Life And Trust

After experiencing a cancelled show back in January, a friend and I returned to see Life and Trust on Saturday. I've seen a bunch of these "immersive" theater pieces now (wisely, no photos allowed, hence the admission card photo), and I think the sets and the mood and the environment here were great. It's the same structure as Sleep no More (which I saw in in Boston in 2009 and again in NYC when it moved), with characters roaming around that you can follow or encounter randomly. We went systematically from the lowest level up and I think saw almost all of it, and intersected with several story lines. There's a lot of dance in this show that I just didn't understand (like most dance), but it seemed well executed.

I never really have the patience to figure out the details of the stories in these things, and that's stupidly exacerbated here by Emursive (producer) not providing a mask solution for glasses wearers. Punch Drunk (Sleep no More creator) does the same thing and it's enraging when you pay this kind of admission fee and get an extremely limited experience. I can't wear contacts, and for my glasses this stupidly designed mask gives you a cockeye tunnel vision of the show, which is downright dangerous going up and down stairs. I ended up taking the mask off when going up and down stairs, and at the Punch Drunk shows had to wear the fucking thing on my head the whole time because I couldn't see anything. I totally get and support the idea of the mask for participants, but how hard would it be to make a version of the mask with a glasses-sized eye hole? I won't likely go to any more of these productions that don't deal with this issue; I'm surprised they haven't been subject yet to a class-action lawsuit.