About halfway through “Life and Trust,”   a mammoth site-specific show that is set spectacularly in the heart of the Financial District,  I was rewarded with the immersive theatergoer’s equivalent of the Holy Grail.

I’d been following around one of the dozens of characters, an agile dancer with a fierce expression, dressed in a crisp uniform —  was he a bank guard or a fascist official? – as he rushed up and down the staircases visiting floor after floor.

  I lost him for a time, then caught up with him in some kind of cul-de-sac; by this time he had loosened his clothing, taken off his jacket, exchanged his cap for a fedora, unbuttoned his shirt. So he was bare-chested when he suddenly stopped, turned around, and stared right into my (masked) face.

 He just stood there silently staring at me. He was singling me out from the other half dozen or so masked theatergoers who had gathered around him.  Then he opened the door behind him, beckoned me inside, leaving the others behind….and shut me in alone with him in the dark.

Oh. My. God.

This kind of individual encounter is what immersive theater aficionados live for; it’s perhaps the most serendipitous and thus most sought after of the six elements that define and distinguish immersive theater at its best.

 “Life and Trust,” put together by a massive first-class creative team and an army of fearless performers, fulfills all but one of these elements of immersive theater superlatively, as beautifully as any show I’ve ever seen in a decade of immersive theatergoing. For the one aspect of the show that some have complained about, I discovered a couple of hacks, which I share below.

Update: Life and Trust closed on April 19, 2025

In most ways, “Life and Trust,” which riffs on the legend of Faust, is a worthy follow-up to such immersive site-specific pieces as  “Sleep No More,”which began the genre in New York in 2011. A wordless version of “Macbeth” as if retold by Alfred Hitchcock and Isadora Duncan, “Sleep No More” is still running, although scheduled to close on October 16^th.  When the producers announced its closing last November, they called it “the end of an era.” But the show kept on getting extended – nine months past its originally scheduled closing date – and theater lovers in the know said no, the era of immersive theater will continue.

 And so it has, in an arguably post-pandemic comeback. At least three site-specific immersive shows are opening in September. “Life and Trust,” which opened a month ago, exemplifies the genre.

Going element by element to explain how:

1. Immersive theater creates a physical environment that differs from a traditional theater 

“Life and Trust” is supposed to be a bank, and it couldn’t be more persuasive as one, located in the six underground floors of an actual 59-story skyscraper built as a bank building in 1931 a block away from Wall Street. Its dark imposing exterior, sheathed in granite and limestone, is the perfect introduction to the ominous goings-on inside.

2. Immersive theater doubles as an art installation and a hands-on museum

The elaborate and meticulous design of “Life and Trust” is not just awesome, it whimsically drives home the devilish theme from the moment you descend into the building, and walk through a dimly lit hallway lined with ominously worded posters that are purportedly promotions for the bank: “Banking is in our blood,” one says. “Trust us with your life,”another.

Past the hallway, we enter the grand high-ceilinged Conwell Coffee Hall, dominated by a breathtaking 1930s style mural. That painting would be enough to indicate the designers’ lavish attention to detail. But it’s just the first example of six phenomenally designed floors full of bedrooms and businesses, a ballroom, a boxing ring, a stable, a gazebo, a bank vault, a wall of safes (one of which can be opened, revealing a gloved mannikin hand displaying a double pearl bracelet), a movie theater, a park, a magical forest, even a lake. And more.

3. Immersive theater tends to stimulate the senses

The Conwell Coffee Hall has a fully working bar, designed cleverly to look like a line of bank teller windows, which stimulates the taste buds. (The “Libations” on the menu include a drink called Sleep No More  , and one called Dorian’s Retreat, as in the Oscar Wilde horror story “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”) A constant underscoring complements the dazzlingly visuals; the wafting of fog and the presence of decaying and decadent artifacts at least suggests a succession of odors.

4. Immersive theater makes individual audience members feel as if they have had a uniquely personal experience, that they are not just part of the crowd.

This was best illustrated by my encounter with the bare-chested official.

5. At the same time, immersive productions often emphasize social interactions

Theatergoers are given time to drink and socialize at the Conwell Coffee Hall, before the plot kicks in. And afterwards, at the coat check line, strangers have been known to compare experiences

6.The most successful immersive theater has a story to tell—and gives respect to storytelling

This is where some have found fault – in this show, and in many previous immersive theater pieces, which lean (as “Life and Trust” does) more heavily on dancing  than on dialogue, and by design avoid following a strict linear storyline. The two most successful immersive theater pieces in New York, Sleep No More and Then She Fell,  got around this by telling stories that theatergoers already know (Macbeth and Alice in Wonderland.)

In “Life and Trust,” the banker J.G. Conwell sold his soul to the Devil long ago for the addictive elixir that eased his sister’s pain, but which he then marketed to the public, creating his fortune, and resulting in the Life and Trust banking empire, headquartered  in Conwell Tower.

  J.G. himself lays out this premise in a scripted scene that is supposed to be taking place on October 23 1929, the day before what came to be known as Black Thursday, the beginning of the stock market crash that led to the Great Depression. A placard at the Conwell Coffee Hall had informed us that we were attending a fete for prospective investors. A group of fifteen investors at a time are led into J.G.’s wood-paneled office to hear his spiel. 

But he’s interrupted by Lillith, ostensibly J.G.’s assistant but actually an emissary from Mephisto. Lillith makes one last deal with J.G.: “For a single night, you can live the years once again.
This time with every caress of the flesh, every secret bliss.” J.G. disappears in a flash, Lillith escorts us to the elevator, and then we’re on our own, let loose to find our own secret bliss – or (as the elixir was labeled in Latin)  “ten thousand hells.”

One can explore by wandering through what in a traditional work of theater you would call the set, but that word is too limiting for such an extensive, extravagant, exacting environment. Or one can choose to follow one of the cast of forty performers — all of whom communicate primarily through movement, not English. (The Tony-nominated team from “The Outsiders,” Jeff Kuperman and Rick Kuperman, are this show’s inventive co-directors and choreographers.)

I tried both.

Once off the elevator, I eventually came upon what looked like a cross between an old fashion pharmacy and a grotesque 19^th century Cabinet of Curiosities, with lots of little jars and huge jugs of floating specimens, and a man lying on what looked like an operating table, while a nurse layered some gray slimy blobs – were they live leeches!? – on his body. I watched as he got up, dressed in a clown outfit, and bolted out the door. I decided to follow him,  as he flew through various rooms and rushed up the staircase to another floor — where he entered past a black curtain that a woman in a gold mask (one of the attendants we had been told about), motioned that I could not enter.

I was both out of breath and out of luck.

But then I found the uniformed character in a piano bar, where the piano started playing by itself, and he began writhing in apparent distress – so gracefully and acrobatically that I decided to try again to follow a character. I followed him as he made his way to his private office – or was it a police station —  where he hung up his hat, and poured himself a drink of a mysterious white concoction – or was it just milk? – before he left for an encounter with a woman in what looked like a Roman ruin, complete with Corinthian columns, and then later locked up another woman in a jail cell.   

It was after all that when he took me into the small room, with no light at all at first, and then just a glimmer. He took off my mask – which shocked me, because we had been instructed that we were to keep our mask on at all times. He put the mask on a hook on the wall, then  took off his fedora and put it on my head. Then something else unnerving happened: He spoke to me. The first words any characters had spoken since J.G. and Lillith, and these were only to me.  He came up close to me, within an inch, and, silent until this moment, started whispering in my ear:  ‘I’m starting to forget. The details… they keep slipping like pebbles through my fingers.”

He stepped away, showed me a…what was it – an animal carcass? (It was too dim to make out.)

Then he whispered to me again: “There’s so much more darkness than there used to be. This used to be the promised land… but now these deviations, everywhere. A country of derelicts….I have my small pleasures – the taste of milk, the scent of soap, the warm sting of pain.” (So it was just milk.)

He held a folded up sheet or towel in front of me — was it bloody?

And then he danced gracefully, acrobatically, just for me.

I can understand why some theatergoers, especially those without much experience with immersive shows, would feel neither in paradise nor in hell, but in a kind of limbo. 

But I have two advantages over those who might feel adrift at “Life and Trust.”

One is extensive background information provided to the press, but not, for some reason, to the public. There are 25 characters in “Life and Trust” all of whom are “either based on or inspired by” actual New Yorkers who lived in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, complete with paragraph-long biographies. The most famous of these are Stanford the architect and his wife Evelyn, a celebrated star of the stage, who are obviously inspired by Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit. In real life, they were not married, although they certainly had a connection (Nesbit’s actual husband shot Stanford White dead.) In Evelyn’s bio, it says: “Rumor has it that in her youth, Evelyn made a deal with the devil in exchange for fame and talent.” — one of the many characters who the show’s playwright Jon Ronson has tried to connect to the Faustian theme.

The uniformed character I followed is named Harold. His bio: “Captain of the Vice Squad at the AmericanProtective Agency. A moral crusader and staunch nativist who fantasizes about the American frontier, Harold often imagines himself as a lone ranger. Tonight, he’s on the prowl to purge New York of its lesser folk.” It includes the list of the three performers who portray Harold. The one I saw was Tony Bordonaro , an alumnus of “Sleep No More” who’s a great example of the talent and commitment of cast members in immersive shows like this one.

As a public service, I reprint the character descriptions below – with the understanding that if you feel these are spoilers, rather than enhancements, you shouldn’t read them. 

Then there is the advantage of writing about “Life and Trust” a month after it opened, during which time there has developed a group of theatergoers who go way beyond mere fans of this show; they’ve become guides, collaborators even; there’s an entire subreddit on the show, and various other theatergoer generated online guides and tipsheets. Among their accomplishments is this map of all six floors. It’s prefaced with a big “Warning” sign in red: “This is your last chance to avoid potential spoilers or location reveals. We highly recommend you read this after you’ve experienced Life & Trust spoiler-free for at least one show.”

 I personally see nothing wrong with a novice planning their theatrical journey at “Life and Trust” beforehand – where to make sure to visit, who to try to follow. There are plenty of serious New York theatergoers who will find a one-time visit to the pricey three-hour aerobic workout more than enough. What the map, and the warning, attest to is the kind of devotion that the show has engendered among a particular group of avid theatrical adventurers.  Going back repeatedly to “Life and Trust” is certainly not required, but these Lifers and Trusters obviously have done so, and there is plenty to justify their addiction.

Life and Trust
“ Conwell Tower” (69 Beaver Street) through October 13.
Running time: Three hours (the first half hour is scripted, the last half hour is a dance finale; in the middle you’re on your own.)
Tickets: $160.50
Written by Jon Ronson
Directed by Teddy Bergman
Experience Direction and Scenic Design by Gabriel Hainer Evansohn. 
Co-directed and choreographed by Jeff Kuperman and Rick Kuperman.
Creative Casting and Movement Direction by Stefanie Batten Bland. 
Co-choreographers and associate directors Kristen Carcone, Lauren Yalango-Grant, Christopher Cree, and Emily Terndrup.
Costume design by Emilio Sosa, hair and makeup design by J. Jared Janas, lighting design by Jeanette Yew, video design by Ray Sun, music director and composer Taylor Bense, music composer Owen Belton ,sound designer,  Brendan Aanes, Michael Kiley, Nick Kourtides, sound and show control systems designer Greg Hanson, scenic designer Grace Laubacher, details designer and art director Jessie Flynn, magic designer Lorenzo Pisoni, intimacy director  Alicia Rodis, sensitivity specialist, Ann James 

 Cast: Bria Bacon, Tony Bordonaro, Sophie Bortolussi, Nathaniel Buchsbaum, Marc J Cardarelli, Aaron Dalla Villa, Tiffany Violet De Alba, Charles-Alexis Desgagnés, Mia DiLena, Brendan Duggan, Zachary Eisenstat, Raymond Ejiofor, Kim Fischer, Jennifer Florentino, Reshma Gajjar, Douglas J Gillespie, Annie Grove, Alonso Guzman, Dorchel Haqq, Casey Bronwyn Howes, Karl Kenzler, Heather Lang, Majella Bess Loughran, Jodi McFadden, Nando Morland, Parker Murphy, Kevin M Pajarillaga, Marla Phelan, Randolph Curtis Rand, Luca Renzi, Gabriella Sibeko, Tori Sparks, Brandin Steffensen, Derek Tabada, Tony Torn, Mike Tyus, Robert Vail, Ryan VanCompernolle, Jacob Michael Warren, Maleek M Washington, and Madeline Wright

Cllck (on the chart and then the i inside a circle on the bottom right, then “view full size”) to see the chart enlarged