Conwell Coffee Hall, the Theatricality of New York, and the Space of Revelation
While Wall Street is a frequent tourist destination—everyone wants to rub that bull—native New Yorkers know that there’s not all that much actually there. The recently-opened Perelman Performing Arts Center near the 9/11 memorial is setting the city on fire with its current production of Cats: The Jellicle Ball. But if you leave the theater to wander the area on a weekend or at night, there’s not much else in this neighborhood to excite the senses. It’s all too appropriate, really: a financial industry that dictates so much of the global economy, and yet it functions as such not because of anything tangible that exists, but only because of our belief in it.
Then some months ago, a new coffee shop and bar opened in the area in an abandoned bank. At Conwell Coffee Hall at 6 Hanover Street, you order your drinks and food at the teller windows of the former Life and Trust Bank. After that, you have the option either to sit at tables or sumptuous red leather couches that seem like the kind of furniture that Wall Street bankers waiting to close a deal might luxuriate in.
On the afternoon I visited, I saw individuals like myself who had their computers out and were hunkering down for a few hours of work at tables with little bankers’ lights, while others in groups held what seemed like business meetings. Tourists wandered in from an afternoon spent at the memorial. The ceilings are high and the space much broader and spread out than your typical coffee shop, allowing for a much wider variety of things to go on without anyone feeling pressured or interrupted. It’s not a bank any longer, and yet somehow it maintains a bank’s feelings of propriety and understated solicitousness. There are even some financial history books scattered throughout the room, and an expansive Art Deco mural on the back wall tells the industrial history of New York by way of dramatic scenes.
But here’s the thing—there never was a Life and Trust Bank. This café, while indeed a functioning business of its own, is actually the entrance into a new theatrical experience that takes place most evenings and some afternoons on the floors below Conwell, which is itself known as Life and Trust. Emursive Productions, which currently operates the long-running David Lynch-meets-the Scottish Play immersive theatrical experience Sleep No More, has recently opened this partner show, Life and Trust. This new production draws its source material from the legend of Faust, as well as The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Great Gatsby, and other similar deal-with-the-devil stories appropriate to the Wall Street area in which it’s located.
Like Sleep No More (which I’ve written about for Sapientia), the Life and Trust experience involves floors of actors performing the same stories over and over on a loop—Life and Trust has two loops as compared to Sleep No More’s three—with almost no words spoken. Everything is expressed instead through movement, usually in the form of dance. The show’s choreographers, the Kuperman Brothers, also choreographed the Tony Award-winning musical The Outsiders, and their work here has a similarly robust muscular quality.
But I have to say, even after seeing the show, the thing that remains most fascinating to me is the Conwell Coffee Hall. Theater as an artform works by creating a magical space in which we the audience are willing to accept anything that is presented. And creating that space entails many different kinds of things, from the architecture we encounter within to the music that plays and the rituals that precede the performance—the lights going down, the orchestra warming up. But there’s one thing that’s almost always there—walls, some kind of physical separator that demarcates the space we’ve entered as something new and distinct from what we left. Even in an outdoor theater like Central Park’s Delacorte, there are gates through which we enter, and trees and bleachers which create a sense of both intimacy and enclosure. At a place like Disneyland, itself very much imagined along theatrical lines, the park as a whole is afforded that sense of a magical space by way of hiding any physical trace of the outside world. Buildings cannot be seen, cars generally cannot be heard. Even planes are not allowed to fly over Disney parks.
But for those who know what it actually is, Conwell Coffee Hall breaks down that separation. It’s a coffee shop and also a part of this larger theatrical space and story. And that has some really interesting effects. First, you’re not sure who or what is real. Are the clusters of business execs in their fancy suits in fact business execs in fancy suits, or somehow performers? In truth, as far as I can tell during the day everyone is who they seem to be. But knowing that you’re actually having coffee on what is actually a set, you’re never sure. And if you go to the far end of the tellers’ windows, where you can purchase a ticket to the theatrical experience, you’re suddenly dealing with someone who is in fact obliquely part of the show.
That intersection of story and reality also means that otherwise normal interactions in a coffee shop suddenly stand out. Everything in our environment—the couches, the teller stations, the bankers’ lamps—is directing us to think in terms of wealth and its pursuit. And suddenly I’m aware of the business execs and their meeting in a different, more critical way. But I’m just as aware of how much I tipped the “teller.” Even as the setting lends us all a sense of value, makes us feel somehow more worthy, it also implicates us. In every one of our choices, from what we do here to where we sit or what we’re wearing, we’re made to consider whether we’re not guilty of pursuing in our own ways the same crass and selfish desires that guides Wall Street.
And the magical space ends up extending beyond the walls of Conwell. Having spent time in a coffee shop that is also a stage makes us consider the underlying theatricality and also intentions of other coffee shops. Starbucks can’t help but feel different after you’ve been to Conwell—more manipulative in the way it organizes the room, the kind of seating that it offers, and also somewhat more tacky and unsubtle. The neighborhood of Wall Street, too, is likewise transformed. If Conwell is a set, what’s to say that everything else isn’t as well? And the fact that the Life and Trust story is so deeply embedded in the story of Wall Street itself gives the area a more demonic, dark magic quality—or perhaps brings out the quality which is already there.
There’s something about the Conwell breakdown of distinctions, its slow-seeping magic, that seems so fitting for New York. For most people coming to New York City for the first time, our initial encounter is mediated by the experiences of New York we have had in other ways. An endless and ever-growing set of movies in particular have given us a sense of the city as something that is indeed magical. The line between theater and reality is unavoidably blurred. I want to say that’s only true at first, but there are moments long-past the inevitable graying of our experience in the city when everything pops into technicolor again.
I think Conwell also raises interesting questions of the American Catholic Church, with its insistence that liturgies can only be done within church structures. When I leave a church after Mass, there is a sense of clear separation between those two environments—the physical church and the world outside. You see it on the streets afterward (and sometimes in the parking lots), how quickly we reset to our hurried, self-driven lives. And yet the central idea at the end of the liturgy is that we take what we have gained here, what we have been fed and bring it with us, that there is not church life and real life, but just life. Maybe we, too, need some kind of middle space which is familiar to our daily lives, and yet retains that sense of the magical.
In theater and contemporary religion, the magical space in which revelation is meant to happen is usually created through a space set aside from the world. The Hebrew word for “holy” in fact means set apart. But Emursive’s Conwell Coffee Hall poses questions about the potential to be found—both theatrically and spiritually—not in isolation from, but openness to, the world.
