I saw "Life and Trust" this weekend and I have to ask...

When many of us feel invisible and out of control in our “normal” lives, are masked immersive experiences really that fun anymore?

Picture: Taking a selife in the bathroom at Life and Trust.

I’m usually a very well-behaved audience member. I like to do things right. Getting in trouble is and has been a great source of anxiety for me for my entire life.

And yet during the 2.5 hours I spent inside Life and Trust— the new immersive show from Emursive (co-producers of Sleep No More)— I was overcome with the urge to test my boundaries and maybe even stir shit up.

When I first saw Sleep No More in 2013, I was completely transfixed by the experience. I had never seen a performance like that— theater that I was INSIDE. Worlds all around me. Exploration and agency— I could go anywhere, do anything (sort of, within the rules of no speaking and no touching the performers and no taking off masks). I had no idea what to expect or what might happen and I was so excited/nervous/turned on, I ran around from room to room panting with adrenaline.

I think many people had a similar experience because Sleep No More ran for nearly 15 years and was the gold standard for immersive performance.

In 2022, I saw Burnt City in London, which was created by Punchdrunk, the creative company that birthed Sleep No More and teamed up with Emursive for its production. Burnt City was not produced with Emursive. The show was a massive immersive exploration of myths about the Trojan War.

In both Sleep No More and Burnt City, the audience is required to don a mask and not speak in order to explore the space. In both, the mask turned the audience completely into voyeurs, and it worked.

Macbeth (the primary source material for Sleep No More) feels like a ghost story: the characters are haunted by their own desires and deeds. So in Sleep No More, catching glimpses of yourself in a sea of ghosts in the mirror behind the performers intensified the themes.

Also there was a relief in wearing a mask, for me at least. I didn’t have to do anything. I could wander, follow my desires, be chosen for a one-on-one with a performer if I was lucky, based just on my proximity to the action, not because I looked necessarily appealing. The mask let me escape more fully.

Burnt City opened in 2022, just as we were beginning to attend live performances again after the pandemic. Wearing a mask felt like a necessary layer of protection, both physically and emotionally. And in the story, I was a mere mortal in the presence of gods. Of course I should wander unseen.

But Life and Trust is asking something different of the audience in a very different moment of our world history.

Now, in 2025, I believe immersive theater can serve an evolved role. We, as humans, are facing a time when we can and should no longer be voyeurs on the sidelines. The path forward requires truly seeing others AND being seen. Immersive theater’s superpower is putting audiences inside of a world and letting them fully embody the rules of that world. Does it make sense now to create worlds where embodiment means disengaging? Hiding in the shadows?

Of course, it’s difficult to critique an audience’s role in an experience without talking about the story. Who the audience is to the story is one of the most important questions an immersive experience creator can answer.

I had high expectations for Life and Trust because this is a fully site-responsive piece, meaning it was created in response to the building and the neighborhood. I got off the subway early so I wandered around Wall Street. What a prelude. Passing the New York Stock Exchange, I imagined what might await me inside the former City Bank–Farmers Trust Company Building, which houses Life and Trust. What might I be asked to consider about money and my role in the machine of capitalism?

The answer was, sadly, not much. Or if there was an audience role or takeaway, I didn’t discover it. The story is based on Faust– a man sells his soul to the devil in exchange for financial success. Why I was there was unclear other than to, I suppose, watch.

Look, I like abstract performance. I like metaphor and symbolism. And, having led story development at Meow Wolf for six years, I also think there’s something very powerful about rich, multi-layered worlds that you don’t fully grok at first blush and have to dig to uncover.

However, I believe that if you invite an audience to explore and tell them to be voyeurs to the action, there should be meaningful rewards for their curiosity.

In narrative design, we often talk about types of people who engage with the story of an immersive experience in categories of desired engagement. “Skimmers” are barely aware there is a story and don’t want to really dig; “Swimmers” will go a little deeper; “Deep Divers” want to consume any piece of story there is and feel like they fully and truly understand every nuance.

The best story design in my opinion flags for the Skimmers, “Hey, there’s a story, there will be a reward if you pay attention," and then gives the reward. If you only design for the Swimmers and Deep Divers, you miss a large percentage of your audience.

Though I design story experiences, I’m usually between a Skimmer and Swimmer myself. I want to be shown early on that my attention to detail matters, and then I’ll keep exploring. Also, if you serve cocktails pre-show, I will drink them, and then I will go into the experience tipsy and even less willing to engage with story without payoff.

Throughout Life and Trust, I found minimal invitations into mysteries with any reward— instead the creators attempted to conjure mystery through low lighting and a tense soundtrack. I wandered alone for probably an hour or more. Sometimes I followed actors, sometimes I deliberately went the other way. I touched everything I could, tried locked doors, opened cabinets. Nothing pinged as a clue to keep going deeper.

Without story rewards for my curiosity, I felt my rebellious audience side emerge. I stood close to the performers. I sat on tables. I laid on the floor. I took my mask off in the stairwell just to feel like myself again. I took my phone out and snapped pictures a few times because, despite them telling me they were going to lock it in a pouch, no one did. I’m still a pretty good audience member— I didn’t take pictures of the performers or use a flash. I didn’t talk to the performers or try to break anything. But I kind of wanted to. I wanted to feel like I mattered in this world, even if it meant destruction.

At some point my date and I recognized each other and spent the rest of the time exploring together. He had seen a boxing ring and I wanted to see it. That was the only mission that made any sense. We found it and I swung on the ropes, which was the most exhilarated I had been all evening. Then we shrugged— is it over? Is there something else we should see? Empty hallway after empty hallway. It took us multiple wrong turns and trudging up and down the marble staircases to find the exit. In lieu of a clear story I made up my own meaning: this was about the futility of trying to having a good time in a building made to worship money.

Many of us are feeling like trapped animals right now in this moment of existence. Our political leaders seemingly operating without regard for the impact of their actions on everyday human beings; free speech, the right to protest, our own bodily autonomy all hang in a terrifying uncertainty.

The future of immersive, as I see it, allows the audience to be seen and have impact on the worlds and stories. As creators, many of us are puzzling out how to do that while also protecting the actors, while also having a clear narrative, while also not relying completely on technology, while also trying to make every audience member feel important… these are very difficult constraints. It’s easy to just say fuck it and fall back to what worked before: spectacle, beautiful environments, an air of mystery, and a mask to hide behind.

But I think audiences are increasingly going to say: let me matter here.