Life and Trust Off-Broadway Reviews

For this (I think!) one-time only participant, Life and Trust was always beautiful to look at, and occasionally captivating as an experience, but without a cohering story to unfurl and something narratively to mold in my mind, it was also frustrating, tiring, and—after hours of wandering around, despite all the striking visual stimuli—thoroughly, teeth-grindingly irritating. This a fun and beautifully, impressively rendered playground, but you will need a lot of time, money, and sensible shoes to make proper sense of it. Its own Faustian bargain, you might say.

You can skip the gym the day you take in the new show from Emursive, the enterprising theater company behind the long-running (more than twelve years) immersive show Sleep No More. For their newest production, they’ve pulled out the stops, providing an experience that, if it can’t quite be described as theater, is certainly…something. Bigger, more lavish and clearly more ambitious than Sleep No More, Life and Trust is also something of an endurance contest, lasting three hours and taking place on six floors of a financial district skyscraper. By the time you’ve finished attempting to follow its thirty characters involved in 250 overlapping scenes, you’ll have more than put in your steps.

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.

Director Teddy Bergman has a fantastic grasp on time and place – it often feels like a terrifying look into the mind of Mia Goth’s character in Pearl – and not a strong enough one on cohesive experience, each scene coheres vibewise. But even with its seemingly endless inventiveness – a somewhat ambivalent qualification here – Life and Trust is a marvel of spectacle, and one I suspect will draw return attendants seeking significance and revelry. We are once again, after all, in the freefalling ‘20s.

Even if you offer a condemnation of the American Dream, the selling point of each is the fun stuff that the Devil offers: the surface-level Jazz Age aesthetics, the thrill of a good party. Avarice is hard to lampoon when you’re also selling themed drinks. Since Gatsby’s copyright has expired, I was surprised that Life and Trust didn’t take the opportunity to write those characters into a few scenes, too — though you might consider J.G. Conwell’s initials.

But the creators of Life and Trust have opted wisely for mood over minutiae, and who anybody is doesn’t matter once you’re immersed in a tapestry of stories that seem to unspool almost infinitely. Almost infinitely but not quite, because Life and Trust, like Sleep No More, runs on a loop so most scenes will occur twice. But I only once stumbled upon a replay, a surging waltz for a dozen cast members, with Mephisto presiding maliciously. I didn’t mind seeing it a second time. If the price of succumbing to Life and Trust’s devilish delights is a lingering desire to see the whole thing again, that’s the kind of deal for which I’d willingly sell my soul.