Review: The Gaudy, Immersive ‘Life and Trust’ Is Part Theater, Part Stunt

02.08.2024 05:00

New York Observer

You may not believe it, but theater critics actually work. It’s not all plopping into an aisle seat, yawning, and scribbling in the dark. Perhaps we read a biography of Mary Todd Lincoln to understand that Cole Escola did not. Or we stream cast albums of Sunset Boulevard and Gypsy to prepare for their revivals this fall. Sometimes we even schlep 5,000+ steps through an immersive fable about American innovation and greed that fills six floors and 100,000 square feet, chasing 24 characters in a dialogue-free trek with enough plot lines to drive an HBO season. Welcome to Life and Trust: If time is money, you deposit two and a half hours and hope interest accrues. For me, I stumbled out of this immersive spectacle footsore, confused, and underwhelmed by everything except the effort involved.

Ever see Sleep No More? Life and Trust (also an Emursive production) is that, only about the rise and fall of an American family from the Gilded Age to the Wall Street Crash of 1929. After a wait in a spacious Art Deco café, small groups are ushered into the wood-paneled office of prosperous banker J.G. Conwell (get it? con…well?). Moneybags has just gotten off the phone after learning the stock market is going kablooie. Keeping up appearances for the wealthy investors (that’s us), our stricken tycoon starts to reminisce about how the Conwell family fortune originated in the previous century with the sale of miraculous green serum—classic American snake oil. This is the only spoken bit of the show (scripted by nonfiction author Jon Ronson), and it sets up assorted family secrets—the biggest of which is that young J.G. sold his soul for financial success. A sultry, devilish assistant named Megara clambers atop the desk to hand out masks and beckon us into the bowels of the bank for the site-specific odyssey.

How to describe what follows? I mean that literally, since those unnecessary and scratchy plastic masks were not designed for people wearing glasses. I spent most of the time fidgeting with the damn thing so that I could focus on the constant flow of action. Who doesn’t enjoy a frisson of panic loping down shadowy flights of stairs with reduced depth perception?

If you can see, what’s to see? Rooms. So many rooms (100, to be exact). Doctor’s office, mad scientist laboratory, saloon, police station, a chamber with western prairies painted on walls and bales of hay, carnival fairground, a pharmacy filled with bottles of green fluid, boudoirs, horse stables, a wall gridded with safes, spooky midnight garden with gravel crunching underfoot, reliquaries with alchemical totems on white marble plinths, a room that was pitch-black except for an ocean with moonlight rippling over the waves (I think?). The level of design detail is gloriously insane. Gabriel Hainer Evansohn is credited with scenic design and “experience direction.” Teddy Bergman (KPOP) is the director, and the spatially resourceful choreography is by Jeff Kuperman and Rick Kuperman (with many others contributing). As with Sleep No More, there is a fetish for antiques like manual typewriters and decorative items that speak to taxonomic minds obsessed with collecting and cataloging: a mounted display of beetles pinned and ranked according to size, for example. If the many dancing bodies don’t attract your eye, there are miles of interior décor and props to ogle and paw.

If you’re on a hot date, or hanging with your best friend, or rolling hard on molly, you may want Life and Trust to never end. I lacked those advantages and grew increasingly impatient after 90 minutes. Whole tectonic plates of story passed me by, since I neglected to follow young J.G. and Mephisto and got sidetracked with a cop, a scientist, and a cell of anarchists in a saloon. One can watch just so many steamy, fight-hump dances between shirtless men and pantsless women before numbness sets in. This is not to scoff at the performers. They work incredibly hard in an environment that probably yields multiple bruises and scratches. I seemed to have a talent for bumbling into the spot where a character had to dive-slide across a table or was whirled in the air. There was a superb boxing match that seemed to have sprung from an Ashcan School canvas. The whole thing culminates in an explosive, multi-level dance finale in which the hell-bound Conwell transforms into a Houdini figure who magically appears hooded and bound by chains in a water tank. Apparently, money is both root of all evil and an illusion leading us to death.

Back in 2011, I enjoyed Sleep No More; it was novel and exquisitely executed, plus I dug the Macbeth meets Kubrick vibe. But even the Punchdrunk hit left me with zero desire to return. These Choose Your Own Adventure stunts combine my least favorite states: feeling trapped, being forced to follow a crowd, claustrophobia, FOMO, and humorless dance theater. On top of that, Life and Trust is too long to sustain interest in its heavy-handed Faustian spin on American capitalism. In terms of content, the “what” is mid, but the “how” is crazily busy—to the point of exhausting. You would think that an immersive event—sweaty, physical, three-dimensional—is the polar opposite of bodiless, isolating social media, yet I found the torrents of trivial visual information and absence of thoughtful language to resemble, well, wasted hours online. But, hey: You’re young, attend spin class, love escape rooms, and don’t care about narrative coherence. For you, Life and Trust may be a gold mine of fun.