In a recent NY Times article, Charles Isherwood reviews the Punchdrunk production of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,”
a site-specific theater experience as well as a performance, where the audience is encouraged to dress in white masks and evening wear, and are set free to roam the playing area and engage as they may with the actors. At the end of the evening, all assemble for the final ballroom bacchanal. (And several “Red Death” parties are scheduled as well.)

This feeling — of immersion, of menace and adventure, of stepping into another, wilder, more risky world — is at the heart of the lure for the audience in the Poppy — with additional intimacy available for purchase, of course, which ups the ante higher still.

Because sexuality is a kind of acting-out, isn’t it? an assumption of roles, a shedding of the public self, to be freer to give and to take, to amend the menu, to wear the mask (or take it off). Yet are we ever more ourselves than the moment when we are consumed by appetite?. . . Happy Valentine’s Day!