Cruise Ship Aesthetics

on Life and Trust, Sleep No More, The Great Gatsby, and other Jazz Age immersions

We were all crammed into a small room that, despite its “art deco” furnishings could not hide its true self as a lounge peripheral to the hotel basement ballroom. We were lured in there by a character offering us secret investment information, but oh, what’s this, a mysterious woman coming in to whisper in the banker’s ear and pass him an unmarked envelope? What shenanigans are about to ensue?

On her way out, the mysterious woman attracted the attention of a man who loudly reported to the entire room that she had a great ass. The banker swung around, devolving from character to cast member, to stick his finger in the guy’s face and say sternly, “Do not talk about her that way.” The guy, clearly drunk but now chagrined, muttered something into his plastic cup of sugary cocktail and the scene resumed. Who wants to talk about a great opportunity for investment?

This was during an “immersive” performance of The Great Gatsby, which attempted to make a big splash in post-pandemic New York City theater. It was billed as a Jazz Age party, with music and dancing and drinking — the center of the ballroom had a full bar with specialty cocktails with clever names referencing Fitzgerald’s material — but the effect was more cruise ship than speakeasy. Audience members had been encouraged to dress up in period costume, and the whole place was just a sea of poly-blends and plastic beading. The booze was definitely flowing, and with the strict boundaries between audience and performer dissolved in the name of “immersion,” cast members had to dodge hands, belligerent behavior had to be corrected mid-scene, and carefully constructed composures kept cracking as people wandered off course and tried to insert themselves into the action. (Many performers of immersive theater have reported sexual harassment and assault by patrons over the years.)

Photo by Stephanie Crousillat

I was thinking about this tragically awful The Great Gatsby while at Life and Trust, another Jazz Age immersive theatrical New York experience. This one is a Faust-story, although you’d only really know it if you read the materials provided before the show started. It’s the latest production from the team behind Sleep No More, the surprisingly successful immersive mashup of Shakespeare’s MacBeth and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca — if you haven’t seen it, there’s no use trying to explain why these two intellectual properties are being shoved together except aesthetics — and this time we’re in the Conwell Tower in the Financial District for their customary blend of dance, theater, and set design. And if “Faust on Wall Street” seems like an easy pitch, yes, you are right, and the concept doesn’t seem to have been developed much beyond that. Temptations, libations, and being dragged to hell at the end.

There is of course a bar. The whole production starts there, and you’re encouraged to try one of their specialty cocktails before going into a “private meeting” with a banker who wants to give us some investment advice. So many of these immersive theatrical experiences are set in the 1920s, where you are of course one of the insiders who knows the secret code at the mafia-run bar to get the illicit booze and not someone going blind from drinking moonshine cut with turpentine. But the appeal is easy to figure out — a century ago we were also teetering on the edge of financial and geopolitical disaster, but those crises are deep in the past so safe to revisit. (In a hundred years, if humanity survives, it’s likely we’ll still be immersing ourselves in the Jazz Age over our current 21st century hellscape, as not even nostalgia is likely to make our skinny pants and dress sneakers and micro-plastic shedding crop tops look good.)

Like with Sleep No More, several floors of the building are designated as the performance space, with interactions and wordless performances and piped-in music scattered throughout small rooms. Audience members again all wear masks, to easily distinguish them from performers. And as an audience member you are meant to chase performers from room to room, floor to floor, trying to get a glimpse of… something. A dance, a fight scene, a fragment of a story. Something that might tie this to Faust and make the whole thing make sense.

Except it doesn’t, and the point of immersive theater is not really to make sense or tell a story. It’s to make a large mass of people feel very special. There’s always the possibility that you as an audience member will be addressed — not to be sternly corrected like at the Great Gatsby incident, but to be plucked from the anonymous mass by a cast member to become part of the action. Instead of passively watching the action happen, you are actively moving around and making choices. Because there is no correct order, no hope of seeing everything, each scene is constructed not to flow into the next but to offer stimulation and sensationalism. And while it is indeed thrilling to be in close proximity to a dancer’s body during a performance, and thrilling to be brushed up against or selected for interaction or taken by the hand and guided to the correct placement, three hours of intermittent and disconnected moments of interest doesn’t really add up to much.

The whole thing was very dissatisfying, but I started to wonder if the dissatisfaction was the point. That it wasn’t just the alcohol that reminded me of a cruise ship, or the pushy audience members emboldened by having their faces masked to throw elbows and shoulders for a better spot, but the overwhelming sense that something better is just around the corner. That you’re just missing it, coming in two beats too late but that if you keep looking for it, a good time is inevitable. I mean, sure, right now this food is bad, this comedian is bombing, this ballroom is tacky, this excursion is tedious, but things are sure to turn around. Maybe if we upgrade, maybe if we try this other part of the ship. Someone has to be enjoying themselves, otherwise why would we all be here?

There were small thrills, like a character I guess who is supposed to be some sort of tempting demon who at one point climbs the walls and seems to hover in a doorframe (I couldn’t help but admire her upper body strength), a weird orgy scene, and actually my martini with a twist was quite good. Narrative coherence was elusive, but there was always the suggestion that it was possible — that if one had better luck or followed a different character or didn’t get turned around in a stairwell and was left wandering and looking for something to happen for probably ten minutes, then the whole thing would make sense. This is why when I talked to Sleep No More superfans, they reported going more than a dozen times, including special parties at their cocktail lounge and storyline variations on holidays. Was any one show satisfying? No, of course not. If you were satisfied, there wouldn’t be the need to return and do it all over again.

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