The Plasticity of Perception: “Babies on the Street: The Show” Brings Internet Drama to The Brick

“Mess is considerably exhilarating to watch live.”

Matthew Antoci, co-creator of Babies on the Street: The Show along with Hillary Gao, tells me the story behind their staging of an internet meltdown.

Back in 2022, Antoci watched an influencer post hundreds of TikToks in the span of a couple of days. They were not alone in watching, as millions tuned in. However, this event raised questions for Antoci around responsibility and forgiveness: “Who are we willing to forgive and who can actually help?” Immediately, it felt like a premise for a piece of theater—exploring the circumstances around online drama, not relishing in it.

Antoci originally came from a performing background. In school, they felt that acting was becoming more and more traditional and formal. They organized drag events. They created a rival to the school’s summer stock company. And they created plays. Antoci stresses that this didn’t come from a playwriting impetus but rather the motivation to create anti-institutional work, “or work that pushes back on [traditional forms] in some way.” As such, they prefer the title “creator” personally. “I think it’s a little silly,” they admit, but see this as being “a person who creates a recipe for a live event.”

This led them to The Brick in Brooklyn, New York. “A place of creating things with the DIY aesthetic,” as Antoci describes it. They also checked out a first-time producer workshop at The Brick where they met Hillary Gao, another Brick artist. Antoci had the loose idea for Babies on the Street and wanted to collaborate with someone, since again, they didn’t come from a writing background. But Hillary Gao did.

Or rather, Gao came to theater from the roundabout path of art history and physics. But in 2020, she started really getting into playwriting. While she directs and acts as well, she’s first and foremost a playwright. She wrote would you set the table if I asked you to? which utilized rich language and poetry to explore a family dynamic. It went up at The Brick, where she met “really wonderful experimental artists” including Antoci. After the producing workshop, the two went to see a movie together. They had strong opinions (Gao walked out), and developed mutual respect from seeing the strength of each other’s artistic convictions. They speak of each other’s work fondly, with Antoci glad to have Gao as a writer. And Gao notes that Babies on the Street “has a lot of direction and generative creativity that comes from Matthew.”

The two had a residency at IRT Theater where they started exploring what it felt like for an audience to watch the show. They brought on Adin Lenahan to help with transcribing the TikToks and Leigh Honigman to produce.

They went into the residency with the primary goal of taking the verbatim text from the TikToks and seeing how the audience responded. What did they end up learning? If the initial idea adapted a specific event in time, it became more universal coming out of the workshop. With the audience present, the team thought more about the experience of watching a breakdown happen, rather than the breakdown itself. “In the original [IRT version], there was no meta-ness,” Antoci explains, as the creators added outside lenses and even injected faux-versions of themselves into the script to highlight the theme of perspective for the upcoming run at The Brick.

This is part of why Gao and Antoci don’t explicitly mention the name of the TikTok influencer during the show, or even during our interview for that matter (for context, you can read about the incident here in Rolling Stone). While the team started with that specific event, the current iteration evolved beyond this incident to focus more on privilege and responsibility–and what it means to witness events around them. On the brief occasions where audiences might be able to hear the name, it gets “bleeped out.”

The creators also censor the moments in the show where the influencer is racist or transphobic. Babies in the Street doesn’t feature the tirades “straight out,” but does acknowledge them. “It’s important to encapsulate her totality,” Gao explains. In the IRT workshop, “We tried to be pretty neutral about how we’re portraying [this meltdown].” But in this version, they took a little more liberty to focus on the themes of perspective and responsibility. The influencer text may be verbatim, but it is cut a certain way.

“I feel like the threshold for forgiveness is shifting all the time,” Antoci tells me. As such, they decided to focus on the text that deals with that question. Still, every now and then the two would ask, “Can we put this in?” And with their strong convictions, they admit they would occasionally get riled up. “But Hillary would be very wise to say, ‘We need to care for the audience.’ But I just feel strongly that confronting those [difficult] things is what makes [the show] alive.”

But of course, these strong convictions are what brought the two together artistically in the first place. “It’s like walking a tightrope and I think we balance each other out really well,” Gao explains. That may not mean the two have everything figured out, but they relish the chance to ask heavy questions and see how they land. For example, how does the show navigate the “social media-show dilemma” of exploring voyeurism without feeling exploitative? “We had so many—and will continue to have—many conversations about how to toe that line,” Gao says with a knowing laugh, seeming eager to soon find out. When the series of TikToks themselves appeared, Antoci notes people watching out of concern and just as many people living for the drama. They compare this to tabloid culture, noting that they see this problem of exploitation as an old one that transferred to TikTok culture.

But one of the changes they made to mitigate this was to put themselves on the line—or rather, fictionalized versions of themselves. Both Mathew Antoci and Hillary Gao occasionally “appear” as characters in the show. So they’re not exempt from scrutiny either. “We don’t want to have our presence explain the show too much,” Antoci says. “Our actual narration isn’t even always reliable. We want to implicate ourselves in the question. We’re really trying to resist a role in the show as narrator.”

“A lot of times when people interject themselves as creators [in a show] it builds a sense of trust with the audience,” Gao adds, explaining that while their monologues in Babies in the Street may not destroy that trust, it raises questions for the audience, “Who are these people? Why are they allowed to make this?” The author-inserts don’t exist as arbiters of reliability, but to make the audience look at the show through a different lens—and maybe even question their own preconceived notions.

The show also allows for multiplicity through its many tech elements. Babies on the Street employs projections and a live camera in addition to traditional tech elements like lighting and sound design. The team cites the Wooster Group and Richard Foreman as inspirations. But Antoci stresses that design also heavily draws on how social media can require cinematography, “actual filming of self,” as many influencers have honed their skills over years of posting on Vine, Youtube, TikTok and other footage-based platforms.

At the same time, the team didn’t want to just demonize the internet. That’s not the core message of this show, and would likely feel reductive. Antoci compares the use of the internet in the show to the location of the South in a Tennessee Williams play. It’s swelteringly hot, but that’s just one element the story requires to get tensions to rise. So the internet is just “one of the voices in the room” as Babies on the Street examines voyeurism, perception, and the distortion of truth.

Created and directed by Matthew Antoci & Hillary Gao, Babies on the Street features Isabel Ebeid, Zoé Eklund, Gabriella Gonzalez, Miranda Kang, and Meaghan Robichaud. Leigh Honigman serves as producer. Dramaturgy is by Emma Sue Harris, Lizz Mangan, and James La Bella. The video design is by Leo Grierson, lighting design by Eric Bowers, costume design by Hannah Bird, and scenic design by Forest Entsminger.

Babies on the Street: The Show will run at The Brick in Brooklyn, New York from July 4th to 13th. Tickets and more info may be found here.