Manhattan: distance and movement

KatjaGrace
Thu, 30 Apr 2026 23:10:40 GMT

Last Tuesday I went to a Broadway show, Ragtime. I was in the front row, but surprised by how much the action did not feel real and a few feet away from me. Perhaps the performers were so skilled they didn’t seem like real people, or the sound so loud and sharp that it didn’t feel like people legit singing just over there. We seemed to have a proper chance of getting spit on us, yet I felt as if I was in a separate world. The biggest break in the feeling of vague unreality was when one of the actors on my side of the stage made piercing eye contact with me for a second or so. Which felt very close and warm and human, and I was kind of thrown by that too, though I liked it.

The next day I saw Jonathan Groff perform at the start of a TIME 100 event. He did feel like another human right there in the room, but still somehow surprisingly distant. His song didn’t touch me, though my previous experience delighting in his presence on YouTube led me to have other expectations. And his song was Sondheim, which should also support other expectations. Toward the end he said something about—I think—his work being about connection with us all and being together, and that explicit thought reached me better than anything in the music.

Having enjoyed the first Broadway show of my life the day before, and still being in New York, that evening we went to see another one: Every Brilliant Thing. It was a one-man show currently starring Daniel Radcliffe, and involved a lot of Daniel running on and off the stage and borrowing objects and asking audience members to briefly represent his high school teacher or vet or crush. It was also quite poignant. So if any performance was going to feel like a real person was in the same room as me, and like that person was reaching me emotionally, this would seem to have a good shot. And Daniel did seem like a real person over there. But I recognized the movingness of the story more than actually being moved.

The play was about a long list of things in life that are ‘brilliant’, which I hear as both ‘great’ and as ‘brightening’. The list made me feel uneasy, because I recognized the things as good, but I didn’t feel it. Ice cream, sure. The smell of an old book, okay. Bed, yeah I guess I like it quite a lot more than not-bed. This was all somewhat fitting with the themes of the play, in which the brilliance of things was recognized to different degrees by different characters at different times and levels of depression. But it still made me feel improper and distant from other people: the audience was meant to understand these things as brilliant. I cried a little about that afterwards.

But it also reminded me later of an obvious-but-hard-to-enact thought: if you don’t feel the goodness of things much at some point, it’s not an indication that everything has gone wrong, or that the world is no longer good, or never was, or that there is something badly wrong with you. This is clear in writing, but if I don’t explicitly consider the issue, it is easy to interpret such experiences of nothing seeming good as some variant of ‘nothing is good’. Which is about as correct as having a numb foot and describing the situation as ‘there is no floor’. The picture in my mind is of a sailor in darkness: sometimes you can’t see the stars, and then you have to navigate by memory. And the darkness is about your current location, not the world—it’s possible to get to other non-dark places, even if you can’t see them from here.

One of the last brilliant things involved the sound of a record crackling into the start of a song, which I was surprised to learn that I did feel something about. Perhaps because it reminds me of being alone, in a nice library, with pen and paper. That kind of state quite close to the sublime! Which reminds me that things can be sublime.

These forays into group emotion left me feeling somewhat like a distant and unmoved observer, but an earlier example is also interesting. In our first hours in town, we rushed out to see a live comedy show. It was in a crowded underground bar, and we were in flip-out seats in a walkway. I was struck by how much even the emcee made us laugh—they were funny, but I bet we laughed more than watching the most celebrated comedians on a screen. And it seemed like a fuller laughing experience—laughing with group, together. I hadn’t really thought of comedy as much better live. I wonder if in-person social orchestration is a big part of making people laugh, beyond the performance-as-separable-pixels-and-sounds. For this show at least, I was easily brought along with the emotions intended, and felt closer.

Is it less vulnerable to go along with comedic emotions than be moved by serious ones? And with a crowd I feel self-conscious? I wonder if my relationship with the other people in the room matters more than the performer.

Sitting outside a restaurant later, watching people and cars pass by, I thought about how sometimes everything seems brilliant to me, and remembering that made everything seem a bit brilliant.

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