“If you get me to 20,000 likes, I’ll do something amazing.”
That is what the performance artist Louise Orwin promises audiences in “Famehungry,” a TikTok-set existential crisis about being an entertainer in the digital age. Presented before a live crowd, it is also simultaneously livestreamed on the app.
In Wednesday’s show, Orwin performed tasks inspired by what she has seen on TikTok Live: eating in front of the camera, running on a treadmill, drinking from a Stanley Tumbler and performing TikTok dances, all while describing her career in performance art.
Whether Orwin’s antics would be witnessed by audiences beyond SoHo Playhouse, where “Famehungry” is running until Feb. 8 after success at the Edinburgh Fringe festival, was an open question this weekend as the app was briefly banned in the United States.
“The jeopardy in terms of the practicalities of the show isn’t great, but also the sense of political jeopardy around the ban is really interesting for the work as well,” Orwin said. “It’s a strange situation to be in.”
Congress passed legislation last year to ban TikTok unless it was sold to a government-approved buyer, citing concerns that the Chinese government could gain access to sensitive user data and manipulate content on the app, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.
After the Supreme Court upheld the law last week, TikTok briefly went dark before flickering back to life for many users when the incoming president, Donald J. Trump, indicated support for the app. (After Trump’s inauguration on Monday, he signed an executive order stalling the ban for 75 days.)
For many, what ultimately was an interruption in service became a joke. But the app’s legal status is murky, and Orwin is one of the users who still does not have access to TikTok. The production managed a workaround with a VPN service, but livestream commenters noted that the stream was laggy at times.
The premise of “Famehungry” — Orwin is mentored by a TikTok user who acts as a guide to the app’s frenetic universe — also offers a quick history of the show’s origins.
In 2020, Orwin was working in a youth theater therapy project when she met Jax Valentine, who was 15 and had about 30,000 TikTok followers — no guarantee of celebrity on an app driven by trends spread across many accounts. But for Orwin, an artist who saw opportunities dry up during the coronavirus pandemic, 30,000 people watching your work was unbelievable.
“I’d lost all my audiences,” she said. “I’d lost basically all of my income. And here was a 15-year-old who had access to a following and was making money off the app.”
That got Orwin thinking about developing a show around TikTok. Valentine, who is now 21 with 80,000 TikTok followers, calls into the theater virtually, from their bedroom in Sheffield, England, and coaches Orwin on how to be successful on the app.
A projected screen behind Orwin shows the TikTok livestream, with live commentary from online users, as well as writing that only the in-house audience can see. As Orwin giggles repeatedly into the cellphone camera, text that she wrote flashes on the screen: “This makes me want to rip my eyeballs out.”
One aspect of Orwin’s performance is whether TikTok will turn off her livestream for violating community guidelines. In Wednesday’s show, two of her accounts were shut down for sexual content because of an onscreen cucumber and, later, a vaguely phallic lollipop. Orwin switched to backup accounts in real time.
“It’s interesting who gets to censor and who doesn’t get censored,” said Vania Myers, who watched the show on opening night.
The “something amazing” that Orwin promised — she follows through whether or not the livestream reaches 20,000 likes — involves a song and a final debasing act. As the audience responds, frequently with laughter or applause, the projection of Valentine on the wall silently glares at the crowd.
Though the show points out many of TikTok’s pitfalls, Orwin and Valentine emphasized that there is not an easy moral judgment to make about a platform with both tangible benefits and real drawbacks. For Valentine, the app has been a tool for building self-esteem, but also a place where they saw their “thirst traps” perform better when they were not yet an adult.
“We don’t want anyone to just leave the show and go home and say, ‘TikTok is awful,’” Valentine said. “We want people to leave it and say, ‘OK, that’s rough. What’s the nuance surrounding it?’”
By the time of the finale on Wednesday, Orwin’s performance had received more than 8,000 likes on TikTok. But because the show had been kicked off two accounts, its online audience had dwindled.
“I hope the three people watching on TikTok really liked that,” Orwin said in the final moments.
Onscreen, user3361307021887 commented back: “Loved it.”
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