NEW YORK, NY.- What’s the going rate for a soul these days? A little more than $200 on weekends, less on weekdays, handling fees included.

That’s the ticket price for “Life and Trust,” the new show from Emursive, the producers of “Sleep No More,” and arguably an even more ambitious undertaking. A version of the Faust legend (well, several braided versions of the Faust legend), “Life and Trust,” which opens Aug. 1, occupies 100,000 square feet over six floors of a financial district skyscraper in New York that was once the home of the City Bank-Farmers Trust Co.

In a brief introduction, which is set on the eve of the 1929 stock market crash, a financier makes a deal with the devil: damnation in exchange for the chance to relive his youth. The show then ushers audiences back to 1894, plunging them into a Gilded Age delirium.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get a canvas of this size,” said Teddy Bergman, the director of “Life and Trust.” “It just keeps going.”

Making this deal with the devil took space. And time. And quite a lot of money. How much money? The producers wouldn’t say, though Jonathan Hochwald, a producer at Emursive, said the final amount was comfortably in the millions.

In 2011, Emursive imported “Sleep No More,” a Hitchcockian riff on “Macbeth,” created by the celebrated British company Punchdrunk. Staged in a series of former nightclub spaces in Chelsea that the producers re-christened the McKittrick Hotel, “Sleep No More,” which is set to close in September, was an instant word-of-mouth success. A few years into the show’s run, Emursive began to scout other spaces for immersive events. Hochwald estimates that he considered about a dozen spaces — in the Red Hook and Bushwick neighborhoods of Brooklyn, and elsewhere in Chelsea.

What Emursive calls the Conwell Tower takes up a full block near Wall Street. The building was intended to be the world’s tallest when its plans were submitted in 1929, though they were scaled back before it opened in 1931. The exterior has been designated a landmark. While most of the upper floors have been converted to rental apartments, a portion of the ground floor and the floors underneath, once the headquarters of the bank, have been more or less unoccupied since the late 1970s. (Occasionally they have been rented for film shoots.)

Hochwald said these floors had essentially been “hidden in plain sight.” “It was quite a marvel,” he added. That marvel demanded an original script. “Having found the building, it was like: What story does this building want to tell?” Hochwald said.

Emursive secured the lease in 2019 and brought on Jon Ronson, a nonfiction writer (“The Psychopath Test,” “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed”), to work up a script. That script used the template of the bank — with its vocabulary of bonds, trusts and life savings — for a rendering of the Faust myth. Here, the Goethe and Marlowe versions are knit with similar stories such as “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and “The Red Shoes.”

With a script drafted, Emursive reached out to Bergman (“KPOP”), a longtime artistic director of Woodshed Collective, a New York-based immersive theater company. Woodshed had set at least one show, “Empire Travel Agency,” in the financial district, so Bergman knew the neighborhood well. (Hochwald said that while Emursive maintains a relationship with Punchdrunk, which also has a Faust in its repertory, the producers wanted a local team for this piece.) When he visited the site, Bergman was immediately struck by its potential, even though the space — concrete, columns — was almost entirely raw.

“The ghosts of its functional history as a bank building and the vaults and the thickness of the walls all gave off energy,” he said.

Briskly, Bergman and the producers assembled a team, including the experience director and scenic designer Gabriel Hainer Evansohn, another Woodshed veteran, and the sibling co-directors and choreographers Jeff and Rick Kuperman, recent Tony nominees for “The Outsiders.”

Echoing “Sleep No More,” audience members are masked (the Mephistophelian “Life and Trust” masks are black, not white) and free to wander the space — following characters at will, pausing to explore an environment — before uniting for a finale. And though Ronson’s script was initially text heavy, nearly all of that text was removed, in favor of a movement-based work with constant underscoring, lending the show a surreal, dreamy feel.

“One of the things that Emursive and ‘Sleep No More’ have done so successfully is conjure the feeling of a dream,” Bergman said. “We want it to use that in the service of creating a different show in its subject matter and also in its Americanness.”

Construction began in late 2019, with the removal of decades of bank detritus, and then stopped in the spring because of pandemic lockdowns. Members of the creative team — including Bergman, the Kupermans, Evansohn, the co-designer Grace Laubacher and the show’s composers, Taylor Bense and Owen Belton — spent much of that lockdown online, manipulating a three-dimensional model of the space. For more than a year, without pressure of construction or deadlines, they could play and imagine how the story might flow through it. The pandemic, therefore, was paradoxically a gift, if an expensive one, since the lease had to be maintained, and ticket sales from Emursive’s other projects were halted.

Gradually, the creative team created a template involving 30 characters in 250 overlapping scenes, which would loop twice during the evening, with every entrance and exit dictated by preset sound cues. While those sound cues are locked, there is typically a sonic buffer at the start and end of each scene to allow the performers to get to their places, even if they have to fight through crowds. In total, Bense and Belton composed more than 1,000 minutes of music.

“You end up with a spreadsheet like an advent calendar. Everything pops out and is a scene,” Bergman said.

The space had its limitations. Left vacant for so long, the electricity and the HVAC required updates, which necessitated an extensive permitting process. “It’s like climbing a Himalayan peak, to get through all of the city bureaucracy,” Hochwald said. The building’s neighbors also had to be convinced that the show wouldn’t create too much additional noise and traffic. And two new elevators had to be installed to make the space compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act.

The vast floors had low ceilings, which made sightlines tricky. And the concrete surfaces were hard on the actors’ joints. “When we started, we were dancing on concrete with little nails popping out or really rough surfaces that felt hostile,” said Marla Phelan, a performer. Running up and down the many stairs was also challenging.

“It’s violent. It’s a marathon,” added Mia DiLena, Phelan’s scene partner.

But there were also opportunities. Padding was installed, a spiral staircase built. “Now we have squishy grass or gravel,” Phelan said. “I can actually be a person that’s not in danger of their surroundings.”

Certain structural elements couldn’t be altered — “because they’re literally supporting a skyscraper,” Evansohn said — but nearly everything else was theirs for the reimagining. And elements such as the walls, the floors and the vault doors could be incorporated into the experience, even informing the choreography.

“You need to create choreography that can’t exist in any other space or any other piece of scenery,” Rick Kuperman said. “That’s what really makes it come alive to us.”

Construction began again in 2021 and ended only recently. At times there were as many as 200 workers building out the warrens of rooms. These workers also created an elaborate entrance point, the Conwell Coffee Hall, a dramatic space adorned with a custom-painted mural by Eric Diehl. It opened in late winter. During the day it’s a bustling cafe. At night, it becomes a theater lobby and bar. In the coffee hall and in the rooms beneath, Evansohn chose real materials — brick, stone, wood — which is unusual for a theater piece.

“The design is tactile,” Evansohn said. And it is thick with illusions and secrets (perhaps you will find the poodle room). “Life and Trust” is built to reward curiosity, but there are, Bergman said, safety protocols to prevent harassment of the performers, a problem that plagued “Sleep No More.”

The performers began rehearsing on site in November. At the end of June, audiences joined them for a handful of friend and family evenings and then for previews. With bodies in the room, the crew began adjusting the hundreds of sound cues and the thousands of light cues.

“We have our plan,” Jeff Kuperman said. “And then you get in the space and reality hits and it all shifts.” Bergman described these adjustments as a mix of precision and magic.

“It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of refinement. It’s alchemy,” he said.

When I visited the coffee hall, on two afternoons in late June, it was full of tourists and locals enjoying sandwiches and cold brew. They didn’t seem to notice that all the clocks were set to 10:29 — the month and year of the stock market crash — or the Easter eggs hidden in the menu and in the mural. Very few would realize what lies beneath.

“It’s exciting,” Hochwald said, gazing around the room. “They have no idea that there’s an entire world underneath them.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.