How the Pulitzer Prize finalist ‘Circle Jerk’ dismantles and remixes the queer agenda
Welcome to Curtain Call, our mostly queer take on the latest theater openings on Broadway and beyond.If Circle Jerk sounds salacious, it’s only because co-creators Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley have tapped into a hypersexualized agenda propagated by those attacking the queer community and those within it.
Nobody is left unscathed in the Pulitzer Prize-nominated, live, three-act multimedia theatrical installation that disrupts the disrupters.Welcome to Gaymen Island, where Jurgen and Lord Baby Bussy plan on taking over the world by creating an AI meme that will manipulate your mind into thinking you have the power of free will.
In the prologue, a maniacal troll prepares sets the scene:“So let me tell a tale of a story of a plotWhere humans learn the power and contagion of a thought.”Patrick, an aspiring actor, enters the scene along with his BFF Michael, who eventually unearths the plan about to be hatched.
Breslin and Foley play with language as much as technology, frequently going topsy-turvy with references to academia and pop culture.“I need you to code switch from faggotry to tragedy!” says Jurgen when he thinks he’s been canceled.
