You hear about us as being hopelessly in thrall to the infinite scroll of social media; obsessed with micro-influencers whose fame doesn’t even last 45 seconds, let alone 15 minutes; and ever on the verge of falling into eating disorders or self-harm as a result of the images and ideas that flash before our truncated attention spans. We are the “anxious generation”, mind-controlled by apps designed to be as addictive as possible. More specifically, we are framed as victims of a Chinese app called TikTok.

To be clear, the TikTok-girl crises I sketched above are all too real. But the older generation’s discourse around them more or less ignores what the people who are in need of rescue have to say for themselves. As a result, it misses the granular details that could make for better and more realistic reforms, if reforms are needed.

Famehungry — a new piece of performance art about TikTok being staged at the Soho Playhouse this week as part of the New York City Fringe Festival — is a good example of how such critiques go wrong. In it, the London-based theatre artist Louise Orwin explores the big question — TikTok, good or evil? — in a multimedia format that streams simultaneously on TikTok Live and integrates the app in interesting ways with the in-person performance. Audience members who still have the tabooed and sort-of-banned app can like or comment as the play unfolds; everyone sees Orwin acting into her phone and her screen-view is projected onto the stage. It could have been fun, but the performance was chaotic and overwhelmed by a too-on-the-nose “concern message” about people like me.

Orwin’s breakout performance in 2014 was a project called Pretty Ugly that examined the online identities of teenage girls. Famehungry covers some of the same territory, asking about the app’s effects on the mental health, self-esteem, and happiness of girls and young women.

The new work opens with Orwin sprawled onstage in various positions illuminated only by the glow of her phone. It’s a commentary on the social-media era: we only exist as we are seen online. I could relate to it some; it reminded me of staying up late with only the light of my phone in my room. She is wearing a red Adidas track suit and clashing neon green bodysuit, and she writhes around while loud and jarring ambient music plays. Next she sits down at a desk covered in pink hair and starts babytalking and making scrunchy faces into the camera. “Just waiting for a few more people to join”, she repeats, over and over and over. She also performs a few TikTok stereotypes, like waving and saying hi, drinking from her Stanley, and eating stuff off her acrylic nails (eating videos are called mukbang, from the Korean words meaning “eat” and “broadcast”).

Orwin explains during the play that she joined TikTok because she missed performing live during the pandemic, and she discovered that one of her former students, a 15-year-old named Jax Valentine, had 20,000 followers. She wondered if she could get up to that number, which was more than she’d ever achieved in a theatre in real life. During the performance, she’s hoping to achieve 20,000 likes and promises she’ll “do something amazing” for the audience if she does. Jax makes live guest appearances on another screen to coach her.

A long middle section of the play talks about what Orwin likes about TikTok. She picks the weird, outlandish, or simply brainrot videos — people running in slow motion, girls dancing in turtle-outfits — and says she likes to see all this human variety from around the world. She believes the app “democratizes the flow of information” and “makes space for marginalized communities”. But she offers this praise while walking on a treadmill, speaking in an increasingly frantic voice, and she follows it up with all the rules of how you have to act to be liked, implying that the app only rewards certain types of behavior and punishes others: turtle-dancing, yes; “fake smoking while covered in fake blood,” no. (I’m glad that content moderation prevents violent videos.) She also does attention-getting things like violently splash her face with water or eating with food hanging out of her mouth — more mukbang. During her final dance number, she pours a pink drink that looks like a strawberry Yoo-hoo over her head.

The play concludes with the artist venting mixed but mostly negative feelings. The attention is nice, Orwin thinks, but other than that, TikTok is “a black hole of nothing”. It’s “mostly people doing the same thing over and over again”, and she is disgusted with herself for participating. She also seems to be disgusted — or at least, negatively impacted — by many of her previous non-online performances. She tells the audience about ones in which she’d asked men to hit her or done other self-destructive or sexually gross things. Talking at the end with her back to the audience, she says she’s tired of “the precarious way I earn a living”, “the constant checking and rechecking”, the “dystopia”, and “making work in a system that’s broken”. She wonders why she’s doing it, and if she should have planned for her future or gotten a real job instead.

Yet what Orwin portrays goes so far beyond what the generally young, female user base of TikTok is like. I was insulted that a grown woman would put on an act that mocks young girls in the name of spotlighting their supposed misery. Orwin is a performance artist, exaggerating to make an effect, but the baby voices and the determination to humiliate herself seemed more about her than about most of us. If someone on TikTok says they’re “just waiting for a few more people to join”, it’s because they’re legitimately waiting. Sometimes people do rage-bait — act obnoxious to get attention — but the influencers who are famous and making money aren’t the ones doing that. They’re usually offering positive messages and running real businesses.

Suggested reading

TikTok: weapon of mass distraction

By Gurwinder Bhogal

I also thought maybe that Orwin was on the app for the wrong reasons. She went there because she was “fame hungry”, and all she cared about was getting followers. And she searched out the weird live content from around the world because that was her personal preference. I sometimes see that kind of content advertised in my feed, but I don’t watch them. My followers are mostly my friends, and I don’t obsess about getting more of them from among the strangers online. I use TikTok as a side tool in life; it’s meant to be fun. I capture fun moments with friends in nice outfits, take clips of interesting city views, and follow fashion, health, and beauty content. I didn’t mind deleting the app because as long as everyone was off of it, I wasn’t missing anything.

Many young women have mental-health problems, to be sure, but those result from all kinds of social and personal factors, not just TikTok. Some people might act foolish and inappropriate (especially when they have an audience of one to five people, who are probably just bots), and that isn’t good for them. But it’s also a mistake on that person’s part, not solely the fault of the app. Orwin herself is a good example, because she tells us she has been making disturbing and self-harming work long before TikTok existed.

I don’t know what danger the Chinese ownership of the app truly presents to kids, but I do think it’s dangerous to condemn something you don’t know much about, or whose positive attributes you’re unable to see. I stay mentally healthy despite the stress of the junior year of high school by getting a lot of exercise, eating real food, and spending time with my friends. Orwin poured soda into her Stanley, mocking a teen-girl cliché. I carry a Stanley everywhere, I admit, because I go from school to sports practice, and I get headaches when I’m dehydrated. Mine is always full of water enhanced with Liquid IV electrolyte powder, which is good at preventing them. It really works — I learned about it on TikTok.

True, Queen Sonja is a broad-minded, arts-loving royal consort rather than a reigning monarch. And the American actor-singer, dramatist and drag artist Taylor Mac — who opened this year’s festival with the queen in the front row — described that turn precisely to point out how safe most of his allegedly “transgressive” work is compared to hard-core avant-garde performance (in his words, “I’m just putting on eye-liner”).

All the same, postcard-pretty Bergen has a reputation as a fairly conservative city. The choice of the multi-talented travesti satirist Mac to headline the festival’s opening day did make gentle waves among the burghers of the wealthy port. Mac, who delivered an abridged version of his epic A 24-Decade History of Popular Music in a succession of surreally elaborate costumes with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra as his backing band, later said that the queen had told him that his show was very different from her usual entertainment. Properly regal understatement. Yet, after a night of camp, glitz, smut and intermittent magic, we still all stood formally in the vast Grieghallen until the royal party had departed.

Context is everything. During Pride month, bandwagon-jumping corporations now proclaim their sexual inclusiveness and gender flexibility with the same unctuous, hand-wringing zeal that would once have led them to advertise — well, a royal warrant or patronage by the nobility. Every investment bank, coffee chain and sportswear brand wraps itself in a rainbow flag — just as Saudi Arabia bans the same motif to remind us that globalisation has strict limits. Even within the tolerant West, however, you don’t need to travel too far to find places where razzle-dazzle, gender-bending spectacle may still create a frisson of unease.

Later this month, Mac and musical partner Matt Ray will perform songs from a new project “celebrating queer luminaries throughout history” at the Public Theater in New York — a marriage of venue and genre roughly as subversive as a solemn Latin Mass at Brompton Oratory. Move a little way outside metropolitan comfort zones, though, as Mac did in Norway, and the treacly clichés of mainstream diversity-speak pick up some spice and bite again. Especially as Mac always makes audience participation a key element of his act: pointless when you’re preaching to the choir, but capable of sparking a crackle of agitation or alarm when public and performer may not share the same cultural space. Although, as he admitted in a post-show discussion, “The only person I knew I wasn’t going to call up on stage was the queen.” But he did (inadvertently) summon the city’s former mayor.

I had come to Bergen in search of more traditional musical fare: a stupendous recital by the great, locally-trained soprano Lise Davidsen with pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, for example. Taylor Mac’s show came as a welcome, surprising — even slightly nostalgic — reminder of a time when camp still kept its edge, when drag queens did not bask in the same aura of respectability as actual queens, and when bids to escape sexual orthodoxy might still bring risk and peril. Mac (born Taylor Mac Bowyer in California in 1973) is no run-of-the-mill drag star.

A garlanded playwright, actor and songwriter he has written a sequel to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus from the perspective of the clown who has to clean up after the slaughter (Gary) and, most recently, transformed the last hours of Socrates into a philosophical queer musical (The Hang). In A 24-Decade History of Popular Music — a moveable feast re-edited to suit venue and occasion — he appears clad in the steepling motley baroque of the outfits created by his designer Machine Dazzle, or else spotlit as a near-naked middle-aged cherub stranded in his lonely, frail humanity.

Mac comes across as part-topical stand-up, part-cabaret diva, and part-pantomime dame. The songs, cherrypicked from the 246 numbers that filled the original, day-long show premiered in 2016, span the social history of American popular music. With Ukraine on all minds, the pity of war and the patriarchal forces that drive men to wage it haunted his Bergen outing. So we had blistering renditions of the Civil War anthem “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”, Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall”, and even an ironic-yet-sincere “Keep the Home Fires Burning” (written, as he should have pointed out, by a gay Welshman, Ivor Novello).

More from this author

Kingsley Amis vs God

By Boyd Tonkin

Satirical patter punctuated the music as Mac lured not just individual audience members on stage but whole demographic subdivisions of the house. At one point he invited every man from 14 to 40 (front-line fighting age) and coaxed them, in pairs, to support each other as they rested as tired troops did in the trenches of the Western Front. Even in enlightened Norway, he noted, some of this stage army found that public tenderness a tough call — but they enlisted all the same.

This recruitment of the audience works best — as he later suggested — when spectators harbour a degree of ambivalence towards him, his ideas and his show: “I want that person who’s maybe a little uncomfortable but game.” Audience participation can have a sacrificial, even fascistic tinge. I’ve seen Barry Humphries, in Dame Edna Everage mode, humiliate over-eager fans who naively craved a spell in the spotlight with the housewife superstar. This felt much less hostile, chiefly because Mac doesn’t simply want to preach to the converted, or outrage the easily-offended. Rather, he turns mixed feelings into fuel.

In a contemporary culture that demands an all-or-nothing, with-us-or-against-us commitment to creeds, causes and “communities” (real or imagined), Mac plays deftly on uncertainty, curiosity and hesitation. Hence a polite, tolerant but somewhat strait-laced city might suit a show like this better than the usual citadels of conventional diversity. In Britain, I’d like to see him play Cheltenham or Harrogate rather than Brighton. After all, that’s where most people still — figuratively — live. (Coincidentally, a report issued last week by the anti-polarisation think tank More in Common finds that a majority in Britain takes “a nuanced, compassionate approach” to transgender issues, and feels remote from the “divisive debate” that grabs headlines and drives online fury.)

Suggested reading

The deracination of literature

By Mary Gaitskill

Mac’s mischief, irony and generosity seem far removed from the drilled and anxious conformism of sex-and-gender ideology today. Witness his exemplary response to an interview question about identity politics from writer Garth Greenwell: “Ugh! Bleh! Ah! Ugh!” Exactly so. As he then explained, “What I mean is, if you spend a lot of time defining who you are, you’re not spending that time paying attention.” Like all good performers, he pays attention, and makes us do so.

Mac is a bit too young to count as a veteran jester. But his sardonic distance from the verbal and emotional straitjackets of institutional liberalism does carry the salty tang of an earlier, less pious age. Even down to his droll choice of a preferred pronoun. It’s “judy” (as in Garland). Use it, as earnest academics and critics have, and you join his act: audience participation again. I did consider it for this article (“judy places judyself in the tradition of the court fool, while judy’s work draws on the styles of Italian commedia dell’arte”, etc) but couldn’t quite keep a straight face.

Mac’s style and sensibility has its roots in a period and place when sexual dissidence brought few corporate plaudits or academic honours. His awakening came during the shame, stigma and dread of the early Aids epidemic. He talks movingly of going for the first time to a gay march in San Francisco in 1987 — and seeing lines of men in wheelchairs pushed by friends and partners. As an actor, playwright, singer — and cross-dressing cabaret performer — in New York from the early Nineties, he belonged to the generation that worked fearlessly to defy the shame, erase the stigma, and overcome the dread.

Suggested reading

Pleasure: a disappointing debut

By Ann Manov

Often mocked and vilified, Mac and the other impolite, in-your-face campaigners of those days helped disseminate correct information, kickstarted research and treatment, and so saved or improved the lives of millions, irrespective of their sexual orientation. The idea of rebuilding in the wake of calamity has sustained his writing ever since. In A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, that theme embraces the trials and triumphs of communities from plantation slaves to Jewish tenement-dwellers, not just sexual minorities. Yes, the notion of solidarity among the downtrodden has its sentimental, wish-fulfilment side. It still makes for a more eclectic, invigorating show than the smug, prickly tribalism that marks much satire today.

Above all, Mac aspires to do more than hug his allies and repel his foes. He stages, and so tries to dissolve, polarisation rather than feeding off it as most “radical” art does. He has said that “practically all my works are little fever-dream prayers asking the audience to wonder together rather than be in suspicion”. He doesn’t require endorsement from an audience and welcomes all reactions, “even if you hate the show” (though, in my experience, only performers sure of their talent ever have the chutzpah to make that claim).

Mac thrives on blurred, divided responses not just in his public but in himself. In Bergen, the most entrancing moment came not in some belted high-octane version of a reconditioned standard (though Patti Smith’s “People Have the Power” did raise the roof), but when he ushered the local Edvard Grieg Choir on stage. They sang, a cappella, the lovely 18th-century hymn “Jesus Christ the Apple Tree”, a favourite of American Baptists: “The tree of life my soul hath seen/ Laden with fruit and always green/ The trees of nature fruitless be,/ Compared with Christ the Apple Tree.”

Meanwhile, Mac reflected on the beauty of the melody, the less-than-beautiful record of some power-abusing churches, and the odd urge to prove faith by downgrading nature itself. WB Yeats wrote: “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” Most “progressive” performance lazily contents itself with rhetoric. Taylor Mac sometimes touches poetry.