Sleep No More’s Follow-Up Show Transports You to the Gilded Age

It’s established Wondercade lore that the Boss loves Punchdrunk and Emursive Productions, the creative geniuses behind Sleep No More: the immersive experience that started in London and has run in NYC since 2011, set to close this fall. (Very sad.) But now, the long-awaited new show from the same people just opened. (Very happy!) It’s called Life and Trust: Set in Lower Manhattan’s Financial District, it’s an indulgent Gilded Age tale of an old billionaire tycoon who may or may not make a deal with the devil. Just like Sleep No More, you put on a mask, don’t speak to anyone for three hours, and find clues and follow actors around the space. (Be ready for some fight scenes, as choreographed by the Kuperman brothers, who worked on The Outsiders, which won the Tony for Best Musical this year.) I chatted with Emursive’s Chief Storyteller Ilana Gilovich about the new show, and what to expect…

By The Narrator

The Narrator: In preparation for this interview I’ve hit the ol’ Wondercade archives, and turns out this esteemed publication has covered Sleep No More and many other immersive productions extensively. But assuming the subscriber reading this right now [I mean you! Yes, you! The Boss told me it’d be fun to break the fourth wall! Okay, back to it….] doesn’t have a memory of our previous 150 issues…wanna give folks a brief primer on immersive theatre and your new project?

Ilana Gilovich: Life and Trust is a site-specific production — sometimes called immersive productions, which means it’s a theatrical experience where instead of sitting down and watching the show passively from a seat, audiences in this case are wearing masks and wandering through a huge space that has been meticulously designed. The performance lasts three to four hours, and audience members can choose to wander through the experience at their own pace, exploring rooms, opening doors or pursuing a member of our fairly robust and large cast to get a sense of their specific storyline. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure theatrical experience.

It’s set in an old bank, literally steps away from the New York Stock Exchange, right next to Wall Street in the beating heart of the Financial District. You’re walking down those cobblestone streets, and you’re already part of this mythic experience: a legend as told through the lens of American history, capitalism, Wall Street, finance.

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TN: If Sleep No More was based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, what’re the roots of Life and Trust?

IG: This particular show is multiple versions of the Faust legend: striking a deal with the devil and surrendering your soul, or capitulating to some kind of moral corruption in exchange for something. As audiences move through this dazzling dreamscape, they’ll glimpse various characters staking everything for what they desire most — whether that be power, money, love, beauty, youth, fame, security or freedom. The production is framed through the eyes of a Faust-like man named J.G. Conwell who gets the opportunity to go back and relive his youth again…in exchange for a very dark bargain. It all culminates in a very operatic conclusion, let’s say.

TN: Consider me fascinated.

IG: Plus, not only are you seeing these characters’ stories play out, but you’re seeing it play out across hundreds of rooms, multiple floors, and seeing a really cool representative sample of what New York was like in the Gilded Age. The American roots of this story were a huge genesis of the creative project. The journalist Jon Ronson, who wrote The Psychopath Test, conceived of the storyline. He’s a journalist first and foremost, rather than a playwright, although he is a screenwriter as well — so we really have a journalist’s depth of research and attention to detail. Almost every character in the show is based on a real historical figure that lived in New York during this time: say, people who worked in the mines, who are working in very new branches of science, or impoverished vaudevillians who are trying to make their living as entertainers. And of course, Wall Street tycoons in the upper class. You’re getting a very holistic sense of who we were at this time.