Correction appendedWhenever I stayed late into the evening for extracurricular activities in high school, there was something about being in a vacant building at night that made the whole affair feel illicit: the narrow, empty hallways; the classrooms devoid of students; the lack of voices in the air. Imagine that feeling, only amplified by the atmosphere of a high school abandoned for decades and a veritable multiroom art installation created by a set designer with an obsession for minutiae. This is what the American Repertory Theater, collaborating with the British company Punchdrunk, has created for its production Sleep No More. Combining themes from Macbeth and the ambience of a Hitchcock thriller and using the Old Lincoln School in Brookline as the perfect set location, directors Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle have created an immersive, nonlinear theater experience that engages viewers completely.

First, theatergoers are carefully shepherded into the building at 20-minute intervals to control the flow of people. Luckily, you can wait in Manderley, a 1930s London bar created specially for the production, complete with swanky cocktails and schmaltzy lounge singers. Once your number is called-you're given a Manderley-labeled playing card when you enter-a tuxedoed man will escort you to the elevator and proceed to randomly drop off the participants on different floors. Do note that this is a participatory exercise: You're commanded to stay silent and don a white face mask while in the building, and then you're left to explore the rooms and follow the actors around as they enact various scenes.

The price of admission ($15 through student rush) is worth it for the sets alone. Each floor has been completely transformed into an eerie amalgamation of visual, aural and even olfactory elements. One room is filled with stuffed animals, animal models and animal skins with a complete directory of its contents written on the blackboard. Another recreates the inside of a barn with scented hay on the floor and an actor who plays cards with participants and offers drinks to the winners. Other rooms lushly recreate royal chambers, including tiny details like a two-tiered rack holding dozens of small silver crosses, old letters, drawers that actually open, books from the era and numerous other oddities. Perhaps the most impressive is a cavernous stage hall redecorated with mobile and fragrant pine trees. The walls have large stone statues of religious figures recessed into individual alcoves. However, everything is still contained within the framework of an abandoned high school, meaning there are still lockers and long hallways, and sometimes you'll see a curiously modern sign juxtaposed against a sink filled with old-fashioned toiletries.

Initially I was concerned that this would be some of kind of creepy haunted house-the rooms are simply left for you to explore, with no narration or explanation, and the music is tense enough to keep you on edge. Everyone wanders around in masks, anonymous, and the lighting is so subtle and dramatic that although most of the time you remain half-hidden, the brief instances of illumination are startling. Even a simple act like opening a door becomes menacing when a stranger's mask can be seen only through a dirty, translucent window, and the timing is fortuitous enough that you face him during a particularly sudden crescendo.

Of course, Sleep No More offers more than an extraordinary set-once you've explored the rooms for a while, you can start following specific characters around and thus get some semblance of a story. Unfortunately, this is where the production does not succeed quite so well. Now, I've studied Macbeth, and I still had difficulty figuring out who was who and what exactly was happening. In the first scene I watched, an extremely pregnant woman rushed around madly, lying down and then getting back up again to roll a black cylindrical container in her hands obsessively. She was then engaged by the man whom I took (correctly) to be Macbeth-thus, I assumed she was Lady Macbeth, especially because she seemed so frantic. The pair performed a kind of violent dance together that was fluid yet forceful; they scaled the cabinets that lined the wall and, in a particularly impressive sequence, balanced precariously atop the narrow shelves while weaving above, below and next to one another. However, I never figured out who that pregnant woman was. Lady Macbeth was actually another actress who engaged in a similar dance with Macbeth in a subsequent sequence, where their passion for each other was more explicit.

While performing, the actors rushed across the room, disregarding where audience members were; this resulted in many startled audience members jumping out of the way. However, participants were allowed an unusually close vantage point because they could stand very close to the actors while they performed-oftentimes, less than a foot away-and the anonymity of the white masks made it more comfortable to truly stare at the actors. Whenever the actors moved from room to room-and they did this quite often-it would cause a flurry of people to move, lemming-like, in their wake. Although you could follow different actors, central events generally had some kind of rising musical cue, and people would rush to a specific room to observe.

The actors were always physically engaging. However, I was often not sure what they were doing. Most of the time they were silent, and though the rare spoken dialogue sometimes clarified who the character was, it never indicated anything beyond what body language and music could have. Of course, because of the nature of the production, several storylines had to happen at the same time, and I probably missed some scenes with other actors in other rooms. Even by the end, I had difficulty distinguishing the characters who were not a) Macbeth, b) Lady Macbeth, c) dead or d) a woman who represented the witches.

However, I don't think the experience was supposed to be linear or to even make sense, necessarily-the important part was a complete immersion in the world, and in this aspect the production succeeded admirably. I gave up trying to take notes because the experience was so overwhelming; when I re-emerged downstairs in Manderley nearly three hours after my arrival, I felt disoriented and confused but still in thrall. I spent the next hour puzzling over what had happened to me, because that's what this production is: an imposition on your senses that whisks you into an alternate universe.

The Old Lincoln School is located at 194 Boylston Street, available by public transit (T stop-Green line "D" to Brooklyn Village). There is also a nearby parking garage. Performance dates are from Oct. 8, 2009 to Jan. 3, 2010.


Correction: This article originally misidentified the directors of Sleep No More. Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle directed the play, not Diane Paulus.