In my dreams, I keep returning to the Manderlay.
For my birthday last year, I went to Sleep No More. Like everyone else who attends the show, I was immediately and irrevocably altered by my visit to the McKittrick Hotel. They carved open something in my heart and put in there a piece of the blue-lit night.
A lot of that is Jordan Morley’s fault.
During that first visit of mine, he was playing Fulton, the Cunning Man of Gallow Green, and he played Fulton as someone grief-sick and despair-haunted, a man utterly broken by the hopelessness of his quixotic mission. I was riveted. The first time I caught sight of him in the hotel, he was a weeping shadow inching towards the Witch’ rave, and I remember being utterly struck by the performance: both the athletic quality of it and the subtler aspects, the growing forlornness, the sheer fucking desolation of his expression at the end.
How strange it was to see him as the Boy Witch, his original role, when I returned a second time. There was some of that misery still in his rendition of the character, but it was subsumed mostly by a fae slyness, a feline mischief, a laughing and eldritch wildness that almost, but not quite, hid how much he feared his encroaching fate. That sheer primordial kinesis was dizzying, as magnetic and overwhelming as Joy-Marie Thompson’s turn as the Bald Witch.
I knew she was leaving the production on January 29th, and so ended up in the McKittrick a few nights before then to watch her one last time. Even if I were to live to a hundred, I don’t know if I’d ever have the right words for the memory of Thompson’s performance. No amount of poetry, no selection of phrases seem sufficient to describe her gaze, or the protean strangeness of her Bald Witch, the way she shapeshifted effortlessly between human coquetry to inhuman power. And the rare tenderness, the flashes of a heart reserved only for her fellow witches.
But if I had to try, I’d say that Thompson danced like a living flame, like an inferno barely constrained in human skin. That her gaze as she strode up to me in the witch’s hut immolated me, rendered me to cinders. That her eyes were white phosphorus, and anyone who met them simply burned away. (Gods, the fight with MacDuff had me breathless.)
Much have been said about Punch-Drunk’s utterly legendary production but my god, not enough praise, I feel, has been offered to the residents, the ecosystem of their interactions, how each dancer transfigures their roles, how their interpretation of the choreography informs the story of the evening, and how that creates a living, ever-shifting mythos.
(For those intending to go soon, I hope you get a night when Nate Carter’s performing as Macbeth. I hope you get to watch him at the banquet as he whispers something to himself, splattered with blood. I hope you get to see the masterpiece he made of the Thane of Cawdor. And if you don’t get to see him as Macbeth, I hope you get to see him as Macduff and how he proves that gravity is an optional thing.)
One of these days, I intend to write a post about what it’s like to be known to the residents, to be met with conspiratorial looks and flickering smiles, to tell a witch that you had a dream of her and to have her whisper those words back to you in the sapphire dark, to dance with a friend in a sea of white masks and watch him vanish into a story.
But for now, all I want to say is that you should go to Sleep No More and get yourself utterly destroyed be the beauty of the residents’ performance.
***
In other news, Breakable Things is in the Preliminary Ballot for Bram Stoker Awards, which blows me away. My little debut collection was released in November last year, and there’s a part of me convinced that wasn’t enough time for anyone to even take notice of it. Yet here we are. Thank you for your love.
This week also saw the cover reveal for The Dead Takes the A Train, and just look at that. Look at that. She’s so perfect.
The Salt Grows Heavy, my mermaid novella, is steadily approaching the day of its birth — and I’m both excited and terrified about the prospect of another book entering the world. I’m not a person who is very good about giving up control. Publishing almost demands that you do. Every book is only yours until it is given to the world. After that, it belongs to everyone who reads it and it is a different book to each of its readers. Trusting that your work will find the right folk always feels like an impossible act of faith.
Anyway, I hope everyone is doing well. As always, a cat photo to end things with —
I have ALWAYS wanted to see this! Carlos did--before my time--and still has his mask from the event. You make it sound like a story I want to enter! I'm so glad you had that experience!
AND CONGRATULATIONS AGAIN ON THE NEW COLLABORATION!!!
I am so proud of you and everything you're doing, Cassandra.