'Sleep No More' Is a Feast for Style Fanatics

- On the Runaway, all things fashion -

Audience members are equally at liberty to pop open a trunk at the foot of that bed - lots of do - to select through its contents or, in idle moments, to slide open drawers where they might unearth, say, a stray swatch of silk or striped afternoon frock.

Talk about cravings. At point in the eerily staged production of "Sleep No More" at a mock hotel in Chelsea, a showily pregnant Lady Macduff hikes up her blue velvet evening dress, hops on to a bar and laps milk from a saucer. At another moment in this crazily meandering interpretation of "Macbeth" by Punch drunk, the British experimental theater company, her dress is laid out on a bed, leaving masked spectators free to pore over its capacious folds and seams.
A costume sketch for David Israel ReynosoA costume sketch for "Sleep No More".

For style fanatics, the show is a banquet, a delectable feast of loosely Deco-inspired period paraphernalia, an "adventure in decor," as Ben Brantley wrote in his review in The Times. It was honored with Obie Awards last week for design and choreography. And it captivated the editors of Women's Wear Every day, who were prompted to used the space as a backdrop for a fashion shoot. Not that you can blame them. The shabbily evocative setting and gruesome mood beg for plunder.

They can at various intervals alter coursework to follow the progress of Lady Macbeth as they flits through a warren of rooms, clambering batlike up the walls in a voluminous bathrobe.