After years of dangling the prospect over our heads, Punchdrunk Theatre’s Sleep No More is finally, really, truly set to depart New York City early in the new year.
Sleep‘s unparalleled fourteen-year run – it launched on March 7, 2011, and is set to conclude on January 5, 2025 – is unlikely to ever be surpassed. If you were one of the lucky ones who caught it, as we did, it’s easy to understand why this immersive theatre phenomenon won over as many as it did. (Even if that fandom sometimes bordered on the obsessive.)
With Sleep finally on its way out, the U.S. producers who imported Sleep all those years ago have, understandably, raced to come up with a substitute. So it is that, while Sleep‘s British creators experiment with smaller productions across the pond, New York-based Emursive Productions have gone out and built themselves a whole new Sleep No More.
Is this a craven attempt to cash in on the Sleep brand? Absolutely. Does it suffer from the lack of input from the real geniuses behind Sleep, U.K.-based Punchdrunk Theatre? Of course.
Does Life and Trust nevertheless have something worthwhile to offer the immersive theatre addict? Well, in all honesty, yes, that’s true too.
AGAIN YOU SHOW YOURSELVES
Emursive Productions’ Life and Trust is a reimagining of the Faust fable, here resituated to a Manhattan bank on the eve of Black Thursday, 1929. As in Sleep No More, attendees wear spooky masks (annoyingly adorned with antlers, making it tough to get a good view whenever a crowd forms). As in Sleep No More, the experience is almost more important than the story itself.
An opening sequence, one of the few with spoken dialogue, sets the stage: it’s October 23, 1929, and wildly successful banker J.G. Conwell, who made his fortune on a magical elixir which he learned decades ago from a mysterious stranger, is (re)visited by one of the devil’s agents. With the stock market crash less than twenty-four hours away, the devil offers Conwell one final Faustian bargain: in exchange for, well, y’know, he’ll be allowed one night to become young again, indulge in all the pleasures and fantasies, “every caress of the flesh, every secret bliss.”
Structurally, Life and Trust is incredible. Taking place across six storeys of a former bank which has been completely retrofitted by the Emursive team, its sprawling, three-hour narrative features a cast of dozens, and a world of quite literally hundreds of rooms, corridors, and other, more secret spaces.
One gets the feeling that even without a cast or a story, it would still be fun to wander through Life and Trust just for exploration’s sake.
YOU WAVERING FORMS
Life and Trust‘s story is well-told, even as it manages to be simultaneously too obvious and yet lacking in clarity.
The obvious bits – a banker named Conwell, a location called “Destiny Park”, a chapel emblazoned with the motto “In God We Trust” – are where the Punchdrunk absence is most sorely felt. Writer Jon Ronson (The Men Who Stare at Goats) and director Teddy Bergman have clearly analyzed Sleep No More inside and out, but they don’t have the subtle touch which Punchdrunk honed over years of experimentation before going big.
This also helps explain why Life and Trust is probably too sprawling and unwieldy.
I am the first to admit I haven’t always understood everything Punchdrunk does. But there’s a clarity and rigour to Punchdrunk which is lacking in Life and Trust: there are too many characters, too many rooms, too many storylines, and not enough effort to bring them together into a coherent whole.
By the time Punchdrunk crafted its final mask show The Burnt City, it was so meticulously plotted that, even if you wandered off into its darkest corners, the combination of sound, light, and actor movements would ensure you experienced at least some of its big moments. Life and Trust, on the other hand, feels like several disparate threads which occasionally intersect, but never entirely come together.
The fictional newspaper provided in the waiting area, with its dizzying array of characters and thinly drawn motivations, helps alleviate some of this, but Life and Trust has the unfortunate tendency to live down to the Sleep No More reputation for obscurity which, in Punchdrunk’s case, was never entirely fair.
REVEALED, AS YOU ONCE WERE
Evaluated on its own – which is admittedly tough to do – Life and Trust is still a very good time at the theatre.
The world Emursive has created is truly spectacular, ranging from dark and foreboding subterranean corridors, to luxurious turn-of-the-century apartments, to areas which borrow from the science fiction and fantasy of the era. Sometimes, Life and Trust even reminded me of Omega Mart, the Las Vegas interactive playground which conceals an impressive sci-fi world behind its decidedly more prosaic exterior. But Omega Mart is a funhouse, whereas Sleep No More is art; I’m not convinced Emursive fully understands the difference.
The story of Life and Trust is quite interesting. If anything lends itself to an immersive adaptation, surely the original 15th century devil’s bargain must be top of the list. There have been a lot of Fausts – some, like Goethe’s 1808 poem or Gounod’s 1859 opera, are the pinnacles of their respective genres – while others – David Mamet’s little-seen 2004 Faustus, Brian De Palma’s cult-classic film Phantom of the Paradise – failed to make the most of its irresistible premise.
Unsurprisingly, Life and Trust is heavy on allusion, with shout-outs not only to most of the above, but to other Faustian classics like Bulgakov’s extraordinary The Master and Margarita and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Life and Trust even finds time for a few nods to Sleep No More, which feels a bit like the snake eating its own tail, but is fun nevertheless.
TO CLOUDED VISION
If its world design is where Life and Trust really shines, it’s in its final moments that the show finally, if belatedly, earns the right to stand on its own.
Dancing around spoilers, I can only commend the Emursive team for crafting a Sleep No More-like finale which has all the spark and razzamatazz one should expect from a Yankee remake. It’s almost as if, at the last, Emursive realized that if it can’t be artful, they can at least deliver a spectacle. It’s hardly a profound ending – I didn’t cry like I did at the end of Sleep No More – but it’s gloriously entertaining, and unmistakeably its own thing.
It’s too bad, then, that so much else in Life and Trust plays like a Punchdrunk greatest hits. Costumes, décor, dance choreography, even the design of the hidden spaces – all these are meant not merely to remind us of Sleep No More, but to reassure us there are still ways to get your Punchdrunk-like fix even after Sleep No More leaves New York.
It’s perhaps appropriate that a show about the stock market should be so derivative. It’s perhaps even more appropriate that it was made with such shamelessly capitalistic instincts in mind.
***
Life and Trust runs now until, who knows, fourteen more years, at the Life and Trust Bank, 69 Beaver St, New York. Tickets available here.
