'Life and Trust' and The Theatre Guild's 'Faust' of 1928
Actor Parker Murphy in a scene from Life and Trust (2024)
Photo: Stephanie Crousillat
Sleep No More, the long-running immersive theater work created by the innovative British company Punchdrunk, closed January 5, 2025, after nearly 14 years off-Broadway. It is being replaced, in a way, by Life and Trust, a new, very similar piece by Sleep No More’s New York producers, Emursive. Both pieces invite audience members to explore, without any special direction, expansive, exquisitely designed environments that span several floors of buildings rented and renovated for the shows. Dancers perform silent scenes throughout the spaces and audience members can decide to stay and watch, follow actors as they leave the scenes, or ignore the performances altogether.
Sleep No More draws its title from a line in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and the storylines that play out in the space are largely based on that play. Life and Trust frames its action in an imagined bank created by a man, J.G. Conwell, who built his wealth on mystical pharmaceuticals he concocted from a recipe given to him on the back of a bag of popcorn by a mysterious old man. In the first scene, one of the only ones with dialogue, the inventor/investor informs us that it is the night of the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression is coming. Conwell, himself, is offered an opportunity to relive his life, but at the end of the evening he will lose his soul. He agrees, and in a literal flash of light he is gone. The audience is left to explore several floors of what was once the lower vaults and offices of the real-life City Bank-Farmers Trust, a skyscraper in New York’s financial district.
There are many different sources for the stories in Life and Trust. Goethe’s Faust serves as the most obvious one (the J.G. in Conwell’s is likely a reference to Johann Goethe), but there are subplots drawn from The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Red Shoes, and The Girl in the Velvet Swing. Each story in some way involves bargaining with one’s soul. Setting these stories in an actual ornate bank vault in the seat of American capitalism, along with the piece’s framing story reminding the audience of one of capitalism’s most spectacular failures (among them, the crash of 1929), suggests, not terribly subtly, that unrestrained capitalism is itself a Faustian bargain, the bill for which will someday, perhaps not too far in the future, come due.
In Goethe’s version of Faust, the title character, deeply unsatisfied with the fruits of his studies, challenges the demon Mephisto to lead him to experience a moment in which he ceases to strive for something better but instead rests. He dares Mephisto:
If I lie ever on a bed of indolence
Then may my life upon the instant cease.
If you can cheat me so with flattery
That I become contented with myself,
Or if you can deceive me—dull my sense
With Luxury, let that day be my last.
Be this our wager!
This is itself a kind of creed for unrestrained capitalism. Satisfaction is impossible, and life is defined by forward movement.
The Faust legend in various forms is staged regularly, but Goethe’s version has only been performed as a play (rather than as an opera) once on Broadway after 1900, in a production mounted by the Theatre Guild. The small but successful company had previously united Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and in the following decades, would unite Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II and bring Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma!, and Carousel to Broadway. The Guild was also noted for bringing the most successful productions and playwrights of Europe to America. Their production of Faust, translated by the brothers Graham and Tristan Rowan, opened in October of 1928, exactly one year before the stock market crash that started the Great Depression.
Scene from Theatre Guild's production of "Faust". Dudley Digges as Mephistopheles (standing on table). Set and costumes designed by Lee Simonson. NYC: 1928.
Photo: Florence Vandamm. NYPL Digital Collections, Image ID: 498840
A program preserved in the Billy Rose Theatre Division includes several short essays on Faust in general and on the Theatre Guild production in particular. An anonymous essay titled “Friedrich Holl’s Production of FAUST” describes the way in which director Holl sought to indicate the universality of the story through staging and costuming:
In setting the period of the play, Holl has kept away from the medieval costuming which has become so hackneyed by its use in the popular version employed in Goethe’s opera. Holl’s theory is that the problem of the Faust man is a problem that is inherent in humanity whether it be the man of medieval times or the man of today.
The creative team seemed to see connections between the story of Faust and the work of German scientist Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Scenic designer and Theatre Guild board member Lee Simonson writes in another essay in the program titled “One Aspect of Faust’s Problem” that Faust seeks to “divine the inner energy that binds the universe together.” He then acknowledges that “We in our time have made various guesses as to what the nature of that energy is,” and that “some of the later theories have even been an echo of the early guesses of the alchemists.”
Another program essay by director Fredrich Holl explores the tension in the play between rest and work, peace and ambition, and concludes:
“The Divine Reason knows the justification of both, knows their nature, their positive and negative tendencies, what they can do and what they cannot do, but knows also that the all-harmonious is not dependent on the working of single factors, but on the whole equation…’Est ist alles relativ.’”
The Theatre Guild production seems to have been conceived as a recognition that humanity had begun, via recent breakthroughs in theoretical physics, to delve into matters of science that felt almost diabolic. Though serious proposals to build atomic weapons were still nearly a decade in the future, the perception-bending reality of the universe introduced by Einstein and others had captured the popular imagination in the 1920s, and might have seemed like the kind of forbidden knowledge and power that Mephisto offers to Faust.
The team at the Theatre Guild were perceptive to see in the Faustian story a parallel with the potentially existential threat humanity was facing as the scientists of the 20th century delved deeper into nuclear physics, but they seem to have largely missed the more immediate threat of the financial bomb that would explode the following year on Wall Street. Notably, though, the ads in the 1928 program dangle the temptations of capitalism so blatantly that it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference between them and the fake advertisements in the newspaper that serves as a program for the 2024 production of Life and Trust. See if you can tell the difference below.
(Ad #1)
(Ad #2)
(Ad #3)
(Ad #4)
(Ad #5)
(Ad #6)
Answer key: 1) 1928 2) 2024 3) 2024 4) 1928 5) 2024 6) 1928