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[0:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Hello, and welcome to the Drama Book Show. My name is Mark-Eugene Garcia. In this episode, we explore the intersection of theater, internet culture, and the ways our increasingly digital lives shape the stories we tell. We're joined by members of Fake Friends, Michael Breslin, Patrick Foley, Rory Pelsue, Kat Rodríguez, and Ariel Sibert to discuss their book collecting two of the company's digitally native plays, Circle Jerk and This American Wife. Created after the company was pushed off the stage and into the internet in March 2020, these works embrace the possibilities of digital theater while exploring social media, queer fandom, artificial intelligence, and reality television. Circle Jerk follows gay white supremacists creating an AI influencer to dominate global discourse, while This American Wife spins a surrealist story of queer devotion to celebrities and the performance strategies of reality television.

The collection also features a visual archive and essays from each company member reflecting on the practical and interpersonal processes behind bringing these plays to life. The members of Fake Friends bring a range of experience in writing, directing, acting, dramaturgy, producing, and criticism. Joining them in conversation is moderator Juan A. Ramírez, an arts and culture writer and critic who serves as chief critic for Theaterly, with work appearing in The New York Times, The Guardian, Vogue, and other publications. Here are Michael Breslin, Patrick Foley, Rory Pelsue, Kat Rodríguez, Ariel Sibert, and Juan A. Ramírez live at the Drama Bookshop.

[2:17] Juan A. Ramírez: Since then, I've had the pleasure of getting to know these people on and off the stage, the screen, the page, and yeah, it's been an incredible time. I cannot believe it's been five years since then. Anyway, Circle Jerk, which we'll begin our discussion with, is a brilliant, piercing critique of internet era white gayness, starring, and somewhat auto-fictionally about, some of those themselves and those nearby who love and loathe them. Yeah, they're all from Yale, so it'll get mad if I define any of them, but they're all brilliant theater makers. Do you guys feel like prophets for writing a play that became this prescient, or were you that tapped into the wired community?

[2:54] Michael Breslin: Like financial?

[2:55] Patrick Foley: You wish. Rasputins.

[2:59] Michael Breslin: Oh, prophets.

[3:00] Patrick Foley: Yeah, prophet.

[3:01] Michael Breslin: Yeah, with a P-H-E, yeah.

[3:04] Kat Rodríguez: Girl.

[3:05] Michael Breslin: Yeah.

[3:13] Patrick Foley: I don't have an answer. I don't feel like a prophet. Hey, guys. Hi.

[3:21] Michael Breslin: Okay, the crazy thing is that it was actually Ariel, because the thing about Circle Jerk that was crazy is that it was about AI, and we wrote it in the fall of 2019, and we were doing this workshop of doing this thing about white gay guys, and we were like, oh, we'll just make fun of everyone in our lives, and then Ariel was like, funny, this new thing called AI is coming, and we were like, what the fuck is that? You're like, crazy girl.

[3:44] Ariel Sibert: Yeah, we were like, Ariel, no one's gonna get that. And then we looked into it, and we were like, oh, that's gay and funny.

[3:51] Michael Breslin: Patrick, you were pointing out that it took so long to write the scene for you guys, of Eva Maria becoming this consciousness influencer or propaganda queen, because we were trying to explain what an AI-generated, sophisticated chatbot was like, in layman's terms, and now, of course, that scene could be like, oh, yeah, it's ChatGPT and a deepfake put together, yeah.

[4:21] Patrick Foley: Yeah, not prophets, but I know in the years since, we've definitely sent each other articles being like, what? Huh? It's up? It's pretty uncanny, and even when we started, I remember the research, some of the research was about government, right, and government use of AI, and some of the technology that was being reported on at the time, and obviously, now we're living in a moment of, is it the singularity? Is it? Is it coming? Can't wait to welcome our robot overlord Drift. But yeah, it's, what a journey.

[4:52] Kat Rodríguez: Something you get into in the book that I really appreciate is that you did some gonzo investigating through a Twitter act called Alt-Latino. Was that something you were doing on your own time, or was it always headed towards this?

[5:04] Ariel Sibert: Thanks. It was not during rehearsal hours, strictly. I had an account on Parler, which was an alt-right app. My avatar was Kim Zolciak, and yeah, I was in some DMs. I was added to a group. I don't, it was a very, I would say colorful, but actually it was an anti-colorful experience. And then I think we discovered through the course of working on the play that was not going to make the cut quite right. Yeah.

[5:36] Juan A. Ramírez: Is there anything that directly made it to the script from your adventures?

[5:40] Kat Rodríguez: From that, I think the insistence on identitarianism, period, and the kind of gravitational pull, because I have also had my own journey, but also really appreciate the sidestepping of labels and it was interesting to explore something that was all about that. Yeah.

[6:04] Juan A. Ramírez: Were you going to add something, Patrick?

[6:07] Patrick Foley: Oh, she killed it.

[6:09] Juan A. Ramírez: Speaking of labels, but in a different sentence, Patrick, you write in the book that this was an era where you tried to straddle on-off-stage responsibilities. Actor, playwright, director, choreographer, dramaturg, company manager, publicist, sound designer. Did I write that?

[6:23] Patrick Foley: Apparently. Did that set... Do you feel that set a different tone for post-COVID theater? Is that sort of what's expected from anyone making theater at this point?

[6:34] Michael Breslin: I definitely feel like everyone's a multi-hyphenate now, but that's kind of a good thing. I would say Michael taught me how to use QLab, but I still don't really understand how to use it. Yeah, I think it was a very fertile, collaborative, exciting time, because it had to be. Because certainly for Circle Jerk 2020, the anti-COVID strategy that we devised made it such that all of the collaborators couldn't be in the space at the same time. So we couldn't have a costume designer at the same time that we had, say, David Bengali, our scenic... or our video designer. But people all had to play different roles, which was fun.

[7:15] Patrick Foley: I feel like... So recently, aka this week, I started using CapCut, which is blowing my mind, honestly. But I was thinking, if we had CapCut when we were making Circle Jerk, it would have been so much easier, because we were on these crazy apps. We were having to download 15 different apps to get the deepfake pictures and sync the sound with it. We were then on Logic and Final Cut and all these other things, just trying to get it all in one place. And now, literally thanks to, I guess, China and CapCut, I think actually the Final Cut app is actually pretty good too. Now it's just a different kind of thing. But at the time, we were like... I sometimes felt like we were like the guy from Mary Poppins, with all the different instruments being like, how do we bring all these things together? And Ariel was our DP.

[8:06] Michael Breslin: I think we were all the DPs at various times for a shoot. There's a lot of play in these texts with video. And Circle Jerk wasn't originally envisioned as primarily a video or streaming project. It was going to be a play with video in it. And there was a lot of live feed, but then a lot of play in a lot of our work between pre-recorded stuff and live stream stuff to trick and fool and play with authenticity and liveness and fell about slander and everybody. And we doing the pre-records both times, because we re-recorded everything multiple times, was just us sometimes in the space we were also rehearsing in, trying to be the DP for each other and the wardrobe supervisor and the script supervisor.

And then often in rehearsals, Rory and I were making a spreadsheet, trying to invent the calling sheet for our live sitcom recording slash play slash video project with the list of all of the cues and which camera we're going to cut to in the live feed and what the actors are supposed to be doing and the lines, which were also changing sometimes. And then the actors were doing this balletic choreography to hit those cameras. Yeah. So we were all, yeah, we all had a lot of hats and I will say, Patrick, I think I wrote that line and put it in our group chat.

[9:33] Patrick Foley: No, you said that. You said that in the book as well. But there is a poly-vocality in addition to the multiple roles. We do finish each other's sentences sometimes.

[9:44] Kat Rodríguez: It's beautiful.

[9:45] Juan A. Ramírez: Ariel, me as someone who definitely understands what dramaturgy is, you have an essay in the book. All you've got is these really interesting process essays that really get into the making of both of these plays and your process. But I'm curious, what does it look like to dramaturge something where the form is so tied to its function? I guess I think something I, for example, sometimes struggle to differentiate is what does a dramaturge do, what does a director do, I feel like a director could somewhat more easily kill somebody else's darling. But what does it look like for you as the dramaturge when, shit, this won't play in this crazy configuration of live digital stream, blah, blah, blah. What is your, at least for the original production at TheaterMeToo, what did that kind of look like?

[10:26] Ariel Sibert: It's interesting. I think in terms of finding the form for all of these plays, I was definitely not the dramaturge in the room finding the form. That was so much of Michael and Patrick finding the shapes through improvisation and through writing or coming in after a retreat with how the last act of Circle Jerk would be this triptych. That form got found so much through the writing. And all of us work and think really dramaturgically. Michael, Kat, and I all trained as dramaturgs and then Patrick was the actor who liked dramaturgs the most out of his entire class, for sure. And Rory is a dramaturg's dream as a director. And there's just a lot of dramaturgical thinking coming from everyone. I say I'm one of the dramaturgs for this company because that's really what it feels like.

But everybody's doing dramaturgical work through generating. And we often have these conversations about how to divorce, or if it's possible to divorce, editing from generating when it comes to collaborative processes like these. And I think we all have answered that question differently at different times. If editing and generating, refining, saying yes or no are actually both happening at the same time, it's really hard to draw a line. I think each of us says that feels right or that doesn't feel right. And each of us throws new things out there. I love that. Thank you. And yeah, the essays are really great for practitioners especially. There's a lot of not how tos, instructions on how to make your own Circle Jerk at home.

[12:05] Rory Pelsue: Yes, if you read the book, we all have these essays that are like in the form, sort of internet form, based on ones we know. And I have a 2002 era internet level competence. So I went with that. I went old school. I won't ask about how I definitely recognize the syntax from some current people on the boards, but I am interested. You mentioned that you read, you first read, or you read the first draft of Circle Jerk.

[12:31] Michael Breslin: The first rehearsal because they were holding it dearly and something that attracted you to it was that it was essentially in your eyes like a drawing room comedy.

[12:40] Rory Pelsue: Rereading it now it's like, oh of course it's mostly in this one living room, but is that something that you felt you drew out of it or like what is, if you could boil down drawing room comedy?

[12:51] Cat Rodríguez: It was beautifully in the script and a lot of people, it's such a, people complain about let's not do theater in living rooms and it's like eye roll, it's so boring, but it's all interesting when you do a play in a living room and in this sense we're almost quoting a play in a living room so it is about the setting, but when you do a play in a space where almost anything can happen it's like it's not about the location, it's about the people and the relationships and even like yes there's like clichés of living room blocking couches in the middle of the room and perching on the sides of armchairs that we don't do in real life but happen in wonderful plays in living rooms.

[13:25] Ariel Sibert: But I think more importantly than that it was like a really rich psychological play and that's actually 90% of what you talk about because it's not some, I don't know it's like that actually felt like the main focus of it like a living room drama so even though it's like yes it's quoting those plays, it actually was kind of like working on one in a really wonderful way.

[13:44] Michael Breslin: Love that. I want to do a quick round of what's the favorite meme that you all managed to get in a version of Circle Jerk. We'll start with Rory, you have the mic.

[13:55] Rory Pelsue: Assuming you all had at least one meme input. Did anyone remember one?

[13:59] Cat Rodríguez: I don't know.

[14:00] Rory Pelsue: I've decided. Long COVID has taken its toll. This is one that's cut, it's from the original, it's from the 2020 version but I enjoyed the Christopher Columbus smash cut that was originally in there with Kokomo's arrival.

[14:17] Ariel Sibert: It was like Sutton Foster singing the climax of the song but it was like 80 times of her doing it.

[14:26] Michael Breslin: Weren't there kids too?

[14:27] Rory Pelsue: It was like high schoolers?

[14:28] Cat Rodríguez: There were also children.

[14:29] Ariel Sibert: Yeah. There's also, did we include that amazing Britney Spears vocal moment where she goes ahhhhhh do you know what I'm talking about where she's riffing, riffing in front of the mirror?

[14:44] Michael Breslin: That was in it at some point and I genuinely don't remember when it was cut. We should say that also, maybe this is fun, Easter Egg was cut before anyone ever saw the show, it was in all of the living room sequences.

[14:55] Rory Pelsue: There were continuous memes in the bottom of the screen.

[15:00] Michael Breslin: So it was like, I remember it was like some fell on a couch and then it was like you'd see in the corner, almost like, not pay-per-view, what do you call that in the corner?

[15:07] Cat Rodríguez: Picture-in-picture.

[15:08] Michael Breslin: Picture-in-picture of Laganja Estranja death-dropping as someone, I remember that one, that was cool.

[15:13] Ariel Sibert: We cut the whole gesture. It took so much tech time and we really tried it and we had it all with the notes and it just was so chaotic, semiotically looking at it with all the memes you were like, it was just bewildering and it was so much work.

[15:27] Cat Rodríguez: And I do think we should find that spreadsheet that has all the memes if anybody wants another annotation version of the script.

[15:34] Ariel Sibert: This wasn't technically a meme. We took another TikTok, I think, and remade it so it became a meme, but it was like everything's appropriation on the internet.

[15:46] Michael Breslin: It was like Cat's character coming from the mainland to Game In Island and I think Cat had 101 fever and was really sick and we were in Prospect Park and we were like, we don't care, Cat.

[15:57] Cat Rodríguez: We were like, sorry, Cat, and she was shaking, we were like, we have to get this content.

[16:03] Ariel Sibert: She was shaking in a crop top and we were having her pretend to find geocached clues and-

[16:09] Cat Rodríguez: Yeah, she was crawling on the ground covered in dirt.

[16:11] Ariel Sibert: Yeah. But it is one of my, every time that I've, I've never watched it all the way through, but if I see that thing, it makes me laugh.

[16:20] Michael Breslin: If only we had CapCut.

[16:22] Cat Rodríguez: Literally. I love that.

[16:24] Michael Breslin: But before we move on to This American Wife, you write that the first Circle Direct stream had 60 audience members and by the end you had about a thousand, including very vocal tweets urging people to go see it from Sarah Paulson, Rachel Ziegler, Roxanne Gay, who's like, maybe not from those three, but who was the person who tweeted about the show that you were most gagged at, but that only you would care about?

[16:42] Patrick Foley: Judy Kuhn.

[16:43] Michael Breslin: Did she actually?

[16:44] Patrick Foley: That was like, I was like, that is a real celebrity. I couldn't even believe it.

[16:47] Michael Breslin: Judy Kuhn, by the way.

[16:48] Patrick Foley: I almost killed myself.

[16:49] Michael Breslin: It was.

[16:50] Patrick Foley: What did she say? And how do we know how she got to her?

[16:53] Michael Breslin: It was literally like a tweet forwarded to her about the show and she's like, guess I'll tune in.

[16:58] Patrick Foley: And I like wrote long, like paragraphs after and she never responded. So I don't know what she thought about it, but Judy, if you're here, love you.

[17:06] Michael Breslin: The to Leslie campaign of her getting a Circle Direct link.

[17:10] Patrick Foley: Fuck.

[17:12] Michael Breslin: Anybody else?

[17:15] Ariel Sibert: This isn't quite the same thing, but when we did it in 2022, Julia Fox arrived to the show 90 minutes ahead of time in a rubber dress at the height of summer and posed for a picture for five minutes and then left, which was amazing.

[17:28] Michael Breslin: She didn't see the show, but it was like, it was great to have her there.

[17:33] Patrick Foley: And actually, finally, Michael, in your essay, which is a stream of consciousness, like note taking situation. One of my favorite notes that you wrote is parenthesis. Note to self pop art. I'm bored. Art pop. I'm activated. Care to elucidate?

[17:49] Michael Breslin: What is the question?

[17:52] Patrick Foley: Do you like jewels and drugs?

[17:53] Michael Breslin: I am a huge jewels and drugs fan from art pop.

[17:57] Patrick Foley: Defend yourself quickly.

[17:59] Michael Breslin: I just think she was like trying out a new sort of shape for herself.

[18:02] Patrick Foley: Is it better than cake?

[18:03] Michael Breslin: No, I wish that we had the full version of cake on our pop.

[18:06] Patrick Foley: But yeah, that's basically it.

[18:10] Michael Breslin: Okay, I've clearly forgiven you guys for making me think about Housewives more than I ever wanted to, but you did sell me on the real Housewives franchise as being the sort of postmodern performance thing, which I think is interesting because when the show came out, it was right before Salt Lake City premiered.

[18:27] Patrick Foley: Right.

[18:28] Michael Breslin: And I think for my sort of outsider's understanding, that's a pivotal entry in the franchise because it really laid bare the machinations behind it. I'm curious, how's your relationship to Housewives changed since Salt Lake premiered?

[18:45] Patrick Foley: I've been much more effective in converting people.

[18:49] Michael Breslin: Yeah, to the queendom fandom.

[18:52] Patrick Foley: Absolutely. Thank you, Gensha.

[18:57] Michael Breslin: And the FBI.

[18:58] Patrick Foley: Thank you so much.

[19:01] Padraic: I can see you simmering in thought.

[19:03] Michael Breslin: It's interesting because there were always these sort of metatheatrical moments pre-Gensha. The one that's coming to mind for some reason, it was Kyle Richards having an allergic reaction to a horse in France.

[19:15] Patrick Foley: And the producers were deeply involved in that episode and you saw them and you knew them.

[19:19] Michael Breslin: I don't know. It's a new genre of the woman who sort of grew up on the show, knows what they're doing, knows the game, which is why the Monica Garcia thing is so confusing because they all are posting shit about each other under a pseudonym.

[19:35] Patrick Foley: But I think that what I will say is Rhode Island is a really exciting return to an OG kind of...

[19:41] Michael Breslin: There's a real Housewives Rhode Island?

[19:44] Patrick Foley: One.

[19:45] Michael Breslin: It's okay.

[19:46] Patrick Foley: Is it Providence?

[19:47] Michael Breslin: No, it's Cranston.

[19:48] Patrick Foley: Jesus Christ.

[19:49] Michael Breslin: It's Cranston, Rhode Island.

[19:52] Patrick Foley: But it's a return to the naivete of the early days.

[19:54] Michael Breslin: It is possible to go back to before.

[19:57] Patrick Foley: But it's also really interesting comparing Housewives of Salt Lake City to Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, where Secret Lives of Mormon Wives does like multiple seasons a year and they're just only talking about...

[20:09] Michael Breslin: We'll now take audience questions.

[20:11] Patrick Foley: Sorry, continue, continue.

[20:13] Michael Breslin: It was your question.

[20:15] Patrick Foley: Continue, please, continue.

[20:17] Michael Breslin: You hate...

[20:18] Patrick Foley: Actually, never mind.

[20:19] Michael Breslin: We're being recorded.

[20:20] Patrick Foley: But yeah, that show's just about them being famous.

[20:22] Michael Breslin: That's basically all it is about now.

[20:25] Patrick Foley: Whereas Housewives, there is this really delicious layer of drama on top of it where they're playing certain roles and there are certain narratives and plots that are completely invented for the show, which is great.

[20:37] Michael Breslin: I would also be curious to talk to a Housewife viewer who doesn't engage with the online discourse because there's a big discrepancy between the online discourse and the actual numbers of who's watching the show, and we can sadly see this in the demise of Real Housewives of Miami.

[20:54] Patrick Foley: Which was such an incredible show, and they had to close it, cancel it, or put it on pause because there weren't enough viewers, but you wouldn't know that from the online discourse.

[21:03] Michael Breslin: As it relates to digital theater, there's a discrepancy between the relationship of the audience on Twitter and Instagram and actually what's making money.

[21:14] Michael Breslin: Michael, Kat, Patrick, you all mention specifically in the book your love for the New Jersey franchise. What is it about that one?

[21:20] Patrick Foley: Prostitution whores.

[21:25] Michael Breslin: That was my way in.

[21:26] Patrick Foley: That was my gateway drug.

[21:28] Michael Breslin: And there was something, I think, about just how unrelentless they were, the ability to go from zero to a million, the family bonds, the children, the daughters specifically.

[21:42] Patrick Foley: I don't know. There was just something.

[21:44] Michael Breslin: It was, and I'm from New Orleans. I'm from the South.

[21:46] Patrick Foley: So I think if I had started with Beverly Hills or something like that, it would have been, I don't know.

[21:53] Michael Breslin: I don't know that I would have understood in the way that I understood suburbia and felt like it was reflected and also really strange, but also so specific that I felt like I was also really tapping into something that, yeah, that I had some kind of language for even though it wasn't my own experience.

[22:15] Patrick Foley: I don't know.

[22:16] Michael Breslin: Yeah, totally.

[22:17] Michael Breslin: I would say, I think Danielle Staub needs a lot more credit because I think historically she was the first wife to come on screen with 10,000 skeletons in her closet because episode one of Jersey would have been like, or season one of Jersey would have been like season two of New York.

[22:34] Patrick Foley: There are no wives before Danielle Staub who came on camera knowing that they had aided and abetted an arrest, prostituted themselves, that there was books about them and their past identities, their dead name, Beverly out there.

[22:46] Michael Breslin: Out there.

[22:51] Patrick Foley: Say it out loud.

[22:52] Michael Breslin: And I actually think because truly we do, I do, and relationship to them began around thinking about them as performance artists.

[22:59] Patrick Foley: There's something so reckless and radically self excoriating about going on camera with such a storied past and imagining that it won't come up.

[23:09] Michael Breslin: It's a psychology that is theatrical.

[23:11] Patrick Foley: So good.

[23:12] Michael Breslin: So, I'll get to your housewife's thing in a second, but talking about your past, you do mention in the book, Patrick, that the only time you've been more embarrassed than you were making this American Wife's confessional sequence is when you were flirting with Jonathan Groff at the Spring Awakening stage door.

[23:27] Patrick Foley: I would like to know more about that.

[23:33] Patrick Foley: So, I think Neil Simon because it was Broadway.

[23:41] Michael Breslin: I have a friend from high school here who can attest that I was in the closet, or at least I thought I was.

[23:46] Patrick Foley: And so, when I got on the Amtrak and I came to the matinee of Spring Awakening with my friend Amanda from middle school, I thought it wasn't going to be a big deal.

[23:54] Michael Breslin: And then of course I saw those sort of porcelain white cheeks under the lights, and I'm not talking about his face.

[24:00] Patrick Foley: And when we went to the stage door, which we did, all I could think to say was, where should we get lunch?

[24:09] Michael Breslin: And he directed us to Vinyl, which rest in power if anyone is middle-aged like I am.

[24:15] Patrick Foley: But the way he delivered Vinyl to me, the lingering gaze, it activated something that I wouldn't be able to name, unfortunately, for two more years, but that was sexual.

[24:27] Michael Breslin: I can't even close the housewives thing. Unlike young cat watching from far away in New Orleans, Michael, you were a one-time paper mill prodigy, so you're right at home watching New Jersey. What was your draw?

[24:39] Michael Breslin: These are women that you knew?

[24:41] Michael Breslin: So, interestingly, I'm not as hot on Jersey as these two, but I obviously have watched every episode, but it's a little close to home, obviously.

[24:51] Michael Breslin: I grew up maybe 45 minutes from Franklin Lakes, where they filmed most of the show.

[24:57] Patrick Foley: But I did in high school, I think I might still be in This American Wife, but I don't...

[25:02] Cat Rodríguez: I don't remember. I used to stalk their houses in my friend's car. We would, she would be driving her 2004 Honda CRV, literally, and we'd be drinking Harlow Rossi out of the bottle and chain-smoking and just stalking their homes. That's Jersey. Stalking homes! Again, this book is a wealth of information and sometimes lack of communication because something that I was reading it chronologically, I was like, ooh, Michael's hinting at where you, the townhouse, the West Village townhouse, where you rehearsed This American Wife and you're very coy about it. And then maybe 10 pages later, Patrick's, it was SJP! We have different attachment styles, so that's what you're saying. We have different relationships to the law.

Yeah, and I will say a lot of our conversations are going to each other and being like, I actually haven't told anybody this. You can't tell anyone. And the other person going, you told me that already. I believe that you told three other people when you last told me that. And you're like, oh, I forgot. I forgot about the secret. I forgot about publishing that. I forgot about it. But no, I think that Jonathan Krofster and what Patrick was saying about self-excoriation and that being as embarrassing as the confessional, I was not a Real Housewives fan. So what I saw when I first saw This American Wife was seemingly violent, unlicensed therapy between two people I really liked who, it wasn't sure how they were gonna survive it.

And it was really self-excoriating and really raw. And I think there's some stuff in the book about how you all found better safeguards for each other in the updated version to still maintain that energy, but with some safety around the honesty. But the Real Housewives part of it is one texture, but the other texture of This American Wife is really trauma and betrayal. And yeah.

[27:02] Juan A. Ramírez: Yeah, I want to ask you, so we all, of course, remember the third act of This American Wife. It's just you two and Jekayne Powell, the third cast member, almost third, because you play the wife, of course, just reading each other the fuck down. What kind of notes do you as a dramaturge give in those scenes that are so built on improvisation and self-excoriation, as you put it?

[27:22] Michael Breslin: Looking back, I just, I was not part of the boundary-setting or safety-insuring policy, and I often gave the note that it could be worse. And I have had to look back at myself and be like, ooh, that was maybe more in the service of aesthetics than it was the service of my friends. Because you can't as a dramaturge, because my skin is not in the game, I'm not on stage, it's very easy for me to say, go harder, when I don't have to be up there looking at the other person and doing it.

[27:55] Cat Rodríguez: I want to talk about how you, in the first run of This American Wife, that you livestreamed from this great Netflix mansion, you had put cameras in the dishwasher, was it? And those melted?

[28:07] Michael Breslin: Oh yeah. Oh, they were cut? I think the feed just went to black the first run.

[28:12] Cat Rodríguez: They melted, yeah. Yeah, we had all these wonderful little cameras and nooks and crannies all over the house that, yeah, were great. Yeah, those ones overheated, I guess. I don't know what to say about it, yeah, I guess they did. I guess, like, there were, like, distinct sections, so there were distinct sections in This American Wife, and what Rory led us through coming up with was, like, a different camera strategy for each section. And so the beginning section, which was, the dream house is this long, continuous shot, and then another camera sort of joins it. Then there was a section where we manned the cameras and interviewed each other. I'm probably going to blank. There was, of course, the confessional setup.

And then there was a section where Michael and Jaquim were talking to cameras on tripods. And then there was another section, I'm not going in order, called the vacation section, which was recorded on GoPros. And we were really interested in working with GoPros and putting them in orifices of the house, which we kept calling orifices of the house. And unfortunately, just some of those orifices are not compatible with electronics. The oven shock to us was not, it was just hard to live cast from the GoPro in the oven to the people at home, and the freezer as well, and the microwave. And that was also the hardest part to get right, I think, almost in the whole show, if I'm, like, remembering correctly.

Because, A, it was, like, cameras, and if you have a camera in a shower, you had to position it so you know that it's in a shower. Otherwise, it's just, like, why is it filmed in this weird way? So that was that. And then also it had the most direct quotes from all the series, and to thread that needle that it's, oh, fans of the show will recognize it, but then if you don't know the show, making sure it doesn't feel too long or insidery. So for all those reasons, that was a big technical thing. So the melting was just one part of it. I'd love to open it up to audience questions, if anybody has any.

[30:07] Juan A. Ramírez: Yes? Can you come up, please? Hi, I saw Circle Jerk in 2022 with Juan. We also had 12 margaritas beforehand, and I was so gagged by it for a lot of reasons. One was references being built in in the amount of them, like the Lay in the Piazza one. I was seized over, and I was wondering what your relationship to reference was in terms of building a show out with Circle Jerk as opposed to This American Wife, which is built on the form of Housewives and has a depth of references in that way. Gag the shit out of me. Is this microphone working? Also, wait, yeah. Okay, that's all that matters.

[30:46] Patrick Foley: Well, I think Patrick and I, when we're speaking to each other, are just like reference bots, and then I think all five of us together are just like always referencing, unafraid to reference or not reference. You got them referencing about referencing. But then also, when we started Circle Jerk, we were very excited about bringing what might be called queer theater or ridiculous theater from the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s into a present context. And those plays, mostly we were looking at the plays of Charles Ludlum, who was an amazing playwright and director and actor who passed in the 80s. But he was an extremely quotational and referential writer, and he would craft plays basically through a series of what I come to think of as like memeing before memeing.

He would hyperlink to other sort of parts of gay culture or whatever culture and create like a play out of it. So we were very excited about it was both intentional and unintentional because the Light in the Piazza thing was just like, we're all upset. Well, three of us are obsessed with Light in the Piazza. One of us from North Carolina, like the character, and the other is a horse.

[32:10] Cat Rodríguez: She's the horse who kicked her.

[32:12] Patrick Foley: Is Rory the other one who doesn't like?

[32:17] Cat Rodríguez: No, he loves, loves, loves. The three guys, sorry to use that word, love Light in the Piazza.

[32:24] Patrick Foley: Use lightly.

[32:28] Cat Rodríguez: Yeah.

[32:32] Juan A. Ramírez: Something I'll ask, maybe it's because I've been locked out of my Twitter for about a year and a half now, but I feel I look back on Circle Jerk and I feel like it really tapped into, even if it is like this dispersed sort of Twitter thing that's decentralized, etc. There was still a sense of like community and we all know the same memes and we all know the same references, etc. And we all have this like forum to talk about them. I don't know if I feel that anymore. Do you think that's, again, a me thing because I'm picked out of Twitter? Do you think it's just we've become further decentralized? Would it look the same now? Obviously a little different, but do you feel you'd be able to tap into that same sort of collective consciousness today?

[33:13] Michael Breslin: I don't, I think it would look, it would, it would look similar, but different now. I think certainly my feed, I don't, there are many people here. My feed is a really scary place. I love it. I can't talk about it publicly actually, because it would, but the, I would say though, I'd be curious how we would tackle the use of AI in memes these days. I don't know if anyone else has the like Lumpa La Lumpies or whatever. Yeah. And there's so many AI memes or Donald Trump strutting to that one song. Do you know what I'm talking about with the purse and the heels? Anyway, what was so felt so pure and such a time capsule of that moment on TikTok was that so many of the memes and the trends felt like homegrown and things we were doing in our backyard or garages as kids.

I think for example of the God, the Celine Dion song, there was this meme of the Celine Dion song. What's the one where it's like, there were nights of endless pleasure. It's all coming back to me now. There's this meme and it was always these, these wives, baby, baby. And then it would be like their husbands with a leaf blower blowing their, and there would be glitter everywhere. It was just so joyous and homespun in a way that it feels like the internet language isn't utilizing as much of anymore.

[34:32] Juan A. Ramírez: No. Okay. I want to ask Ariel and Kat. So much of, again, Circle Jerk and This American Wife is about, as you said, self-excoriating yourself as a gay man. I'm curious what, if anything, you read yourself on during the process of both of these plays.

[34:48] Ariel Sibert: Sure. Thank you for that. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna connect this actually to the question that you asked at top about Parler and my alt Latina Kim Zolciak account. You're the fake friends Doja Cat, of course. I do think a kind of through line in this is there was a, there was a sense of danger and risk. And I also remember early in Circle Jerk, there was this idea that maybe as my alt Latina character, I would go out into the streets and interview people live and confront them with my alt Latina view. And then I think we realized that might not be safe. That might not be safe. And I think that Circle Jerk, This American Wife, The Confessionals, What Gets Asked, The Framework, all of these, these things, in addition to who my character in Circle Jerk is at the end, Kokomo Catherine, who also had her own transformation.

She was originally Sarah Jessica Walker. She had, she, listen, she was transformational, really. She, but I think there was a long process of discernment in both of the plays and distinguishing between what felt dangerous and exciting in that way versus what was risky in a really productive way. And I will always give flowers and credit to Rory and heard him say about reading the play on the way over and the kind of living room drama and the people and what he demanded that we do was take them seriously. And yes, it's funny, but it was less funny when we were laughing. He, ha, because of how like clever girl we were and more actually risky to take them really seriously and to go into those parts of ourselves that feel, ee, ooh, I don't want to say that out loud, or I can, but not maybe in mixed company.

Right. And so for me, I would say for Circle Jerk, definitely that's the, the character at the end. It's fun to play a fembot who's doing cultural reference and left and right. And, but there was also risk in that because we were quoting, but also didn't want to slip into problematic tropes of performance, especially when some of those cultural references are not of my culture or background, but are a part of the discourse. Right. And then for, for the end character, it was really that relationship to whiteness and also to a politic that this horseshoe theory that was part of Circle Jerk, that you could swing so far in the other direction that what

[37:33] Ariel Sibert: Say you stand for can be one thing, but the way you go about it, the politic, the material experience of it could actually reproduce or replicate something that you feel you're ideologically the opposite of, but they're actually kindred, scary spirits.

[37:50] Cat Rodríguez: Yeah.

[37:51] Patrick Foley: Totally.

[37:52] Ariel Sibert: There are a lot of women in these plays.

[37:56] Cat Rodríguez: There are.

[37:57] Ariel Sibert: There's just a lot of women in these plays. I felt like with all of these processes, I was invited into the building of a collective unconscious from which a lot of characters emerged from text threads or articles that Michael and Patrick found that led to ideas or that Cat added or that Rory added or films or everything pooling together out of which Michael and Patrick and Cat embodied these characters that had little pieces of my brain in them too. There's a lot of identifying with in the company and yeah, I felt very, I felt very welcomed into a vocabulary of dense referentiality and yearning and feeling unheard while screaming. That felt very true to me emotionally.

[38:42] Patrick Foley: Yeah.

[38:44] Juan A. Ramírez: Not to invade the sacred space of the rehearsal room, but I'm curious, Cat and Ariel, were there times that you were like, let's talk about this side of how gays are so nasty and horrible and you felt maybe some resistance or maybe they're like, wait, us? What?

[39:04] Ariel Sibert: I didn't understand why everyone was so mean to each other and then I unpacked my own internalized homophobia and learned, no, no, no, it's, I, I, yeah. How was I educated? No, like this is a really like, there's so much satire and there's so much self-awareness in these topics and in these plays.

[39:31] Cat Rodríguez: Yeah. I think we're really serious about not taking ourselves too seriously. The only thing that kind of approximates comes to mind was it wasn't in the rehearsal room per se. It was when the world was our rehearsal room. We took a field trip to Fire Island as part of research and I was probably the only woman on the island on a Tuesday at like midday.

[39:54] Patrick Foley: What month was it?

[39:55] Cat Rodríguez: It was like a very random.

[39:56] Patrick Foley: July.

[39:57] Cat Rodríguez: July, Patrick says.

[39:58] Patrick Foley: Was it July?

[39:59] Cat Rodríguez: I think it was like May.

[40:00] Patrick Foley: May, Patrick says.

[40:01] Cat Rodríguez: It was like, kind of pre-season, like very just like rando. It was a, yeah, it was a Wednesday, it was a Tuesday, it was a whatever. And had an experience where there was a show going on, sorry, it was boring. We were talking by the exit. We got heckled.

[40:16] Patrick Foley: Alexis Michelle.

[40:17] Cat Rodríguez: No, no, no, bleep.

[40:18] Patrick Foley: Yeah, sorry.

[40:20] Cat Rodríguez: It's in the book, Patrick. There was some heckling and then the entire room that was watching the show, which is a room of all men, started shouting, what was it? Go home, go home. And this was the week where the squad, if you remember, the squad was getting tweeted and told and people were showing up in person and saying, go home with the connotation of go back to your country. Although most of those women are born and raised in the United States, or if not born in the United States, came here quite young, actually, and have lived almost all of their lives here. So anyway, no, to answer your question.

[41:05] Ariel Sibert: I thought you meant the Taylor Swift squad.

[41:06] Cat Rodríguez: That was a perfect fake friend analogy.

[41:10] Patrick Foley: Also that, that's, yeah, that's nowadays. To get semantic for us, like you, I think, I forget who in the introduction to this calls this Circle Jerk and This American Wife, your internet plays. Is that how you retroactively view them? Is that because they're about the internet, because they're for the internet? All of the above, neither?

[41:27] Michael Breslin: Yeah, that was a term that I came up with thinking about this way after we had made the plays when I was doing my dissertation work, because when we did the plays, we just called them plays. And then like, we were like, we're doing plays online. And then this huge Twitter discourse erupted over digital theater. Huge. It was like really active, really fiery, really at times pathetic, at times intriguing dialogue on what is theater online. The New York Times did a bunch of coverage over, is this really theater? Whatever. But I felt like internet plays, because we're probably not going to make another play in this form, like they were very of their time. And I thought internet plays was an interesting way to think of them, because yes, they were on the internet, but not always, but they were like about the internet when they weren't on the internet.

It encompasses all of it. And it also places it in a very specific time in history. The word internet also just said something about that time too, that even now, obviously we all use the internet, but it's AI and like all these other technologies are cyber plays. And we grew up with the dawn of the internet, basically, not really, but dial up and all that kind of stuff in our homes. So we're an early internet generation of people.

[42:45] Patrick Foley: It's very millennial. I wonder if any of you could take it to a petty place and name something you've seen since Circle Jerk that you've been like, that was my fucking idea. Because I have, I'm not going to say, it's not my interview. Name them.

[43:00] Michael Breslin: No.

[43:01] Patrick Foley: No.

[43:02] Michael Breslin: Name, name.

[43:03] Patrick Foley: Any trends you've seen taken off since that you feel maybe they just saw your play.

[43:09] Ariel Sibert: Internet play.

[43:10] Michael Breslin: Oh, there was one. There definitely was.

[43:12] Patrick Foley: Yeah.

[43:13] Michael Breslin: I would just say, I would say this sort of grand gesture of Evita when Rachel Zegler steps out into the public at the beginning of act two is an obvious quotation of the kind of gesture that Kat was going to do in the original Circle Jerk, but was cut. And I also think All Latina would be a great name for the Evita revival.

[43:30] Patrick Foley: I also think, yeah.

[43:31] Michael Breslin: So this is not something that anyone would have seen, but you said it was cut. Nicole Scherzinger in Sunset Boulevard was just doing drag of Kat.

[43:48] Ariel Sibert: What about the Dorian Gray?

[43:49] Patrick Foley: Absolutely.

[43:50] Michael Breslin: She came prepared.

[43:52] Patrick Foley: Come on.

[43:53] Michael Breslin: Absolutely loved it. Has there been any theater makers since that's been like you've met and been like, oh my God, I saw it. If not love, if not stole, if not hated, just, I saw it.

[44:04] Ariel Sibert: I'll say when a lot of us also teach and what's really sweet is like kids who were in high school at the time will often be really excited about it and they'd never seen anything like this. So for me, that was always, and it's not like, I don't know if I'm a big person, but that's always actually the most moving and it makes it sound ancient, but it's that it affected young people in a way that I never thought it would. It was like really special. Also, I want to say really clearly, we did not necessarily invent or pioneer many of the—

[44:33] Michael Breslin: Yes, you did.

[44:35] Patrick Foley: Audience member goes.

[44:36] Michael Breslin: Really not. We really were coming out of a lineage of artists who were working with media and live performance and streaming. And we were obsessed with many groups like the Worcester Group, like Big R Group, like a bunch of these ensembles that really generated work together and also incorporated media. So I feel like also at times, like that moment in time gets overemphasized sometimes of, oh, it was like this explosion of a certain kind of thing, which we made our own version of it, but it was like coming out of. So when I see the Dorian Gray or I see a lot of the Jamie Lloyd work, which I actually adore a lot of the Jamie Lloyd work, it's like, to me, that's also a part of the very long lineage of theater that many people have contributed to creating.

[45:21] Ariel Sibert: And we were like memeing.

[45:25] Michael Breslin: Yeah, I remember seeing a radio show when I was a sophomore at NYU where they controlled all the cues from early versions of iPhones duct tape to their wrists, you know what I mean? Which is a kind of gesture that I don't know that we'd be able to pull off now. I guess we plugged certain things into the internet.

[45:48] Patrick Foley: Your souls.

[45:49] Michael Breslin: Let's wrap this up. I wonder, hold on. Take five seconds and think about your favorite line from either play. One, two, three, four, five, cut.

[46:03] Cat Rodríguez: I identify as alive, I think is great. Something that I quote quite often, just becoming the Circle Jerk myself is, hi Michael, whenever I see Michael. That's what it's from. It's from me. It's my own line reading.

[46:21] Ariel Sibert: I'm afraid to reference.

[46:22] Cat Rodríguez: Or not reference, put it in a blender, yeah.

[46:28] Michael Breslin: Mine is, you don't know what I go through at night, which was written by Kim Richards and re-appropriated and re-contextualized and re-collaged into the work.

[46:41] Ariel Sibert: I do.

[46:43] Michael Breslin: Because for gays, intimacy looks like hate to red.

[46:49] Cat Rodríguez: Yeah, there's a lot. I do think, nevertheless, I identify as alive to myself every day. Also, repression is the only thing that leads to great gay art and some fungi microaggressed in amoeba grow up. R.I.P. Just as for the krill line, I am the whale and you are my krill.

[47:11] Ariel Sibert: You guys, I got on Lexapro in March and ever since then my memory has been shot. So I don't, I actually, no, I saw Michael two days ago and I was like, you look so tan. And he was like, you say that every time you see me, it's a line and Circle Jerk.

[47:27] Patrick Foley: Can I do a cut one?

[47:29] Michael Breslin: Please.

[47:30] Patrick Foley: This is from Workshoppers and I always loved, which was, it was about, there's a whole sequence about the Titanic, a conspiracy theory about the Titanic and it was like, yeah. And then it was like, and then the asterisk went, and then the Guggenheim was in the Titanic and he left and we know that he's gay because he founded a museum in the shape of a chode.

[47:45] Michael Breslin: Incredible. Incredible writing.

[47:47] Patrick Foley: Hold on. I have got to ask. Why was there a Titanic thing? And why was it cut?

[47:51] Michael Breslin: Oh, whoa. We can, everyone wondering why there was a Titanic thing and why it was cut can ask these people IRL or online on the internet, on the cyber webs.

[48:02] Cat Rodríguez: My line, of course, Michael, it's from you. It's that gay men born after the Second World War are disgusting.

[48:07] Patrick Foley: Are trash.

[48:08] Cat Rodríguez: That's why I don't let them touch me.

[48:14] Patrick Foley: I'm going to go to broadwayworld.com and figure out who Rory is. I don't post, I just read.

[48:21] Michael Breslin: Anyway, I want to thank the Fake Friends, Patrick Foley, Ariel Sibert, Michael Breslin, Cat Rodríguez, and Rory Pelsue. Thank you so much for doing this. Congrats on the book.

[48:30] Juan A. Ramírez: Thank you, Juan.

[48:36] Juan A. Ramírez: And we are back. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Drama Book Show. Coming up next, we'll explore The Jean Benet Game, a play by award-winning playwright and screenwriter Tori Keenan-Zelt that examines the complicated relationship between true crime, childhood, and the violence and grief women are often discouraged from discussing. The story follows best friends Molly and Ray, who, as 12-year-olds, secretly reenacted the murder of Jean Benet Ramsey during sleepovers. Twenty years later, Ray is working as a guidance counselor at their former middle school, trying to leave the past behind. After Molly's death, her 12-year-old daughter discovers their old playbook, and the game begins again.

Joining the conversation is moderator Katie Zapanta, a Filipino-American dramaturg, producer, and theatrical literary agent focused on new work development. The discussion also features actors Kylie McQuayle and Molly Carden. So remember, follow us on Instagram at Drama Book Show Podcast. Follow our Eventbrite at Drama Bookshop. And remember, all the books we talk about can be found here at the Bookshop. And so can we. And we will see you at the Bookshop.