How a Single TikTok Changed the Game for an Obscure Off-Broadway Show

OBIE Award-winning experimental troupe Hoi Polloi are accustomed, even following 17 years of acclaimed work, to banking on strong reviews for selling out their shows.

For the company’s last production, it only took a single TikTok.

Joe Weinberg, known on TikTok as Overthinking Theatre, posted on September 15 about Hoi Polloi’s latest show: a site-specific staging of Celine Song’s Family. An early play by Song, who achieved mainstream success with her Oscar-nominated film debut Past Lives, this remount of Family was presented by Hoi Polloi in an unspecified residential location in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.

“There is an extremely niche group of people who are going to go absolutely nuts when they find out this play exists,” Weinberg began. “Is this video gonna reach that niche? I don’t know, we’re gonna find out.”

It reached that niche – and then some. Now sitting at over 5,000 ‘Likes’ and closing in on 50k in views, Weinberg’s TikTok kicked off a “ticket spree,” in the words of Hoi Polloi founder Alec Duffy. 

“It was pretty amazing,” Duffy told BroadwayWorld. “In the past, we would have had to wait for reviews to come out to generate those kinds of sales.” Duffy is also the director of Family, which ran through October 4 for just 30 audience members a night.

Weinberg’s TikTok dropped on the same day that Song herself posted on Instagram about the production. The combined impact of the viral video and Song’s plug swiftly sold out the run, which then added an additional week of performances (those, too, sold out in a flash). 

“[The show] immediately caught my eye because I’ve loved everything I’ve seen from Celine Song, and I’m also a big fan of intimate, site-specific shows,” said Weinberg. “So the combination seemed almost too good to be true.” (Weinberg was encouraged to attend Family by a cast member, but was not paid or incentivized for his video.)

Past Lives fans drawn in by Song’s name might be in for a shock. Song wrote Family as a graduate thesis at Columbia University, where she earned her MFA in playwriting in 2014. Like much of Song’s theatrical work, it is a dark, violent tale which grapples in abstract terms with our most grotesque human impulses—a far cry from the gentler lyricism of Past Lives. 

All the same, Song’s name and the appeal of an exclusive, off the beaten track staging sent ticket buyers flocking. 

“The production might give off a niche, obscure vibe,” Weinberg granted. “But it was just a question of, “If only the right people knew.” 

“So I did my best to reach the right people, and it seemed to work—but you never know with the algorithm.” 

A single TikTok has sold out a limited run at least once before. ‘Moschinodorito’ (aka Connor Boyd) helped sell out the initial SoHo Playhouse run of Job with a TikTok plug. And extensive social media strategies are now a requirement for any Broadway production, with hit new musical The Great Gatsby lately finding particular traction on TikTok with multiple viral sounds. 

Viral marketing might be new territory for Hoi Polloi, but unconventional stagings are not. Most of the company’s shows have been staged immersively.  The 2022 satire White on White at JACK seated the audience amongst a splintering affinity group. Shadows turned Collapsable Hole into a full-on party right out of the original John Cassavetes movie in 2012. And Suzan-Lori Parks in Gardens was performed in community gardens throughout the five boroughs of New York in 2007.

Weinberg put most of the credit for the show’s success on the exciting nature of Hoi Polloi’s work, downplaying his own impact. 

“It was definitely gratifying to read comments from people who bought tickets after watching my video,” he said. “But ultimately I can’t take too much credit—the video got traction because Hoi Polloi put up a show that people genuinely wanted to see!” 

Duffy and team are now figuring out whether the show can extend even further. A complicating factor: its mystery location is, in truth, his family’s own home. 

“We're currently figuring out as a (real) family how/if this production could continue in our home,” he said. 

Photo Credit: Maria Baranova