So I have done the immersive event of the summer and have returned to talk about it. That’s right — your Life & Trust review is in this post as well as another immersive review, plus shows old and new to talk about.
I’ve mentioned before that Life & Trust is getting a lot of attention in the immersive world, particularly in terms of what it tells us about mask shows and the future of large-scale immersive entertainment. 150 words didn’t feel like it would cover that so at the end of this post, you’ll find a slightly longer more considered view of it. With that in mind, I’ll do the upcoming first and end on the reviews for a change.
Upcoming Immersive
Murder in La La Land - I’ve booked my ticket to see this supposedly not-your-normal cheesy murder mystery event for Thursday, July 18th if you are interested in joining me. I cannot vouch hard for it, but I imagine I’ll learn something from it — if nothing else, what Fever thinks murder mysteries should be. Price is down to $60 (due to flash sale until 7/8) at Brooklyn Art Haus.
DIRT - I have my ticket for this interactive theater piece meets game on Wednesday, June 10th. Join me if you’re interested in this chance to imagine what you would do if the East River dried up and you could develop on it. $35 at the Tank.
Hiker Trash - Linked Dance Theater, of such interesting shows as The Incomplete Collection and Winter’s Walk, has a new small piece up that is exploring the Appalachian Trail and the bonds we form hiking. It’s a small and proportedly highly interactive piece for an audience of 4. It’s expensive at $70 for an hour show, but Linked Dance does really interesting experiments, so I’m willing to take the chance. I’m seeing it on July 24th if you want company.
More Concerts
So I finally did my homework on the Summerstage and Celebrate Brooklyn shows this year and I found a couple I will see. If you’re unfamiliar with NYC summer concerts, most of them are free to attend. Those that aren’t can be expensive, but they’re outdoor, so you can literally just sit in the grass and listen to the music, which I will argue is an at least equal experience.
Snail Mail, Summerstage, free, August 27th - Snail Mail makes slightly pop-y ballads such as this. I like her music and while it’s not something I would pay to see, it’s nice soundtrack for a day in the Central Park.
Beabaadoobee/Hovvdy, Summerstage, free (if you sit outside), September 11th - Beabaadoobee is an interesting artist making Pavement-y music, often literally, but I think the real draw might be Hovvdy. I’m not sure why I like this stuff when I don’t like so much else like it, but I do, so picnic it is for this one.
I’m also very seriously thinking of trying to get tickets to see St. Vincent (the new album is the best yet, IMO) and Fontaines DC (who have what might be one of my top songs for 2024), but boy they are expensive so jury is still out. Let me know if you might go and I could be swayed.
Reviews
Moment you’ve been waiting for. One quick review and then the deep dive into Life & Trust.
Odd Man Out - This immersive performance is the story of a blind Argentinean musician returning to his country after leaving the violence of the dictatorship to pursue his career. The performance is completely in the dark, using audio and other senses to give you an experience of the character’s sightless world as he grows up, finds love, and flees his home. The performers are talented and the theatricality was good in terms of the live audio experience of so many settings, but the whole piece is hamstrung by how simplistic and clichéed the plot is. The horrors of Argentina in the eighties and the experience of blindness are powerful themes to explore, but every choice in this work from the trite romance to the barely sketched musical career of the protagonist to the lazy clowning humor of the other plane passenger just dilutes the play. It’s as if the writers didn’t trust us with a more nuanced version of these themes and just made the most dumbed-down choices to keep us entertained. It’s a shame because the idea of the staging is really interesting and the stories here are important. I only hope the Pitch Black can show a bit more sophistication and confidence in the audience and tell stories that aren’t so embarrassingly thin.
Life & Trust - The tl;dr is that it’s worth seeing the show, but it’s a flawed show that’s hamstrung by its format. What follows is a longer description of my experience, but if all you want to know is if you should see it, the answer is if you liked Sleep No More (or never saw it), you should get a ticket to Life & Trust just to see a scaled up version of it. As a spectacle, it’s at a scope that’s kind of amazing.
It’s a Great Spectacle
The first thing to say about Life & Trust is that the production value of this work is incredible. The show takes place over several floors in the basements of an old bank and the sets are just breathtaking in terms of scope. I was in the show for three full hours and I am certain there are areas I never walked into. Each floor contained multiple environments, each unexpected and fully engrossing. You can literally walk from a medical office into an Egyptian tomb, from a mine into a saloon, from a sideshow into a psychedelic drug trip. If nothing else happened in the piece, it’s almost worth the ticket price to just wander around in awe of how much money and time went into making this work.
Thankfully, things do happen in the space. At this level, we’re square in Sleep No More territory. What you mostly watch are people dancing out narratives. It’s very well done — the dancers are talented and the choreography is quite good at times, and there’s an introduction of stage magic in places that’s impressive. But there’s nothing about this that’s original in terms of form. My go-to description of Sleep No More is that it’s a dance performance in a haunted house and Life & Trust matches that description precisely. This isn’t a criticism; if seeing people dance out narratives in crazy sets is your jam, this show delivers. The conclusion in particular is amazing. And if you went to Sleep No More multiple times just to live in that world, Life & Trust will embrace you as well.
All of this is to say that as spectacle, Life & Trust is powerful and successful. I’m glad I saw it and I would encourage anyone who wants to see spectacle done well to see it too. The issue is that Life & Trust is not just spectacle; it’s meant to be a story. And as a story, it’s flawed, both in the execution of a mask show but I think also BECAUSE it’s a mask show.
Where Life & Trust Fails as Story
Life & Trust is based on the Faust myth, where Faust sells his soul to a devil (Mephistopheles) in exchange for power, both to do good as well as have his desires met. This plot is established in Life & Trust in an introductory framing element around a fictional character (Conwell) serving as Faust, but when you enter the full performance, there’s nothing that really orients you to that plot. Instead, a couple dozen new characters appear in various places that have stories you haven’t been prepared for. I assume one of these characters is supposed to be Conwell, but I’m not even sure of that, because nothing is introduced, explained, or framed once the show starts.
Instead, what you get are snippets of their plots through dance performances in the different sets. While the dances are compelling to watch, they don’t do much to tell you the context of the story. I mean, I can tell that someone is seducing someone else, or someone stole something, or some people are fighting, but I don’t know who they are, why they care, or why any of it matters. So most of the time I spent in the piece, I only had the vaguest idea what was going on.
That vague idea was based on the overarching Faustian theme: someone wants something, they trade their soul to get it, they break the things and people around them, and regret the decision when they come to a bad end. While that’s a comprehensible structure, I don’t really care about it if I don’t know the characters or what the specific stakes are. So I didn’t care. After about two encounters, I stopped trying to figure out what was happening and took it all in as a bunch of vaguely related unconnected scenes. I just stopped paying attention to the story.
This was not simply my experience. I know people who have seen Life & Trust 4 times already; I’ve been in conversations with groups where the show has been collectively seen more than 50 times. Even these die-hards don’t know what a lot of the stories are. They apparently have to do different aspects of historical American exceptionalism, but even knowing that, there are still 3 or 4 characters in the piece that no one can follow. And these are people who worked hard to figure out what they did. It’s safe to say that basically no one who has seen Life & Trust at this point knows the plot, and when you HAVE A PLOT in your piece, that’s not a good thing.
Mask Shows Are Not Great at Story, and Life & Trust is Not A Great Mask Show for Story
This brings us to the issues with mask shows generally. When discussing the lack of comprehensible story in Life & Trust with others, I was told that some of the issue was “skill” at seeing this shows, specifically knowing that you should follow one character to figure out their story if you want to understand a mask show. That argument I call bullshit on. There is NOTHING in the affordances of a mask show that tells you to follow one character. You are constantly being led by characters into collisions with other characters, being left behind by characters that TRY to evade you, being brought into shiny rooms with a hundred things to gawk at. The average person is NOT going to follow one character in the midst of that stimulation. They are going to meander and tangent and explore. That is what a mask show tells you to do by its formal structure, independent of its particular story.
Better mask shows, such as Sleep No More and (from what I’ve heard - I didn’t see it) The Burnt City work because the frames are strong enough (Macbeth and Greek Mythology, repsectively) that even if you don’t follow the specifics of a particular moment you encounter, the overarching structure gives you the context to make it sensible. I don’t exactly know what’s happening at every moment of Sleep No More, but I know it’s Macbeth, the cues of the scene tell me it’s Banquo I’m watching and I know Banquo’s story, so I get the idea of the scene and can follow it from that Shakespearean lens. But since Life & Trust is just the framework of Faust and one man’s story (Conwell) that you can’t even identify in the main show, you don’t have any hooks into anything you’re seeing except this very thin “people get corrupted by want” theme that doesn’t make you care about anyone.
On top of this, Life & Trust has the audience of a mask show. That means that the people around you are desperate to see everything they can and are literally running in front of you and pushing you out of the way so they can get a better view. Oh, and remember this takes place over multiple floors, so be ready to climb a lot of stairs and dodge a lot of power-walking spectators over three hours as you chase performers. None of these things are deal-breakers to enjoying the show, but wow will you wish that audiences in mask show had the tiniest bit of etiquette.
In conclusion, I think the right way to go into Life & Trust is to just ignore the story and treat it as a big abstract ride in a sexy, violent Faust universe of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. On the spectacle side, it works for one trip, even if it’s overwhelming in terms of all the sets and characters and content and stairs to climb. But I think all of us as a community could do a better job thinking about how to make mask shows a bit more sensible and friendly to the casual audience.
Thanks for reading, everyone. More near the end of the month once I’ve gotten through this crop of shows, but definitely email if coming to one of the upcoming things is up your alley.