Fake Friends Adds Two Live Performances of CIRCLE JERK

Fake Friends has announced that Circle Jerk, a queer comedy about white gay supremacy, has added two live performances on October 24 and 25 at 7:30pm, followed by on-demand rebroadcasts at circlejerk.live through November 7.

Fake Friends has also launched a new Tea Time Talk series with critics, scholars, and artists in conversation with the artists of Circle Jerk. 2020 Pulitzer Prize Finalist Soraya Nadia McDonald will be featured on November 1, 3-4pm, and artist-scholar madison moore will participate on October 30, 3-4pm. Fake Friends has also released a new trailer (https://vimeo.com/470829175) for the production.

Circle Jerk is a multi-camera, live-streamed performance broadcasting from MITU580 in Gowanus, Brooklyn, that investigates digital life and its white supremacist discontents. A homopessimist hybrid of Ridiculous theater and internet culture, it tells the story of gay right-wing trolls and the algorithms they invent to spread their agenda. In an era when truth is dead and fact is fiction, Circle Jerk is a realistic comedy about a farcical reality.

"Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley's berserker comedy Circle Jerk is a coup," wrote Helen Shaw in Vulture, adding "I bet artists will be using it as a model, even after the pandemic." Elisabeth Vincentelli in The New York Times called this "crazed, ambitious satire" "the most elaborate [show] I have yet seen in the virtual-theater era." In Towleroad, Naveen Kumar declared, "Circle Jerk isn't a substitute for in-person theatre, or a case for humbly making the best of limitations. It's a gauntlet and a dare to imagine the future." Nicole Serratore in Exeunt NYC wrote, "Somehow the show manages to eat its technicolor wackadoodle cake while having a solid grounding in social critique too-the rare satirical success."

In Circle Jerk, it's winter on Gaymen Island, a summer retreat for the homosexual rich and fame-ish. This off-season, two White Gay internet trolls hatch a plot to take back what's wrongfully theirs. Cancelations, meme schemes, and political and erotical flip flops abound as three actors playing nine parts play out this chaotic live-streamed descent into the high-energy, low-brow, quick-change shitpit of the internet. Circle Jerk combines quick changes and live chat, theatricality and the post-COVID live-stream, to take on the laptop-orchestrated shitshow that is online life and its political discontents. It takes a Ridiculous theatrical angle on our contemporary world of deep fakes, fake news, viral memes, and white gay supremacy.

In Circle Jerk, co-writers and performers Breslin and Foley, who are nevertheless still willing to identify as white, gay, and men, stage an (impossible?) experiment in indicting themselves and mainstream white gay supremacist culture in the US. Breslin and Foley, joined by Cat Rodríguez, take inspiration from Charles Ludlam's The Mystery of Irma Vep and sci-fi genre films like Ex Machina (both the Gothic children of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the German Expressionism of Fritz Lang's Metropolis) to send up plotlines about the crisis of technology in relationship to humans and the concept of "reality." Circle Jerk is co-directed by Rory Pelsue, includes dramaturgy by Ariel Sibert and is produced by Caroline Gart.

Circle Jerk examines how politics (made in the bedroom) can empower a group of people who have been historically oppressed to become the oppressors. The title takes its name both from the homoerotic ritual in which men masturbate in a circle, getting off on watching each other get off, and the subreddit "/r/circlejerk," a forum for the derisive critique of groupthink, popular among young men in the US. This "circle jerk" is an attempt not only to look at but to direct our collective gaze upon our inherited supremacies and the underbelly of our cult of culture.

Circle Jerk marks the first official production by new theater and media company Fake Friends. The company is composed of Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley (creative directors), Ariel Sibert and Catherine María Rodríguez (core company members). Previous projects created by these collaborators, then under the name Michael+Patrick, have included This American Wife (NYTW Next Door) and A Doll's House, Part 3 (Exponential Festival, ANT Fest). Breslin and Foley were members of Ars Nova's Makers Lab 2019, and they are currently commissioned by Ars Nova and Seaview Productions to develop a new musical.

The creative team for Circle Jerk includes video & lighting design by David Bengali, scenic design by Stephanie Osin Cohen, sound design by Kathy Ruvuna, costume design by Cole McCarty, wig and make-up design by Tommy Kurzman, video and lighting associate Ted Boyce-Smith, costume associate Alicia Austin, stage management by Codey Leroy Butler, production management by Violet Tafari and Russell Maclin, video engineering by Ido Levran and Ted Brown, master electrician Megan Lang, graphic design by Kameron Neal, and production assistant Yolanda "Kim" Richards.

Tickets to Circle Jerk are priced on a sliding scale of $5-$50 and can be purchased at circlejerk.live. Live streamed performances broadcast nightly at 7:30pm until October 25. The on-demand rebroadcast will take place from October 26 - November 7, 2020.

The cast and crew of Circle Jerk, along with the staff of MITU580, are following strict social distancing and safety guidelines during the creation and presentation of Circle Jerk.

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