Punchdrunk and MIT’s "Sleep No More" sets the stage for theatre and videogame experimentation.
Dave Itzkoff’s review of “Sleep No More,” a site-specific theatre installation in a Chelsea (NY) demonstrates what happens when the threshold between videogames, alternate-reality games, theatre and drama are blurred. Created by British theatre group Punchdrunk, and produced with the help of Emursive and MIT the installation combines technology, performance and alternate-branching storylines. As Itzkoff notes, “Sleep No More” lets masked attendees follow, with eyes, ears, hands and feet, an open-ended tale that mashes up “Macbeth” with elements of Hitchcock films like “Rebecca” and “Vertigo.” At the invitation of Punchdrunk, I was taking part in an experiment to see, primarily, if…