What: Cole Escola's irreverent play about Mary Todd Lincoln.
And? There's definite talent onstage, but the show isn't for me. I don't like queerness, addiction, or mental illness being treated as punchlines. I also don't like being twenty minutes ahead of the play in terms of plot twists.
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| Cole Escola as Mary. Photo by Emilio Madrid. |
8/17/24: Life and Trust
What: Emursive Productions's newest venture, an immersive promenade adaptation of Faust.
And? It's taken me a long while to finally do my write up of this. That's largely due to Personal Zelda Stuff, but it's partly due to my struggle to wrap my head around this production. Which isn't necessarily a complaint. If there's one word to describe Life and Trust, it's ambitious. The space in the Financial District they've built is stunning in scope: opulent and expansive, with high Deco ceilings and that sense of giddy excess right before the stock market crash of 1929. This production features a different sort of prologue to Sleep No More: a visit with banker Conwell on the eve of the collapse of his empire, before we travel back in time to see his rise when he was a young man eager to make his deal with the devil. Then for the next few hours we are in the type of immersive experience we may remember from Sleep No More. And yet it is not like that. At Sleep No More I described the experience as wandering through someone else's nightmares. But at the same time, I had enough of a grip on the story of Macbeth to be able to place myself within the narratives I followed. I knew where I was.
Here, for the most part, I did not. Part of that was because I deliberately was not following young Conwall, as he tended to have the biggest crowd chasing him (I'm a different person now than the Zelda who was able to be at the front of the crowds following Macbeth or Boy Witch. 2020 has made me crowd averse in general. What's also true is that audiences for immersive shows have changed considerably since Sleep No More first arrived in New York. Everyone is savvy now, and everyone is vying for the front of the pack. It's exhausting.). I spent my evening following characters who seemed to have less of a crowd chasing them. If the crowd increased, rather than fight for a spot, I would wander off to another area. This is where I really want to compliment the designers' ambitions. There are so many different environments and worlds in this space, so many places to explore. Hidden pathways behind curtains, strange nooks and installations--I didn't mind that I was often on my own.
However, I will say that this strategy left me ready for the evening to end ahead of its actual ending. If I had been more aggressive about following characters, this might not be true. As for the characters I did follow? I have no idea who any of them were. Truly. At sea, me.
My big complaint though I must reserve for the grand finale (not part of the cycle). It's a shallower space than the ballroom at the McKittrick, and the central platform is not raised enough to accommodate for this. All this to say, I was too short to see what was going on on the central platform, and looked at the side platforms instead. So there was probably more story here I missed as well. Alas.
Another sign of the ambitious nature of this production is in the expansion of what is asked of the performers. The athletic dancing and melancholy speechless performances continue here, but they are further enhanced with acrobatics and a bit of illusion magic (escapes and teleportations). Oh, and that player piano! I loved it.
Will I go see this ten or more times, as I did with Sleep No More? Probably not. The tickets are double the cost of what they were back then, and I'm not as fascinatedly in love with it as I was then. But I'm glad I saw it, and it is worth experiencing.
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| The cast of Life and Trust. Photo by Jane Kratochvil. |
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