NO SLEEPING

Dreaming doesn’t need a bedroom. It’s more that the bedroom needs the dream.

Or is it that the bedroom needs the dreamer, to become a place for dreaming?

NO SLEEPING Interactive Performance Project is an experiential, multi-sensory lecture and responsive performance taking place in a collection of Massachusetts historic house museums. It celebrates the photographic impulse to commemorate and preserve, while ruminating on future’s lost. The shapeshifting nature of grief guides this experiential performance, with an array of devices that use light in a photographic manner (historic, lo-tech, and the technology of now), to activate rooms and bedrooms of historic homes where someone remembered may have dreamt and slept.

NO SLEEPING evolved from the search for connections between historic homes that are open to the public and Deb Todd Wheeler’s relationship to the private, non-historic site of her son’s bedroom, which she has maintained since his unexpected death. She wrote a script that inspired a template for this interactive, multi-media performance. Todd Wheeler and Sue Murad developed the template for NO SLEEPING while artists-in-residence at the Meetinghouse in Harvard, MA.

The nomadic character of NO SLEEPING, composed of different spaces and participants at each telling, forms a winding walk through spaces of light and darkness.

Through spoken word, accumulated objects, soundscapes, projections, and performance, this thought piece on conservation is a devotional investigation of place, form, and memory. With the gentle direction of Sue Murad, the audience becomes part of the work by shifting from the mindset of passive watching toward collaborating. Those present become a part of immersive experiences, with each sense activated, including taste.

The 2025 performances took place in partnership with houses in the Greater Boston area: starting at Deb’s house, then moving to the Shaker Meetinghouse (Harvard, MA), the Codman Estate (Lincoln, MA), the Loring Greenough House (Jamaica Plain, MA), the Forbes House Museum (Milton, MA), the Gibson House, (Boston Back Bay) and the Gropius House (Lincoln, MA).

In 2026 we are in residence at the Forbes House Museum. If you are interested in joining an audience at Forbes House, or participate in other NO SLEEPING programming please let us know by filling out the form below!

NO SLEEPING Team:

Deb Todd Wheeler, Co-Director

Sue Murad, Co-Director

Shana Dumont Garr, Curator

Gastronomy: Special thanks to the incredible work of the food artists at the following houses:

Maureen Coffey, Spring/Summer 2025 (Meetinghouse, Codman Estate, Loring-Greenough House, Forbes House Museum)

Megan Cronin, Fall/Winter (Gibson House Museum, Gropius House)