‘Sleep No More’: Part ‘Macbeth,’ part ‘Hitchcock’ and part haunted house

NEW YORK — Geez, I would hate to go through this alone,” said my friend John as we made our way in the dark down a winding corridor. So would I, I thought, glad we were trailing about a dozen others, all of us a bit disoriented in our masquerade masks with protruding beaks. White and hollow-eyed, they made us look like ghost birds.

Ghosts, darkness, shades of anxiety — welcome to the immersive experience of Punchdrunk Theatre. The London-based company has taken over three adjacent warehouses in Chelsea and decorated more than 100 antique-cluttered, dimly lit rooms inside for its production called “Sleep No More,” an Alfred Hitchcock-inspired adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” The idea is, the audience wanders at will through the rooms and corridors, piecing together a narrative from the scattered personal effects and hints of lives lived there. Occasionally performers will burst into a room to enact a scene; you can follow them or poke about in the vast labyrinth at your own pace. It’s a fully functional feedback loop, customized by you, perfect for Twitter-age attention spans. But this isn’t faddish hipster ephemera. Far from it. Chances are, you’ll walk away from “Sleep No More” obsessing over its myriad details, chewing over your peculiarly intoxicating trip in a way no traditional theatergoing can match.

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A hit in London, “Sleep No More” enjoyed a sold-out run in an old Boston school in 2009. With this production, slated through June 25, Punchdrunk is making its long-awaited New York debut.

As we filed through the passageways, we were told to keep our masks on at all times to intensify the event. With the crowd an anonymous, expressionless blur, you focus more on the performers and on your experience.

At the moment, mine was one of guarded anticipation. This place promised to be like an enormous, haunted Dunsinane — a stylized, Britishy “Macbeth” theme park. Cool, right? As long as I didn’t get lost. An oily-voiced man in a tux appeared and led our group into an elevator, where he admonished us not to speak to one another throughout our stay.

“And remember,” he murmured as the doors closed. “Things are not always as they seem.”

I shared an excited stare with John. It was the most I could muster with the mask.

It was also the last I’d see of him for hours.

We rose a few flights, and the elevator shuddered to a stop. “Everybody out,” called tux guy. I was the first to step into the pitch-black hallway.

I heard the doors bang shut behind me. Was that me who gasped? No one else had gotten off. What I’d most feared had happened: I was lost. Alone. And more than a little bit scared.

No seats, no polite applause

As a drama student, Punchdrunk founder Felix Barrett had decided conventional theater was a bore.

“I was tired of going to things and saying, ‘Oh, that was all right,’ and then moving on to something else,” Barrett said by phone from London last week. Chipper and upbeat, he speaks at a manic clip; it’s easy to imagine him being restless in a theater seat. “What I wanted to know was, how do you change the act of going to the theater into something that empowers the audience? How can I make work with the force to engage?”