Field Trip is an arts and culture social club in New York. We go to Broadway shows and Off-Broadway shows, museums and gallery walks, architecture tours and other things that seem worth leaving the apartment for. Most people come by themselves. We meet beforehand, usually over drinks and snacks, and then go see something together.
Lately, I’ve realized there’s an easier way to explain it.
Field Trip is a little like a book club for New York culture. And especially for Broadway.
Think about the mechanics of a book club. Everyone has experienced the same thing. There’s a date on the calendar. There is no need to arrive with an icebreaker because someone has already written 300 pages of them for you. And, if the book club is any good, eventually the people become at least as important as the book.
Broadway is almost suspiciously well suited to this arrangement.
There is a very specific few minutes after a show ends when everyone spills onto the sidewalk and has Opinions.
Sometimes there is consensus. Sometimes you’ve spent two and a half hours having what you thought was a shared experience only to discover that the person next to you was apparently watching a completely different play.
Both are useful.
A show gives you performances to obsess over, directorial choices to litigate, sets you would like to live in, sets you would like to have a word with, songs you’ll be listening to on the train home. There’s the thing that happened in Act II. There’s whether Act II needed to happen at all.
And unlike a book club, where someone inevitably shows up having read 43 pages and hoping no one notices, the entire group finishes the material at exactly the same time.
You don't even need to like what you saw.
In fact, one of the pleasures of seeing theater with other people is discovering that a show you found merely fine has sent someone else into a state from which they may never recover. Or vice versa.
The material is also not exactly in short supply. There are 41 Broadway theaters. Add Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway and suddenly your book club has a reading list it will never finish.
So why isn't a Broadway book club more of a thing?
I have friends who like theater.
I also have friends who like theater a perfectly normal amount.
These are not always the people I need when I have just learned that something interesting is happening in a 99-seat theater on 13th Street next Wednesday.
This is one of the odd things about being a person who sees a lot of theater in New York. There are thousands and thousands of us. We are not difficult to find in aggregate. And yet, on the particular Thursday when you want to see something, your usual theater friend is busy. Someone else has already seen it. Another friend has agreed to one play this month and you used that chip last week.
So you buy one ticket.
I’m very pro going to Broadway alone. There’s something luxurious about looking at a seating chart and having no one's preferences to consider but your own. You can buy the weird single seat in the middle of a row. You don't have to negotiate dates. You certainly don't need to find someone willing to spend exactly the same inadvisable amount of money you are.
The part I sometimes miss isn't having someone sitting next to me.
It's getting to intermission, turning to my left, and saying, “Okay, we need to discuss.”
Broadway fans have, of course, found each other.
There are Broadway Reddit threads and Discords and TikToks and Instagram accounts and group chats. There are corners of the internet where you can find someone prepared to discuss a replacement casting announcement with the seriousness of a papal conclave.
This is good. It also tells us something.
People don't only want to see theater. They want to talk about theater.
The slightly harder thing is turning the people who understand your extremely specific internet reference into the people you text because you found two seats for Thursday.
That's where I think the book club has something to teach us.
A book club doesn't require you to walk into a room and announce, “Hello, I am here to make friends.”
You are there because there is a book.
The book does an enormous amount of social labor. It gives everyone a reason to show up, something to discuss when they get there, and a reason to do it all again next month.
A show can do exactly the same thing.
For starters, you would see the show together.
This sounds obvious, but I think it's important. The conversation is different when everyone has just watched the same performance on the same night. You saw the same understudy go on. You heard the same audience lose its mind at the same moment. You all watched whatever happened with that one piece of scenery.
You would also need to make it normal to come alone. Requiring someone to already have a group of theater friends before joining a club intended to help them find theater friends seems like a fairly serious design flaw.
And you'd probably want to meet before the show.
Putting twelve strangers next to each other in a dark room for two hours is many things, but it is not a particularly efficient mixer.
This is why Field Trips usually start with a happy hour. By the time we get to the theater, you've met the people you'll be sitting with. You know a little about them. At intermission, you aren't making conversation with Seat G112. You're finding out whether Andrew also thinks that choice was insane.
The size matters, too. We generally keep Field Trips to around 12 people. That's enough people that you aren't trapped in one conversation all night, but few enough that you can actually meet everyone.
A 200-person Broadway meetup is an audience.
And then you have to do it again.
That's maybe the most book-clubby part of the whole thing. You start recognizing people. Someone you met at a play turns up at a museum. The person you talked to at happy hour three weeks ago is suddenly sitting across from you again. You stop having to introduce yourself.
Eventually, something even better happens.
You start making plans without us.
After one of our Broadway walking tours recently, a group of us was sitting around a table at happy hour when I noticed a phone making its way around.
Six people were putting their numbers into it.
“We're making plans to see The Book of Mormon together.”
As the person who runs Field Trip, I was thrilled.
Maybe it is unusual to run a social club and get this excited when your customers make plans that specifically do not involve your social club. But this is exactly what I want to happen.
Field Trip can put something on the calendar. It can pick the show and get the tickets and reserve the table and assemble twelve people who all thought, independently, yes, I would like to do that.
But the point isn't that those twelve people should require Field Trip to see each other again.
The point is that now they have each other's numbers.
There is one place where the book club analogy starts to break down.
We don't only see Broadway.
Some weeks it's an Off-Broadway show. Sometimes it's a museum exhibition, an architecture tour or an afternoon walking around galleries. New York has supplied us with a fairly ridiculous syllabus, and it seems unnecessarily restrictive to pick one subject.
The thing tying it together is curiosity.
You see something you already knew you wanted to see. You get talked into something you didn't. You meet someone who has been to an artist or theater or museum you've never heard of. They tell you about it. Now you want to go there too.
Which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like a good book club.
So if you've been searching for a Broadway book club, a Broadway social club, a club for Broadway fans, or simply some people who will not try to talk you out of buying another theater ticket: that's more or less what we're building at Field Trip.
The homework is just seeing the show.