Dancers in one of the largest spaces at Conwell Tower perform in Life and Trust, an immersive theater piece taking place on five floors. Photograph by Jane Kratochvil. (Banner photograph by Stephanie Crousillat.)
Life and Trust, a new theatrical event from Emursive, which produced the Punchdrunk hit Sleep No More, takes as its inspiration the Faust legend and mixes it with the 1929 stock market crash, the structure of A Christmas Carol, and glimmers of Citizen Kane. As with Sleep No More, attendees wear masks and performers do not, and silence is the rule. The audience, too, plays a part: The evening begins in a cavernous lobby with red-marble columns at “Conwell Tower” (formerly City Bank–Farmers Trust), half a block from Delmonico’s in lower Manhattan. A placard announces the date, Oct. 23, 1929, and the event: Life and Trust Bank’s Prospective Investors’ Fête. The audience is the “investors.”
Parker Murphy plays young Conwell, and Mike Tyus is a phantom observer. Photograph by Stephanie Crousillat.
As with Punchdrunk’s show, dance and design are paramount, although an atypical dialogue scene sets up what follows: “Never married. No children. Never so much as a game of tennis,” the tycoon Conwell says grimly, after hearing warnings about a wobbling market. His banking empire started with a syrup he acquired to relieve the suffering of his sister Naima, who had a bone disease. One day Conwell met a magician who sold him the cure, but at a Faustian price, and before the scene is over, a psychopomp has possessed him. The audience is invited to review Conwell’s life by proceeding through a door and down a spiral staircase.
Co-directed by Teddy Bergman and Jeff and Rick Kuperman, some scenes are danced in long, ghostly corridors, others in confined spaces. (The Kupermans also choreographed.) When a scene is over, the audience will typically follow one or the other of the performers to the next encounter. The experience is individual and aleatory; like a hedge maze, the thrill is the discovery. A young policeman (Tony Bordonaro) lies on his back and crumbles gravel on his uniform, then sticks a hand down into his crotch. At another point, he rushes into an office, where he strips off his shirt, pours a glass of milk, and lies supine again and drinks it so it dribbles down his cheeks. He then pulls out a cat-o’-nine-tails and flagellates himself. But who he is and his connection to Conwell remain a mystery.
Conwell in the show’s climactic scene, with a triumphant Mephisto (Kevin M. Pajarillaga).
The young Conwell is played primarily by Parker Murphy, and one may follow him through his story, but it’s just as likely one may end up at other scenes where other actors play Conwell (“Details blur, morphing into elusive phantoms,” Conwell has related. “Memories within memories within memories. Each iteration a subtle distortion.”). Thus an exchange of cash between the magician (Brandin S Steffensen) and Conwell (Brendan Duggan) for a vial of bright green elixir is later reenacted with Steffensen and a different actor—and a gold bar to boot.
Duggan, dressed by Emilio Sosa in slacks with suspenders over a white tank top, is then drugged and dragged to a laboratory. He manages to escape to appear in two other scenes, possibly not as Conwell. One is in a boxing ring lighted by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew like a George Bellows painting, where he triumphs over an opponent. After that, Duggan moves to an adjacent stable for a homoerotic duet with Robert Vail, dancing around the stalls, climbing in the confined space; it ends with kisses.
Gabriel Hainer Evansohn’s wonderful sets exhibit various influences. The wall of the bank lobby, where drinks are served from behind teller’s cages, has a gigantic mural evoking Thomas Hart Benton: billowing smokestacks, a blast furnace, and a towering skyscraper. In a bank vault downstairs, dancer Zachary Eisenstat performs a sequence of break-ins of safety-deposit boxes by listening to the tumblers. Inside the spaces he cracks open are objects arranged like Joseph Cornell boxes: one holds an elaborate wooden box with a package of popcorn and a list of ingredients, including opium; another has “Conwell’s Syrup 1879” and a decorative, carved mortar and pestle; a third has a miniature Easter Island head. In another room, vitrines hold childhood toys, echoing the sled in Citizen Kane. At another, on the shore of a lake, a woman gingerly walks over rocks to dance on the water, as it were, with a moon on the horizon.
As theater, Life and Trust may not have the pronounced homages (to Hitchcock and Macbeth) in Sleep No More, but that fits with the fluidity of memory. The dancers and imagery are superb, and the pop-up moments—I almost collided with a desperate-looking woman escaping from a cell—create vivid souvenirs for the mind.
Tickets to Emursive Theater’s Life and Trust at Conwell Tower (69 Beaver St.) are currently available through Oct. 13. Performances are Wednesday through Sunday evenings; arrival times are staggered from 7:15 to 7:55 p.m. For tickets and more information, call the box office at (646) 412-5747 from noon to 9 p.m. or visit lifeandtrustnyc.com.
Playwright: Jon Ronson
Directors: Teddy Bergman, Jeff & Rick Kuperman
Choreography: Jeff & Rick Kuperman
Scenic Design: Gabriel Hainer Evansohn
Costumes: Emilio Sosa
Lighting: Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew
Sound: Brendan Aanes, Michael Kiley & Nick Kourtides
