(Interview edited for length and clarity.) Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley on the set of Circle Jerk in Brooklyn. When the pandemic shut down Broadway, the duo pivoted online to release Circle Jerk and cause a maelstrom of gay chaos.īreslin and Foley hopped on a Zoom call with MEL for a wide-ranging chat about tackling white gay male complicity, compensating performers on TikTok and openly watching the sordid new season of The Real Housewives of Orange County. What came of a year reading the works of Charles Ludlam and Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism - chased with The Hills and Fire Island Instagram stories - was Circle Jerk, a play set to premiere at Rattlestick Theatre in the West Village this July. In May 2019, they began researching a play, tentatively titled Alt-Light, about what happens to gay men radicalized online.

it felt like an honest Representation of the back of my eyelids when i'm trying and failing to sleep 🙂 /Qh9DezvyN0- hari nef October 26, 2020īreslin and Foley never expected their play about going viral to actually go viral, even though the digital stream features TikTok videos and references to bussy and deepfakes.

is out on the edge of the cliff divining Phase Two of how we Do identity and language. Streamed #circlejerklive last night and it hit me where it hurts.

Sarah Paulson and Roxane Gay gushed online about the joyful return to live theater, while actress Hari Nef tweeted about the orchestrated pandemonium: “It felt like an honest Representation of the back of my eyelids when I’m trying and failing to sleep :).” Harris, who financially supported the play through his overall deal with HBO, leveraged his status as Broadway’s darling (and one of the only good adults on TikTok) to create, frankly, a circle jerk of support. In a series of events almost too fitting for the show’s exploration of stan culture, Circle Jerk’s audience grew faster than the coke line at the Rosemon. It’s now available on demand through November 7th. It’s okay if you don’t know these references: New York playwrights Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley don’t expect you to catch every detail in their extremely online, deeply memed play that just finished an eight-show run on Vimeo last week. Imagine you’re watching The Real Housewives of New York City’s “ Scary Island” episode when suddenly Milo Yiannopoulos waltzes in - only to reveal he’s is, in essence, the whiplash experience of livestreaming Circle Jerk.

Gay zoom circle jerk