In Sleepwalker, a one-man show created and performed by Andy Russ and stage managed by Ollie Crowe, at the Wilbury Theatre Group in Providence, an open-air cell claims center stage. Absent walls except for a floor panel, the metallic frame of the cube suggests an imprisonment while allowing for permeability. Its bars segment the blankness of the backdrop curtain and remaining theater space, and within their contours the action begins even before the first act.
While the audience filters in, a fully masked Russ paces back and forth within the box under the pall of dim lighting. His silhouette looms and lurches along the wall behind him, as if a silent secondary character. A lack of identifiable features beneath his dark garb and a furious pace of motion creates a nervous energy, while Russ’s hold on a vintage radio microphone — and the availability of ear plugs upon entry — anticipates some forthcoming but unknown disruption.
Billed as a multimedia meditation, Sleepwalker wrestles in sight and sound with the statement and question: “They say that your entire life flashes before you when you die. But then what?”
The first of three acts, “punchline,” compresses the moments of life into an industrial soundtrack amplified by a pulsating light show projecting a kinetic visual display into the surrounding void. Constrained within his cell, Russ thrashes through distorted vocals and spoken word repetitions. With the venue located inside the WaterFire Arts Center, the intermittent beams of passing traffic along Valley Street flickered with reminders of life carrying on beyond the drawn blinds.
“Even though I had a sort of punk vibe in mind, inspired by Nine Inch Nails and Ministry and all that,” said Russ in a phone interview, “I’m a lighting designer as well and have recently been doing a lot of work with using video as part of the light design and projection design. So that was me exploring raw energy in a visual way, like, how can I mirror the sonic with the visual aspect?”
The tension of the opening collapses into “a hug held to long,” as Russ enacts a kind of burial, tucking himself under a blanket within the same cell where his vocals and movement had only moments earlier dominated. The act’s title draws from what Russ considers a “serendipitous accident,” following a miswriting of his original intention: “too long.” He said the typo of the more familiar phrasing opened up the possibility of thinking about the scene in a different way.
A projection of self-recorded musings — part Blair Witch Project, part contemporary video selfie — ponders death before segueing into a readout from Lydia Breckon honoring the ancient mythologies and cultural symbolism of honeybees. A film montage relays an insect’s vantage. In an age of colony collapse, the tradition of telling the bees about life events works bidirectionally.
“Bees are in almost every culture, in every culture’s folklore,” said Russ. “More often than not, they are tied to this link between the everyday real world and the afterlife or realm of the gods.”
The third and final act, “pins & needles,” teases the tingling sensation of the body’s limbs falling asleep, as Russ positions helium balloons anchored by weights throughout the room, around the periphery of the empty cell at its center. After a lull with the inflated hearts, stars, and orbs in subtle motion offering an illusion of stillness, Russ returns unmasked, wearing pyjamas, shifting between a delicate barefoot tiptoeing and the jabs and thrusts of a boxer or a soccer player. He calls out names under each balloon, with an urgency and vitality that continue, until they don’t.
“For me that last image is more about possibility, but it’s important that I’m leaving it open and vague,” said Russ, noting the pleasure he derives from hearing his audience’s interpretations.
“Through popular media, we are often fed the same flavors over and over again,” said Russ. “What I find personally interesting is experimenting with new ‘flavor combinations’ — with visuals, with sound, with text, with movement, with image, things like that. There’s that sense of novelty and exploring the experience of being alive and life and everything that comes with it.”
Sleepwalker premiered at the Wilbury Theatre Group from January 8 to 10, 2026. Russ says he’s hoping to make an appearance in some form at the next Providence Fringe Festival.