PUT YOUR LIFE AND TRUST INTO THE HANDS
OF LIFE AND TRUST
There is a daunting immersive theater experience in Manhattan’s Financial District that is also somehow prophetic. The location, 69 Beaver Street, is already scary at night, surrounded as it is by empty, dark urban canyons; the address is one of the side entrances of 20 Exchange Place, an Art Deco stone-clad skyscraper a block from Wall Street, formerly a bank. The show takes place on October 23, 1929, when a huge selling wave made the stock market collapse, the day before the infamous Black Thursday. In our times, so dangerously similar to the 1920s with its decadence, market speculations, corruption, deep social divide, and a new rise of fascism (as I wrote in my review of Gatz at The Public), an adaptation of the Faust legend for Life and Trust seemed an appropriate choice.
We enter the fictional Conwell Tower, walk into the impressive Conwell Coffee Hall – half bar and half bank with a line of teller windows and a gigantic Art Deco mural behind them – treated with care by the clerks and servers who address us as possible investors. After a drink, we are personally invited to a suspicious meeting with the chairman of the Life and Trust Bank, J.G. Conwell himself. Conwell explains his past to us in his striking wood paneled office, how he made a fortune producing a green concoction that supposedly cures cough but gets people addicted. He bought it from a shady character, hinting to the Faustian story at the base of his success. While we were there, news of the market crash arrives; desperate, Conwell decides to sell his soul to another shady character in order to go back in time and avoid the financial catastrophe – twice in a lifetime, a record. Then, he disappears.
Parker Murphy and Kevin M Pajarillaga (Photo: Jane Kratochvil)
We follow his secretary and, I guess, we enter Conwell’s past in the Gilded Age. 25 individual stories that seem unrelated take place in different rooms; a magician gets out of a straightjacket, there is a boxing match, a vaudeville act, a tailor in love who hides inside his shop, a sensual ballerina who convinces me to sign my soul to Mephistopheles, etc. The actors move around and the audience follows them, but the sets were so interesting – and the people trying to make sense of the story too eager to stay close to the performers – that it was easier to just wonder around and get lost in the incredible maze.
(Clockwise from left) Kim Fischer, Kevin M. Pajarillaga, Parker Murphy, Tori Sparks,
Brendan Duggan, and Reshma Gajjar (Photo: Jane Kratochvil)
The experience director and scenic designer Gabriel Hainer Evansohn (with Grace Laubacher, Jessie Flynn, and all the design team) do a spectacular job creating a dreamy late 1800s world. From the Art Deco’s slick geometric forms of the bank to the wistful cardboard vaudeville sets, every little detail is accurate and fascinating. We travel up and down six floors, discovering a garden, a cinema, a squalid apartment with laundry hanging on the walls, a barn, a theater, shops, a pharmacy, a fortune teller room, a mirror maze, and strange offices, numerous bank vaults, Masonic halls, truly a secret world below a gigantic building. We are given sinister plastic masks to wear and it was a bit hot; I advise the producers to use more fans or lower the heat to alleviate the face perspiration and the sense of claustrophobia.
Life and Trust (Photo: Stephanie Crousillat)
It’s impossible to follow a story and probably you are not supposed to; writer Jon Ronson and director Teddy Bergman are not clear in their intent. There is almost no dialogue and the dances and movements choreographed by Jeff and Rick Kuperman get lost in the magic labyrinth: I caught the end of one, the middle of another, but the small rooms are overcrowded and nothing happens between acts, so I only saw four full sketches and wandered around for three hours. Also, there is no one direction to follow; you are encouraged to get lost, which is grand, but the show needs more action to inhabit the large space, more recurrent or longer acting loops, maybe automatons (so popular in those times), and definitely louder sounds to catch the attention of the wonderers when an act is about to start on each floor, even if there is no narrative and we are supposed to be lost in Conwell’s surreal time travel.
Jennifer Florentino, Parker Murphy (Photo: Stephanie Crousillat)
Produced by Emursive (of Sleep No More), Life and Trust (see “faust” in the title?) is best as an immersive experience. If you don’t want to run up and down the stairs trying to follow the 25 stories, you can still enjoy the mesmerizing 100,000 square-feet set, some of the sketches, taking your time and exploring the maze. It’s not “theatre” as I know it, but there are many theatrics performed that made me feel like I was in a gigantic amusement park a century ago. The big takeaway? Hopefully, Life and Trust is not going be an omen of gloomier times for us, fingers crossed.
Life and Trust
Conwell Tower at 69 Beaver Street
open run
for dates and tickets, 646.412.5747 or visit Life and Trust
