sleep No More fan on Tumblr. That is owed to whoever it was that created fuckyeahsleepnomore (remember when the archetypical Tumblr was named in that format, fuckyeahwhatever? Fuckyeahpaulzivkovich, fuckyeahwillseefried, fuckyeahnatecartershair, we could have driven it into the dirt if we wanted). Some of the things I did on this blog became paradigmatic conventions of being a fan on Tumblr: pick a name with some textual significance to the show; write some stuff; repost from the tags and try to find other enthusiasts. I think the other thing that happened, significantly for the emergence of our fandom, was that my proximity to the show strengthened the notion that being an online friend to the show could gain you access to the people involved.

I came into my close relationship with the production through a mixture of early arrival, connections, a certain amount of goodwill from the blog, and, it has to be said, some gay men’s privilege. Jenny Weinbloom spotted me early as a frequent visitor. John O’Malley facilitated some introductions. My pre-Scorched essay “A Sword Between Banquo and Me” made the rounds over email. After my fourth show, I became really comfortable talking to performers, particularly after the Saturday late show when everyone gathered in Manderley until 4am. When the first round of new cast arrived, it included two people I had previous connections with: I had met William Popp at a swim practice, and my best friend had worked with Tony Bordonaro on a soap opera. We were all young gay New Yorkers and our lives already intersected substantially. So it didn’t seem so weird that we were at parties together outside of the show, occasionally hanging out, and having very casual, friendly relations.

In those early days, there were basically no boundaries, and the kind of access early fans had to the show and the performers would really stun fans who’ve come in since, say, 2016 or so. It was magical, and problematic. No one really knew how to navigate being at the epicenter of a cultural phenomenon, and the early fans were along for the ride. As dancers, the cast weren’t particularly attuned (and neither was I) to the vicissitudes of Broadway stagedoor fan culture, and to the extent that crept in slowly, began to make plain how unsustainable that chummy closeness was; more recently, conventions of East Asian fan behaviors, gifting in particular, has also come over. All of this feels alien to me, but I think the lesson there is that 2011-2013 was just an extremely abnormal time, a kind of whiplash from the sudden fame of the show (which did not, directly and personally, extend to its cast, whom the show kept extremely shrouded).

Sleep No More learned how to program for loyalty very, very late in the game. The Salons, which I’ve been to, and the roundtables, which I have not, have been really wonderful gestures toward community engagement that would have been unthinkable in the early years, and Ilana Gilovich deserves tremendous credit for championing and moderating these events. In my own personal case, I’ve had small but meaningful gestures over the years: the invitation to the MIT Media Lab experiment, some helpful assistance from the Box Office (though not here at the end!); a warm welcome back at the end of my long unemployment. But the chief benefit of being a fanboy was never anything that came from the production, it was that I made friends of performers and staff, and that gave me a currency in the early and middle years that I greatly enjoyed. It’s almost fully spent now.

Tumblr’s deletion of pornography largely killed the platform, and the latter generation of Tumblr fans gradually moved into the Second Age of their fandom like I had when this blog first concluded in 2014. Over the past year of repeated extensions, permit issues, and complicated preemptive mourning, I’ve dipped my toe into the new homestead of Sleep No More fandom, which is now on Discord. Whereas Tumblr was petty and cruel, the Discord tends to be prudish and overprotective; but these differences are generational as opposed to platform-oriented, and are the product of a fandom reacting to a different kind of relationship with the admired object than what we had in the early years. The Discord is also deliberately and explicitly communitarian, which is something else extremely alien to me, and very much the opposite of the egotism of the Tumblr era, but has been a great comfort for its participants through a year of confusion and uncertainty. For my part, I have found peace and joy in seeing the fandom grow well beyond me and develop mores that I just don’t understand. That means progress has come along.

My chief regret over all the years is the tendency of fans to be excessively deferential to the show. Far too eager to not offend, far too unwilling to criticize. It’s okay to say something isn’t good, or that you don’t like a performance. It may shock people to know this, but in my one conversation with Maxine Doyle, she herself commented that the show had not been good that night. It happens, and it’s useless to shine the apple of pretending otherwise. Nor do we get points for white-knighting for Emursive’s miserable management, or trying to rationalize terrible creative decisions like axing all the Manderley characters. Our fondness for something is well-reflected in our ability to articulate flaws, errors and poor choices, and I wish we had all been better about this all along. 

What it all meant for me

The Discord’s moderation has suggested that it will be deleted some time after the show closes; and so Tumblr’s longevity in the post-porn era is truly its most astonishing feature. This means that, barring another upheaval or change of ownership, this blog will endure on the internet as a relic of what Sleep No More was. If you go back to the beginning and read it forward, you will get the fragmentary tale of one very naive, overenthusiastic ex-academic moving to New York City and living out his own little Bildungsroman inside an immersive theater production. I am really pleased that so many of you came along for the ride, and that these confessions of my younger self – embarrassing as they often now are when I look back at them – can do a good job of telling someone why Sleep No More meant so much to so many people.

Over the past year, I’ve tried to add more detail to my personal experience of the show, and be a little more upfront about what was going on than I could be at the time. For as much as I wish I could claim to be an extremely intellectually even observer of the show and the culture around it, I feel it’s more fair to reveal that in fact, the main driver behind much of my love for this show was that I met a boy, he broke my heart, and I stuck around to let it really scorch me. None of this diminishes what the show meant; is it not the very essence of the show itself? “And then one day, he went away. And I thought I’d die. But I didn’t. And when I didn’t, I said to myself, is that all there is to love?”

Somewhere, back in the day, in an interview I know I listened to but could not possibly source, Felix Barrett said something along the lines of: every visitor to the show should fall in love at least once while inside. And I think he’s absolutely right, and I think every single fan of the show, in their heart, has done so. Hopefully not with the contours of my own experience exactly, but it’s the essence of it. I know I am compelled by powerful scoring, dramatic lighting, dynamic movement, and intelligent intertextuality. But I fall in love with a kind and gentle heart, and a generous spirit that is on a journey and eager to share it. And I encountered quite a few of these over our many years together in the hotel.

I’m also acutely aware that this blog itself played a major role in giving me the life I have today. The job I landed in 2014 was a corporate social media role – one that I landed in part by talking about the work I had done on this blog. I also talked in the interviews about my enthusiasm for the show, and how it had given me a sense of meaning, belonging, and purpose to my intellection. I talked about the struggle my year of unemployment had been with unvarnished honesty, and my manager later told me that was what had clinched it. I learned the kind of storytelling I did in that search here, on Tumblr, talking about this show.

For nearly fourteen years, thinking and writing about this show, and this mode of performance, has been the most satisfying intellectual enterprise I have ever engaged in – far better than all that grad school. I could not have known at the outset that this is where all my critical faculties would be fully engaged, or that several of my obscure interests, my fondness for Arthur Schnitzler or for Thomas Mann, would be extremely relevant. Now, as we begin to look forward, I know that this activity does not end here with the closing of the show. I hope to continue, both in remembrance of what we all experienced, and in anticipation of successor productions in this format, to think and write about this kind of immersive theater. The difference will be that the mask will be off, and I will be writing as Evan, not as Scorched the Snake. 

Saying goodbye to fourteen years of Sleep No More means saying goodbye to several full chapters of my life, and to all of my life in New York City thus far. It is saying goodbye to earlier versions of myself, to someone who was afraid to have to push his way through a crowd, afraid to talk to strangers in bars, afraid to gaze deeply into someone’s eyes, afraid to express desire. To someone not yet open to all the range of creativity that this show and its people have introduced me to. To someone who did not yet know all the brilliant and loving souls who made it all possible. But I am happy to say goodbye to those versions of me; the one I am now is so much richer, so much wiser, so much more connected to a beautiful world than I had ever been before. 

We have had such a wonderful time. The show’s closure is about to tear a giant hole in my life, my habits, and frankly, my personality. I cannot wait to figure out what I will do to fill that void, what insanely enriching and engrossing thing I will feel pulled to next. If there is one paramount lesson of this whole experience, it is that my enthusiasm for something will take me on great voyages when I trust it. We all now just have to trust it.

In just a few days, we will gather for three nights of celebration of this world we’ve made and shared together. In the early hours of Sunday, January 12, we will each exit the McKittrick Hotel for the last time, stepping out into the cold of night, but not into darkness. The streets of town, paved with stars, will glisten and glow before us as we walk away toward our next adventures, forever changed, and permanently enchanted by our friends, our loves and our losses.

“How strange it was, how sweet and strange, there was never a dream to compare.”

[scorchedthesnake]

The Analysis

When Sleep No More closes on January 5, 2025, it will have run for just shy of 13 years and 10 months, from its opening on March 7, 2011. I hope they announce the final total number of performances, because I certainly have not kept my own count.

Including the final three performances this weekend, I will have attended 142 performances of the show. That's 426 loops. Naturally it's not distributed evenly. Here's how that breaks out by year:

My biggest year, surprisingly, was 2019 with 26 shows. This followed three years of just having quarterly check-ins to see how things were going. Had it not been for the pandemic, I probably would have gone to even more in 2020.

The contours of this fascinate me. The reason I have shared the memories posts over the last few months, has been to fill in a few blanks from the way my relationship with the show was originally narrated on the blog. While friends were aware of the personal stakes, and I often alluded to them, I wanted a higher level of detail to be included in the public and historical record.

I went the most when my infatuations were the strongest, and less when my heart was broken. And still, after a breakup in the fall of 2015, I didn't start going more often – just the opposite, I very nearly stopped. At that point, the kind of ghosts present were just too much for me, and it would take several years and the intervention of some fortuitous chance to reset my relationship to the building. When 2019 came, I went to the show precisely because my life was falling apart, and suddenly the show was the reminder of who I could be if I wanted.

1:1s

As noted widely, I became a collector of 1:1s. Across these 142 performances, and a few others thanks to the old rooftop experiences, I had a total of 332 1:1s. I had a few shows with none, several with 5, two with 6, and one extremely lucky one with 7.

My most frequently visited 1:1s are, by number: 63 x Porter 44 x Malcolm 32 x Speakeasy Barman 28 x Banquo 26 x Taxidermist 23 x Boy Witch

Among these, my most frequently visited performers were: 15 x Paul Zivkovich (all Porters) 11 x Austin Goodwin 11 x Parker Murphy 11 x Ernesto Breton 10 x Will Seefried 10 x Tony Bordonaro

I'm grateful to all these performers for indulging me and sharing so much of themselves with me. I don't put all this out to boast, or, alternatively, to self-pathologize. But I do put it out because, as I will return to in the final entry coming after this, I hope in our retrospect we can be honest about why this show worked. I think between my anecdotes and my data, I am telling a story about how Sleep No More connected with me, and it's not a crass or base one. Instead, it demonstrates that something Felix Barrett once said, in an interview somewhere ages ago, is extremely true.

[scorchedthesnake]

Anyway aren't you glad I didn't write like that the whole time

[scorchedthesnake]

Where This All Began

Originally posted here, May 10, 2011.

Read the many fond reviews now appearing of Sleep No More, the immersive theatrical mashup of Macbeth and Hitchcock staged in Chelsea by the British company Punchdrunk, and you will find a third player frequently mentioned alongside the Bard and the Master of Suspense. Stanley Kubrick's name is often also counted among the forebears of Sleep No More, and while some reviewers reference The Shining, most invoke his name on account of the masks worn by Sleep No More audiences, which seem to be a touchstone for Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut. It is not an inappropriate connection to make. After all, from behind Sleep No More's masks, one can witness, among other things, an orgy.

But from my perspective this is an altogether too simplistic account of the ties between a set of works with numerous shared themes, among them dreaming, obsession and voyeurism. Neither orgies nor Venetian masks were truly at the core of Eyes Wide Shut, though that was surely the most significant impression the challenging, critically beleaguered film left behind in the imagination at large. And while these elements of Sleep No More's production are surely a deliberate nod to Kubrick’s film, I am inclined to suspect a much more interesting, complicated and elucidating relationship, most likely unintentional, between Sleep No More and Eyes Wide Shut, or more specifically the text on which Eyes Wide Shut is based, Arthur Schnitzler's 1925 Traumnovelle. 

Schnitzler's work seems fated to be known in the English-speaking world mostly in the form of adaptations. His most famous play, Der Reigen, is produced today under the name La Ronde, as it first became widely known through Max Ophüls' 1950 film. A more recent stage variant starring Nicole Kidman, The Blue Room, had less of an impact. Similarly, Traumnovelle broke out to British and American audiences by way of Kubrick's version. A contemporary of Freud and a physician, Schnitzler was both sexually adventurous and methodically taxonomical, and his work known for its psychological complexity and his sexual frankness.

Kubrick took some liberties with Schnitzler's text. Some help to restate the story from early twentieth century Vienna into contemporary New York. Other changes weaken the structural order of a novella that Schnitzler himself often called Doppelnovelle, as it was intended to contain two stories in delicate parallel; one mostly a vivid dream, the other real but so unbelievable, so uncanny and mysterious that it may just as well have been a dream itself. The conflict in Kubrick's film is set in motion by Alice's confession to Bill that she lusted after a sailor she had seen fleetingly while on vacation; this episode is in the original text, but Fridolin (adapted into Bill) also had a temptation, a young girl he met on the beach during this same trip to Denmark. "Denmark" of course ends up being the password to the masked ball, not "Fidelio" as in the film. Kubrick freely interprets what Fridolin sees at the 'orgy', though it is likely in line with visions that Schnitzler's language could merely hint at. Alice's dream however, though full of her endless sexual betrayals, is absent the capture and enslavement of her husband, prefigured in the novella's opening lines as their young daughter reads a passage from The Thousand and One Nights, as well as the crucifixion and torture of Fridolin, which make Albertine's version much more potent as a countersubject.

Yet in both the novella and the film, the episodes of dreaming, whether while sleeping or in the waking state, are bracketed by interludes of confession. These dialogues are instances of compulsory narration: Fridolin/Bill and Albertine/Alice each must in turn recount the experiences of their various adventures: at the ball (the Ziegfeld's Christmas party); in their bedroom remembering their vacation (in the novella, their Denmark trip, and their engagement years before); Albertine/Alice's dream, and ultimately, Fridolin/Bill also retells the entirety of what he witnessed at the masked ball, what led him to it, and what he did while trying to force that experience to make sense: "Ich will dir alles erzählen," "I'll tell you everything."

It is on account of this structure that the usefulness of Traumnovelle / Eyes Wide Shut as intertextual relatives to Sleep No More becomes clear. Like the âventiure of medieval epic, the dream sequences are departures from the bourgeois family's equivalent of the court: security, stability, childrearing, profession. Schnitzler, for his part, accentuates this with particular attention to the contact of Fridolin's and Albertine's hands. Their hands touch and intertwine in all of their scenes together, until their jealousies and admissions finally become, as Fridolin states, "ein Schwert zwischen uns," a sword between them, and something else to grasp at. They then go their own ways in 'dreams' of infidelity. For Fridolin in particular the contact points of his hands are representative of his attempt to gain traction and knowledge within his waking dream. 

As a point of comparison, Sleep No More is often described as being like witnessing someone else's dream. It is, like Traumnovelle, the experience of inhabiting a sequence of coinciding dreams. The audience member is initiated into the dream-realm of the McKittrick through a maze of dark corridors that lead into the bar. Here however one is already in the performance per se. Characters, albeit less alien ones, circulate and interact with the audience, who, ordering drinks and waiting for their cards to be called, enjoy one final act of speaking before plunging into the ensuing hours of muteness and voyeurism. 

Once inside, key points of traction come largely through the hands. One pores through documents and artifacts, one tries doorhandles and knobs, and, occasionally, one of the dream-figures takes you by the hand and leads you deeper into the dream. When this concludes, the audience is led back to the bar, where one simply must talk about what has just been seen. It is a compulsory confession, as reunited parties of visitors compare what each witnessed, nervously and often questioningly recalling strange, confusing scenes, knowing full well that if they are not confessed and mutually confirmed, they will slip into unknowledge and oblivion. Every visitor's account is fragmentary and incomplete. Even the collective recollection the production's structure encourages is not enough to account for the enormity and mystery of the space one has only just begun to explore. It is hard to not be reminded of the conclusion reached by Fridolin and Albertine about what they have undergone: 

"... Ich ahne, dass die Wirklichkeit einer Nacht, ja dass nicht einmal die eines ganzen Menschenlebens zugleich auch seine innerste Wahrheit bedeutet." "Und kein Traum [...] ist völlig Traum." (in Eyes Wide Shut: The reality of one night, let alone that of a whole lifetime can never be the whole truth. [...] And no dream is ever just a dream.)

Sleep No More is driven by a comparable degree of pervasive ambiguity. It is telling, perhaps, that the production has relied so heavily, and so successfully, on word-of-mouth in lieu of conventional marketing. As something that defies traditional description and explanation, it seems to want its fans to be stammering and incoherent, and altogether glad to bring new visitors in with high, but curiously inarticulate expectations of what they are about to experience.

If Sleep No More, like Eyes Wide Shut and Traumnovelle before it, is a dreamscape with indeterminate boundaries with waking, then its name is perfectly appropriate. This title derives from Act II, Scene 2 of Macbeth, after Duncan has been murdered:

MACBETH Methought I heard a voice cry, "Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep" – the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care, The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, Chief nourisher in life's feast LADY MACBETH What do you mean? MACBETH Still it cried, "Sleep no more!" to all the house. "Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more. Macbeth shall sleep no more."

Sleep, so commonly metaphor or metonym for death, is made to be the locus of peace, calm and life. Macbeth betrays the uses of sleep, and so the Macbeths are repaid with the ultimate corruption of their sleep with ghostly visitations, madness and death. Schnitzler, alternatively, approaches sleep as the avatar of sexuality, but it is still the gateway to a realm of betrayal. The treacheries in his text occur in dreams, where they are only barely confined and threatening to burst out. 

But there, confession brings the couple back together. After their adventures, they again clasp hands and are grateful for being awakened: "Nun sind wir wohl erwacht - für lange," says Albertine ("now we're awake," in Kubrick's film, "and hopefully for a long time to come." At the novella's conclusion, Schnitzler identifies dreams as an agent of isolation only temporarily overcome, and as certain to reemerge as each coming night: "So lagen sie beide schweigend, beide wohl auch ein wenig schlummernd und einander traumlos nah" - "and so they lay silent, both surely slumbering and dreamlessly near the other." The admonition to not look too far into the future is both fitting and haunting. The command to ‘sleep no more’ is the damnation of Macbeth and an impossible prescription for the temptations of Fridolin and Albertine, and Bill and Alice. For the Sleep No More audience, it is intended as an omen.

I felt an acute terror during my second visit to Sleep No More, when in a private moment with Banquo, he pulled a huge sword from beneath his mattress and thrust it into my hands. My terror was less the fear that he would strike me with it, or ask me to use it, but instead arose from a sudden sadness. The sword was not real, neither heavy nor sharp. This whole experience was not real, and nothing I could imagine coming of the encounter with the performer would happen other than what was scripted. Rather, I knew for certain in that moment that I was having "merely" the brilliantly executed approximation of a dream. "Ein Schwert zwischen uns," I immediately thought, and felt yanked back into drab, sober reality. Unlike Fridolin, my grasp on this theatrical, not psychical, sword reminded me that this is, in fact, just delightful artifice. But it is also not paradoxical that this moment, perhaps the most powerful so far in my exploration of the McKittrick Hotel, accounts for why I think so highly of this production. Ordinarily, the fourth wall is the front of the stage and the edge of your seat. Here, I find myself reaching the boundary of reality and performance only fleetingly, and in the most surprising and captivating of ways.

[scorchedthesnake]

A non-exhaustive list of things I've loved from Sleep No More, in no particular order

Gossip Girl Party: to celebrate what we feared would be the injection of our beloved niche show into broad public awareness, Jenny Weinbloom and Russ Marshalek hosted a viewing party complete with trivia, an "Is That All There Is?" lip sync contest, and a mask signed by Hecate as the prize, which I was tasked with discreetly picking up at the Hotel from Careena:

Ginger Lobby: Paul and Austin, Porter and Boy Witch pairing for the ages. As Paul said at his salon: "I met my husband in that phone booth right over there!" You simply could not beat the chemistry and intensity of those performances.

Zebra Fucking Katz: the video for "Imma Read" had some masks and the cast loved it so they got him to play in the Rep Bar after the Valentine's Day show

OG Mayfair: pretty hard to beat the wildest, most surprising, most drama-inducing party in the history of the hotel

HELLHOUND: Every time I walk by the wolf in the laundry area on 5 I think of you, Alex Smith.

The thing with your legs: The way Will Seefried would squeeze your legs together with his while doing the Porter 1:1 – one of the best variations ever done in that scene!

Your Heart Sings: and basically every other improv moment with Nate Carter.

How would you like a chocolate penis?: in the wake of Gossip Girl, the hotel found itself the destination of some number of bachelorette parties. One night mid-performance I stopped by Manderley for water and suddenly heard Calloway call out, "EVAN, HOW WOULD YOU LIKE A CHOCOLATE PENIS?"

Team Hard RT: When Bowmore Spirits set up a promotional event with a tasting and show combo ticket, they did a giveaway on Twitter which you could enter by retweeting their posts. Several of us combined as Team Hard RT (remember the only way of retweeting? RT @ soandso? Well, then a dummy account the brand owned won, and we called them out.

Teaser Trailer: my finest creative moment in this whole blog

Kelly’s Drink: New Year's Eve 2011 - Kelly Bartnik wanted a gin and tonic in the show, so we brought a flask and glass along and assembled it for her in Bald Witch's shrine.

Mayfair 2 with Will: Will's improvised Porter 1:1 at the gate is one of my favorite performance moments of all time.

MIT Media Lab: My entire experience with this project was an unending list of incredible moments. Working with Felix Barrett. William, Alba, Ben and Careena doing awesome things. Repeated 1:1s in the padded cell. An NDA. The whole thing was a fanboy's dream come true.

My name’s Malcolm: Ben Thys' final show as Malcolm, he ran from the ballroom into the stairwell and surprised an unsuspecting audience member who exclaimed "Jesus!" Ben didn't miss a beat and as he ran past her shouted back, "my name is Malcolm!"

Clyde: If you never got to see the original Lodge, I just feel sorry for you. It was the most excellent little cocktail bar imaginable. It also acquired a groundskeeper, Matt Downs, who in the character of Clyde managed to convince an awful lot of people that he worked there.

Oh but the Hotel only has 5 floors: At my 10th show I still had never been to the 6th floor. I found myself in a conversation with Violet. She asked if I had seen everything in the hotel in my many visits? And I said well everything but the 6th floor. "Oh, but the Hotel only has 5 floors," she said. "Let's see what card you're holding." I showed her my Ace. "Oh you aren't going to want to go with them. Or the 2s or the 3s. In fact, why don't you have another drink and I'll come get you when the time is right."

Every Recap About This Time: this little collab with Kevin Cafferty is some of the only good comedy writing I've ever done, and I'm thrilled any time the tropes in it resurface.

Julian’s elevator: When Zach Martens was on as Man-in-Bar as Julian... I often just outright skipped the show. And he gave me the best solo ride in the elevator I ever could have wished for.

We haven’t been properly introduced: At a Pride party a few weeks after all that May Fair stuff happened, I met up with Nick and Paul and finally got to meet Austin, who walked over and greeted me with "we haven't been properly introduced" which disarmed everything.

Do you know who we are?!?: aggressively making out with a friend and fellow fan at one of the Infernos up on the mezzanine, some random party guest walked by and said, "gentlemen, please!" and we both turned, glared at him and in unison responded: "do you know who we are? Do you know whose house this is?"

Heather Matarazzo: The star of "Welcome to the Dollhouse" hosted a storytelling hour in Manderley one night after the show. Being that I had been at the show, I was animatedly talking with people about everything that happened that night, which got me an aggressive shushing from one of my teenage icons. I may have shouted back that it was my bar and I'd talk as much as I pleased.

NYE Balloons: that I got to be at the center of such an iconic moment was a tremendous gift I will cherish forever

Getting my avatar: Oh how I wish I could remember your name, kind fan who made the pineapple dress and the coins and then made this wonderful sketch of me in my confusion as you presented me with the coin. I use this avatar everywhere and I just want to say one more time – thank you, this is the best kind of magic.

Luke Taxi: for whatever reason, despite being a long-time Punchdrunk veteran, Luke Murphy is basically never in roles with 1:1s. Macduff, Macbeth, Neoptolemus, etc. So when I found out he was occasionally doing Taxidermist, I patiently stalked and hoped someday I'd luck into a show and then somehow actually get it. And sure enough, it was very worth that wait – he hit every note of that creepy 1:1 perfectly. Months later as his departure drew near, I lucked into another night he was in the role. Frances Koncan and I followed intently but when the time came and it was just the two of us with him, he looked at us, sighed heavily, and retreated into the bathroom without either of us. Bless that wonderful man, he knows how to keep us wanting more.

WTF Breaks: in the days before the phone lockdown, the bar reopening after first loop was a great time to meet up with people, express shock at casting and/or pulls, and send some insane tweets about what was going on. Kinda miss these tbh.

Scorched haha the Snake: Tony Bordonaro gave me the meta moment I had long worried would come one night when, as he concluded the Banquo 1:1, he said, "they have (long paused) scorched HA HA HA the snake... not killed it."

Is this making out? Brandon made some excellent memes and this one is my favorite. So I'll take the opportunity to shout out the 3 Speakeasy Barmans and 1 Taxidermist who actually did make out with me.

Telegram_mrsnake: That they made this for me when I came back from unemployment, and gave it this file name... man, it moves me to tears even still.

Macbeth is Evan Matthew Cobb: when Evan Copeland first appeared in the show, this was sent to the cast list. A totally honest mistake, to be sure, as at the time if you googled Evan + Sleep No More, I am indeed the one that would come up:

The Fraggle Room: it's fucking real.

Reverse Porter: Nick Dillenburg, you were in the show for exactly 37 seconds and I stalked the hell out of you and got 7 1:1s across all your roles and they were all wonderful, and I am so glad you took the risk of the Reverse Porter on me... it was unforgettable.

Carnival des Corbeaux: of all the party photos, this one will forever be my favorite. If I had to pick one photo to sum up everything that ever happened in the McKittrick Hotel, it's without a doubt this one:

[scorchedthesnake]

Something I Absolutely Forgot Happened

He and I have had a few more conversations in the intervening years, but I totally forgot this was our first significant chat. God, what an unfathomably talented person he is.

[scorchedthesnake]

Fragments of Something Meaningful

[scorchedthesnake]

Topical for things under discussion on the Discord today

Something an original cast member said to me once.

[scorchedthesnake]

What Will Said

When I wrote my memory of Will Seefried's adlib 1:1 at Mayfair 2015, I said I had no recollection of what he said. Well, fortunately, I have another Tumblr, where I put my actual feelings about this show and everything that happened around it, and I just spent an hour looking over all my old posts, and found this:

[scorchedthesnake]

April 1, 2022

The post-Covid reopening finally came in February 2022, long after most everything else had already come back. Many of us attended an invited dress and found, as expected, a number of changes – no 1:1s initially, some new choreography to fill in for them, some nice hygienic changes, and a number of new faces. It was wonderful to be back. It was also incredibly sad how much we had lost in the meantime.

If you were fond of playful deviations from the script, as I am, it was all kind of devastating to see how by-the-numbers everything had to be now. Obviously, I understood, but the mischief of the early years was well and truly gone. On the other hand: phones were all locked down, finally. While it had been entertaining to see Paul smack the phone out of a patron's hand and hiss "shame on you," none of the cast ever should have had to deal with that. In late 2019, audience were strolling around with a document open on their phones telling them where to go and what time, and it was awful. The reprieve from that was by a wide margin the most positive change at reopening.

Sleep No More had so much become my home that my best friend's boyfriends, as they came and went, realized that it was the best place for them to meet me for the first time – I guess I was at ease and felt mastery of the situation and was more forgiving than usual of any personality quirks. In April 2022, Matt's long-distance boyfriend came for a visit, and suggested that we go together with my new friend and at the time possible romantic interest (this didn't last long, we have a certain fundamental incompatibility) Josh. Further, a friend from my old classic Warcraft guild was in town so we made a major evening out of it.

The show that night marked the return of some 1:1s – I had the first confirmed post-pandemic Fulton. Crowd behavior was already beginning to slide back to pre-pandemic levels of obnoxious, which frankly felt good.

After the show, for a brief time, they opened the lobby – the "Porter's Parlor" which was a way of relieving crowding in Manderley. We got some nice drink service and they let us do photos. My friends asked me, why do people treat you like royalty here? And it was true – everywhere we turned, we met someone I knew from forever ago and some special door was opened. The hospitality in that immediate reopening period was incomparable, and after so long away, felt wonderful.

It was a tremendous send-off for my two weeks at The Burnt City which followed later in the month.

[scorchedthesnake]

March 7, 2020

Over the years I tried my best to schedule an anniversary visit on each March 7. I came into the year 2020 having spent more time at Sleep No More in 2019 than any other year, and was fully intent on visiting even more frequently in the year to come. In December I had turned 40, and after a year of dreading it and feeling miserable about missed opportunities throughout my life, I had realized just how lucky I am and how surrounded by love I am, though none of it looked the way I had expected it would. I had left my job at Pearson on a good severance agreement, and so was not worried about money in the immediate term, or finding a new job right away. We rang the year in in Thailand on a climbing trip, then I spent a few days visiting an ex-boyfriend in Tokyo. All was well with the world it seemed.

And then in late February I was in San Francisco and was reading about the emerging coronavirus outbreaks in China and now in Italy, grateful that I had not gone forward with my original 40th birthday plans of attending Carnival in Venice. On the flight back from San Francisco on March 1, I noticed people masking and wiping down their seats and thought, oh my goodness that's hyperbolic. But soon the virus was popping up in the US, and it seemed like it might make things messy for a few weeks. So I booked a double show on the anniversary, worried that I might not be able to make it back for a while, but still wanting to see some of the new casting. I had no idea what was to come.

There were so many highlights in both shows. At the early performance, Brandon Coleman and Nate Carter teamed up for a stellar combination I dubbed "Pretty Lobby." Joy-Marie Thompson, a new Bald Witch, really stunned me. The late show, unexpectedly, was even better: Paul was Macbeth, and Zach Martens was Malcolm, and I was in the height of old school swooning. Jeff Docimo played an absolutely brilliant Porter that I guessed he must have learned from Will. It was an absolutely wonderful evening, full of brilliant performances, and I was in disbelief that nine whole years had passed since my first night in the Hotel, and I still found it as captivating as ever.

After the late show, I finally got the chance to meet Nate Carter. I apologized for occasionally two-looping him, and he said it was fine, he'd long since figured out that I come to the show "for the gay shit." We talked about many things, including "Your Heart Sings," into the wee hours and being kicked out of Manderely one last time. Everything felt perfect, and I wished this meant I was about to enjoy another year of the show, and once again be a part of the fan community, my bonds to the place healed and restored.

Six days later, Sleep No More, like the rest of Broadway, shut down indefinitely, and it remained closed for 23 months. Many friends found themselves suddenly out of work, and as fans, we did what we could to support them. I remember tuning in for Nate's drag shows on Instagram, or Quarantunes with Steph Amoroso. From the confines of our apartments, we weathered those first few extraordinary months of lockdown somehow. Gradually the world reopened, but Sleep No More itself did not for even longer. Frustratingly the two things I enjoyed most in the world, swimming and Sleep No More, were among the last to return to operation in the post-pandemic world.

I was so glad I had done that final double, and if it had ended up being the sudden and unceremonious end to the show, I would have been glad to end on such a high note, capped by a final night in Manderley feeling like a part of a big, multigenerational family, and glad for the story we had all made together.

Stopping by the shuttered McKittrick Hotel, March 2021

[scorchedthesnake]

It infuriates me that the final post on this blog, still forthcoming, will have to dedicate so much space to the absolute clusterfuck that is Emursive's management of Sleep No More's final year.

I was keen to be generous during the first permit shutdown in the spring, but the second time around, there's no forgiving it.

Emursive have been so eager to claim credit for Sleep No More and transfer its goodwill over to Life and Trust, so let's let them have it.

Emursive have to own that, when faced with a Buzzfeed expose on sexual assault in the show, they threw their own cast under the bus. This was the hint that malfeasance of the current scale was to be expected.

Emursive have to own that twice now in one year they have utterly failed to do their due diligence and secure the necessary permits for the show to operate.

This has come at massive cost to us, and to their performers and staff. So it is only fair that it come as a massive cost to the reputation of this utterly inept, greedy company. So yes, Emursive, you're the producers of Sleep No More – you're the producers of a finale year for the most celebrated immersive production of all time, and you absolutely threw it in a dumpster and lit it on fire.

May similar misfortune strike all your expensive current and future endeavors that have yet to recoup their costs, and may they face a savage and skeptical public and press, wary of how you treated everyone in the final days of Sleep No More.

[scorchedthesnake]

April 12, 2019

Things started to go downhill a few months into the year. One day in mid-March I had this hunch I should call my mother. We hadn't spoken in about a week and I just had this feeling. When she answered the phone, her voice was shaking and she said, "Evan, I'm in a lot of trouble." She had just seen the image of the mass in her breast. I spent a week in Palm Springs at swim camp before heading to London for a full-team work off-site where it became clear the new CCAO wanted me gone. And then I reached out to Roger to see about scheduling my next trip to Austin to see him, and he said that he had to have a conversation with someone first before we could set plans. When he didn't respond within a day, I came to understand that meant he'd met someone down there, and was seeing how serious it was. He confirmed this by text, and that was it.

I had met Roger in 2017, when I went to Homoclimbtastic for the first time (Homoclimbtastic is the national queer rock climbing convention, held in West Virginia every summer). We were driving into the campground and he was walking up the driveway and Matt said, oh, you'll need to meet this guy, you'll like him. And sure enough, I really did like him. We flirted while climbing and swimming for a couple days, then one night around the campfire we talked and drew closer and pretty soon I had my arms around him and kissed him. I noticed this was the absolute limit of the public affection such a shy man was okay with. We spent the rest of the trip together, and a couple months later I went to Austin to visit. Our relationship then mostly consisted of this: me coming to Austin, or meeting up on climbing trips to various dirtbag places all over the country. He was interviewing for jobs in Denver so we visited and thought about maybe both moving there. He was my date to weddings, and we had done New Year's in Mexico the previous January. And now I knew, he was already dating the new guy when we took that trip. It was fine: we had always agreed that if either of us met someone in our own cities, we'd give that priority. But we'd also tell the other it was coming, which he didn't do.

I confess that one of the reasons I had been spending so much time at the McKittrick Hotel in early 2019 is because of one performer, who just happened to look a lot like Roger. No, really, I'm not being crazy, look at these photos:

It wasn't Nate Carter's fault that his first cast photo made him look like that. But, Nate also happened to be the biggest breath of fresh air Sleep No More had experienced in a very, very long time. Nate loved Sleep No More, as he said when he left, he was absolutely a fan of the show himself. On some extremely visceral, fundamental level, he understood the kind of mischief and malevolence in all of his roles, the kind of play the show had always intended to make possible for performers and for audience, given the right levels of trust between and among them. He did insane and insanely awesome things every loop, like throwing a drink in my face, or choking me, or making a taxidermy ferret platter. It was always something new and something wild with Nate, and it brought back all the joy, danger and sex appeal that had gone astray in the middle years.

So on this night, I was back in New York and incredibly upset, and at the show looking for some solace. I was sipping my whiskey in Manderley when a text came from Roger. He said he'd be in New York for work the next week and wondered if I might want to meet up and talk? This from a guy who didn't really text... ever; or talk, ever, unless pressured. I didn't know what to do. But there he was making a mess of my safe place from thousands of miles away.

And Nate was on that night as Boy Witch.

I followed him dutifully through his loop, distracted by the familiarity of his face. I dressed him, which is a scene I hate because it is stressful, and painful to see someone in such agony, but you have to be there to help him put himself back together. And I go to this scene because it leads to my favorite interaction on that loop, which comes next: he takes my hand and we race breathlessly down the stairs, until the last flight when he lets go and disappears around the corner, far enough ahead of me to surprise me and push me into the wall.

He holds me by the throat, leans in and kisses my face. He says “thank you.” All of this is familiar, it’s what I know is coming, and its comfort is why I am here.

He turns to walk away, but then he stops. Turning slowly, he comes back to me and presses his hand into my chest. He lingers and stares. 

“Your heart sings,” he says. My broken heart sings.

I didn't get to actually speak with Nate until nearly a year later but by then we knew each other pretty well anyway - I followed him a lot and he knew he could mess with me however he pleased. During the pandemic shutdown he told me: he could tell something was up that night, that I was with him but not, that something uncanny was with us both as we did the loop. And he said he could tell I was hurting somehow, and just wanted to recognize it in some way. He of course had no idea of any of it: my mom, my dumb job, my dumb ex who looked like him. But it was one of Nate's great gifts as a performer, that he could read someone instantly, and that he was unafraid to bend a rule or stretch a character just a bit to make the connection, because he knew that was actually the job.

We were blessed to have him in the hotel for many years and many roles (but never the Porter, because God does not grant us every wish). I don't know if anyone ever embodied the spirit of the show in quite the complete and perfect way Nate did, and he showed that while nostalgia was well and good, the Hotel was living and breathing and thriving, even in its ninth and eleventh and twelfth years.

Nate, you're forever in the pantheon, and we wish you all the happiness and peace and joy in the world.

*and to follow up as you may have worried: my mom was treated, and has been cancer free for five years now.

[scorchedthesnake]

January 12, 2019

You'll note a lot of time passed between the previous memory and this one. After the fervor of the first few years had passed, and my heart had been broken more than a few times, I was focusing on some other things in my life: swimming, climbing, work, and in the latter part of this period, something resembling a relationship. After 2015 I was attending Sleep No More exactly four times a year, a sort of quarterly check-in on how things were going and sort of testing the waters to see if I could ever fully dive back in.

The thing was, the Hotel was full of ghosts. Every room and every corridor held vivid memories of moments and feelings, and for the most part it was unbearable. The show itself was just fine! But my relationship to it, and to people who were no longer there on a full-time basis had changed so much, there was always tension when I went back.

At the start of the year 2019, I knew big changes were coming for me personally: just a hunch I had in the lead-up to my 40th birthday in December. We had a new Chief Corporate Affairs officer take the helm at work, and initially I was enthusiastic about that. It didn't last very long. My situationship continued, and we had even entertained the idea of moving to Denver and trying to actually be together – but this wasn't panning out either, so something was going to give.

So I stopped in for one of my quarterly check-ups early in the year, and found something quite surprising: Austin Goodwin as the Boy Witch. Ordinarily, this probably would have put me off a bit – half of Ginger Lobby without the other half? But something was very different about that night.

Here's what I wrote on my personal Tumblr at the time:

I went back again, repeatedly even, such was my need to figure it out. I hoped I could see what it would be like to not know a single soul in the building. I’ve tried this before to no avail, inevitably someone appears who tethers me back into everything that ever happened there.  And I very nearly succeeded this time, but for a witch who was a familiar face from long ago, nearly five whole years now. And yet despite that long, not exactly easy history with him, or perhaps, paradoxically, because of it, the ghosts that have long haunted the ever familiar corners of that building evaporated before my very eyes. Through a whole loop with him some kind of white restorative magic coursed through me and the whole place recovered its long lost glow. For hours my face burned with an old warmth, a contentment and belonging.  We can never go back to Manderley. That much is certain. But sometimes, in my dreams, I go back to those strange days.  So I reread all of Scorched, the good parts and the painful ones, the proud parts and the shameful ones. What a treasure to have that archive of myself in such a curious phase of life, so full of longing and new desire and terrible, terrible desperation. What a joy to revisit the curiosity and excitement, the hunger for every shred of knowledge, and what agony to relive the welcomes and the farewells that marked turning points in a long journey together. The earliest days at the hotel coincided with one set of enormous life changes – arriving in this city, discovering a new life for myself, a new person I wanted to and was able to be. Returning there now awakens a keen awareness of a new set of life changes now in progress, unfamiliar and daunting in their own way.  It does not feel like welcome home – not exactly. A familiar embrace, certainly, but there is some other strange process afoot in figuring out where exactly this piece of the puzzle fits.  Only one is a wanderer. Two together are always going somewhere.

It began a renaissance of sorts - and 2019 would end up becoming the year I visited the hotel the most times out of all of them, and the person responsible for that is the topic of the next memory.

[scorchedthesnake]

June 19, 2015

In the long history of the McKittrick Hotel, there has been a host of performers who attained legendary status for iconic interpretations of beloved roles in the show – Macbeths, Boy Witches, Hecates, Bald Witches, Porters. And some did so despite only being with the production a very short time.

One of these was the actor Nick Dillenburg, who I think only did one short contract, appearing as Malcolm, Speakeasy Barman, the Reverend, and the Porter. Unlike everyone else I'm writing fond recollections of in this series, I never once met or spoke to him. But if you followed my personal Tumblr back when all of this was current, you'll know that I referred to him as the bravest actor I had ever encountered at the show, and I think that still holds up.

(Porter 1:1 spoilers to follow)

One crazy weekend in June 2015, I committed to a double double (early/late Friday, early/late Saturday) because as I mentioned in the previous memory, Will Seefried was back and he was known to be playing Malcolm, and I really needed to see that before he left again for good, so I bought four consecutive tickets to max out the chance of seeing him. This was known as the "See Fried Spicy Alligator" trip because, in the search logs for this blog, someone had come in having searched for that phrase and I guess it pointed them to all of my Jesus Christ Will Seefried posts. The good news was that Will was the Porter at the Friday early show, and sure enough, that meant he was on in his other role at the late show, and boy was he a fantastic Malcolm.

The Malcolm at the early show was Nick Dillenburg – who was also fantastic; and in turn he switched over to Porter for the late show. I'd seen Nick's Porter several times before that night. I think this was key, because he knew he'd seen me before. Everything was going just as to be expected, until he brought down the box of props.

Then to my astonishment, he put the lipstick on me. And then he put the wig on me, and the entire dressing sequence of the 1:1 was reversed. It was intensely intimate, utterly shocking, and for a return visitor... so insanely effective. I've cried through many a Porter 1:1 over the years and here for the first time I felt his torment in the most acute and terrible way.

I've been given to understand that this got Nick into some serious hot water. The cast were and are under pretty strict direction to not deviate from the script in such a significant way – and I think it's a real shame, because this is by far one of the great standout moments I ever got to experience in a performance. I know I'm not the only one – but there can't be all that many of us that he ever did this for. Over the years, I've been told the space to improvise or deviate or play has been more and more severely curtailed, especially after the pandemic reopening. I understand there are surely some good reasons for that, safety included, and ensuring a consistent audience experience as well... but what a loss.

I know it's a small memory, but I will always salute and honor Nick Dillenburg for doing something I wish every return visitor to the Porter 1:1 could get to experience.

[scorchedthesnake]

May 20, 2015

The theme of Mayfair III was Absurdism. I have some poor quality photos of some of the performances, but low-light performance was not great on the phone cameras of the day and if I remember correctly, I had been mugged shortly before this party and was using my very old backup phone.

Regardless, the party wasn't really the thing that mattered, because we were living at the the time in a golden age of excellent casting, particularly in the favorite role of the Porter. Both Paul Zivkovich and Austin Goodwin were appearing pretty regularly in the lobby, as was Nick Dillenburg – but more about him in the next entry. Another classic Porter had also stopped back in for a short contract, and that was the unequalled Will Seefried.

As we've joked before, the Porter may be canonically ginger, but is somehow also simultaneously the decidedly un-ginger Will. He had the Porter honed to absolute perfection with a heartbreaking sadboy rendition of it, and, well, "the thing with your legs," which remains a unique element of his 1:1 performances that no one else has ever managed to pull off with such impact. Audiences swarmed the lobby whenever he was on, particularly for his Moonlight Becomes You.

On party nights like Mayfair, we had pretty much all learned that playing the 1:1 hunting game was futile. Too many people, too much familiarity, and too much drunkenness and aggression. So I was stunned, in a crowded 3rd loop lobby of partygoers, when Will sought me out at the phonebooth, and took me by the hand back to his office where... to both our dismay, his key failed to unlock the door. The steward assigned also tried, and could not.

Will, however, was undeterred. He clasped my shoulders and turned me to face him, then signaled to the gathered crowd to move back. He shut the gate in the hallway and pushed my back against it, and proceeded to ad lib a 1:1 monologue. I wish to God I could tell you what he said, but I didn't write it down then and it was soon lost to the infamous delicious libations. But he pressed me into that iron gate and whispered something profoundly sad into my ear while everyone gathered could only watch and wonder.

Later, on the dance floor, I saw him and thanked him for the truly unique moment. "I couldn't just leave you there with nothing!" he said.