A post about my weekend, an attempt to combine the genres of ethnographic field note and fan account, touching on social theory, precarity, a Tom Stoppard play, and parasocial relationships.
Context: I went to New York to see a play this weekend and it was great.
More context (skip down if you’re here for the fan account): In a moment of profound procrastination and personal creative stagnation back in March, I decided that I would go to New York to see an actor I like in his professional capacity in a show called Travesties, a play by Tom Stoppard that hasn’t been staged in NYC since the 70s. I didn’t quite understand at the time what the show was about but I was like fine, as a fan I want to support my fave when and how I’m able. But now that I’ve seen it, the show was actually a nice capstone to a long semester of thinking with social theory of the twentieth century, much of which has used Marx as a starting point and tries to make sense of the brutality of world wars, the gross excesses of imperialism, and extreme and enduring inequality.
I'm personally and academically concerned about all of that stuff in its broad senses, but ethnographic curiosity has repeatedly brought me to “the arts,” by which I think I mean creative practices that are intended to convey/play with meaning, and in particular, performing arts, which have in some way or at some point a “live” audience, as in, people who are co-present while the art is happening but not its primary producers. I puzzle a lot over the potential for live performance to change people’s thinking or their approach to the world in ways that address the theoretical concerns mentioned above.
In particular, I’m fascinated by fan-artist relationships, which seem to have this kind of productive or transformative potential beyond the moment of the performance. I’ve seen how fans’ parasocial relationships with artists - which don’t depend on face-to-face interaction but rather on fans’ mediated engagement with artists’ work - generate fan communities and sustain fans through difficult material circumstances and many kinds of challenges (academic, mental health, etc.).
(None of this is to say that fandom is unproblematic - far from it - or even that it’s mostly good in some normative sense. My point here is that when I look for the ways that art can spur social change, I look first to what fans are doing.)
In other fan experiences I’ve had, there’s a palpable yet hard-to-explain difference between engaging with someone’s work through a screen and actually being co-present at the performance. Affect is magnified - even though you’re not having a one-to-one conversation with the artist, you could experience a sense of intimate connection. I want to emphasize that it’s a parasocial intimacy - it’s asymmetric by definition and owes a lot to imagination, and from an ethical standpoint it requires some careful guardrails. But that doesn’t make it less real in its experiences and effects.
To conclude the context piece, I decided to go to this play to be a fan and to have a fan experience, to dwell in “liveness” with an artist I admire and see what that’s like.
A little about the play: You could think of Travesties as a speculative, intentionally fumbling genealogy of the western debate over the relationship between art & social change, a dense piece of RPF/real people fan fiction which has as much to do with semiotics (meaning-making) as it does with material & political conditions. Stoppard’s writing is deeply critical and leaves no participant - audience, performer, historical figure, its own text - unscathed.
Although the play is about a moment in 1917 Zurich, it draws on a much broader intellectual repertoire reaching back to Marx and the socialist movements of the mid 19th century, then even further back into western concepts like the nation-state as the primary building block of human society as well as the dominance of “rationality" in organizing & (re)presenting thought. Some of the characters in the play point out that we take that stuff for granted, thereby enabling atrocities and holding us back from building something better. (I think the social theorists I encountered this semester would basically agree.)
I'll say at this point that while the text of the play is clever and intense and funny on its own, everything about this production, from the sound design to the set to the musical interludes and choreography to (of course) the cast, made it a billion times more enjoyable. Even as it’s highly cerebral, it’s got all the things you’d look for in high drama: romantic proposals and furtive makeout sessions, an assassination, a revolutionary anthem, a burlesque dance, a full lecture on dialectical materialism and socialism at the turn of the century, hat tricks, PTSD flashbacks, several cases of mistaken identity, and an unusual number of limericks. Also cucumber sandwiches, tea cakes, and plenty of champagne. Let me emphasize that every single cast member puts in that WORK and they are all magic.
Now to the fan account: I went to this play to see Seth Numrich do his thing as a professional stage actor and I was not disappointed. To say that Seth plays the role of Tristan Tzara, noted founder of Dadaism (precursor to Surrealism) is a gross understatement: Seth fully embodies Tzara as Tzara, Tzara as memory, Tzara as Ernest (or was he the other one?), Tzara as Franz Ferdinand, Tzara as apparition, and Tzara as fiction. Yes, all of them, sometimes more than one simultaneously, and I’m sure I’ve missed some. This is a very physical role that involves a lot of body work, and Seth was all over it. (I can’t believe how wrong Turn did him and all of us by having him mostly standing around talking.) Also, anyone who has seen Seth in other stuff knows that his eyebrows do 80% of the emotional work on his face and this show was no exception - they ought to have contracts of their own and receive royalties because they make Tzara possible (not to mention Tzara’s monocle).
After the play there was a Q&A session with the audience and some of the actors. Seth appeared with a couple of colleagues and answered lots of questions about the play: what it was like to work with Patrick Marber, the director; sorting through the historical and linguistic density of the play; how the comedy of the show balanced out its intellectual heft; working with a movement coach and hoping that would catch on more in American theater; and how unexpected things can happen in performance that require quick thinking by the actors. He’d stepped out of Tzara, the dandy suit and purple ascot, and into more relaxed posture and dress - striped cardigan, jeans, and Keds.
In other fan experiences, I’ve joined fellow fans in making posters to support our faves - it’s nice to hold them up, especially when the lights come up after a performance, and hopefully your fave spots the sign and feels supported. So my friend and I had created a fan sign (“Unproblematic Fave Seth Numrich,” which might only make sense in the world of internet fandom, oops oh well). Thanks to the sign we managed to catch Seth’s eye as the Q&A ended and he graciously came over to talk to us. This is where I would say my previous analytic of liveness needs to be expanded: the interaction that followed was undoubtedly a performance, scripted in its own way by those guardrails of parasocial relations but no less affectively significant. An ethnographer watching the interaction might have noted the fan standing next to the stage while the actor folded himself into a squat on the stage’s edge, quite literally coming down to the fan’s level, wrapping his arms around his knees - nonthreatening, approachable, and probably exhausted.
I had a few questions and Seth had some interesting thoughts to share about taking seriously the possibilities of Dadaism, and about what that might look like at this point in his career (“I realized in preparing for this role I’m not 21 anymore,” he said of the physical demands. I’m also not 21 anymore and I found that comment highly relatable.) The resonance of 1917 and 2018 as historical points where people are actively questioning what social structures ought to do and how art might alter them came up. To extend an argument Tzara makes in the play, art as a set of semiotic practices in flux ought to propel social change. (This conversation did not reach the point where we agreed that the solution is to overthrow capitalism but I want to believe it could have. Lol.)
The flip side of this sort of art poptimism is that under capitalism, the arts are a highly marked category (different from & often less esteemed than law/policy, academia, journalism, etc), and, Seth noted, precarious for those who practice as well as unevenly accessible to audiences. The fact that this precarity came up so easily in a conversation with me, a stranger, was striking; it is this precarity which both invites critique and precludes the kind of intellectual engagement, self reflection, and social organizing that might mitigate the precarity. In other words, being an actor, even (or perhaps especially) at Seth’s level, is a balancing act where the conditions of employment, and its ephemerality - a show only runs for so long - make it incredibly difficult to figure out what might be required to reshape those conditions. Our imaginary ethnographer might analyze this part of the interaction as less scripted and perhaps, as a consequence, more intimate, but from where I stood, it could have just been exhaustion talking.
At that point staff were cleaning up the stage and Seth said he’d get out of their way. I thought I’d offer the fan sign as a gesture of support, and he graciously took it with him, promising to hang it in his dressing room. He also asked my name and my friend’s name and repeated them as though to remember them (bless). Some people get training on how to interact with fans, but my impression is that Seth is a genuinely kind person who needed no training at all in making a fan feel seen and heard. The play and the subsequent interaction with Seth are this weirdly circular, iterative ouroboric complex that comment on each other and I think that says something to me about how we engage with art and what fandom means/does, but I’m not prepared yet to make a definitive argument. I left with a lot to think about and that’s honestly the highest compliment I give.
tl;dr: If you’re looking for someone to stan who is a skilled professional AND who has the intellectual curiosity to seriously think with an early 20th century artistic movement and the kindness to sit and chat about it after a physically demanding three hour show, look no further. Also, if you happen to come into some money, please give this man a fellowship or a gig that will allow him to do whatever he wants without worrying about how to afford his life. (And/or, you know, help overthrow capitalism.) Seth Numrich is made of sunbeams and breezes in tall prairie grass, and he must be protected at all costs. I’d like to give a shout-out to @sethnumrichfans for taking the lead on that.
addendum: I have very little experience with meeting famous people but so far the rule holds that they are far better looking in person than on screen.
