Circle Jerk is a queer comedy about white gay supremacy, a homopessimist hybrid of yesterday’s live theater and today’s livestream (set in tomorrow’s news cycle). It tells the story of gay, right-wing trolls and the algorithms they invent to spread their gay agenda and take over the Discourse…and then, the world. In an era when truth is dead and fact is fiction, Circle Jerk is a realistic comedy about a bleakly farcical reality.
We live in a world of deep fakes, fake news, viral memes, and mainstream drag. We’re interconnected by our millions of daily digital (mis)information exchanges but still report feeling (self-)isolated. So where do we go for a little comfort, a little beauty, a little harmless illusion? To our bedrooms, to our screens, to watch our stories. But those stories, from the ones on I Love Lucy to the ones on the local news to the ones on Instagram Live, reach out and touch American people and American politics beyond the screen.
Historically, queer theater has played with identity, staging the joys of artificiality and the crises of attempted authenticity. It confronts our aversions and attractions, putting the Ridiculous and the humiliated on the pedestal where “straight plays” enshrined perfection, Realism, and truth. Queer theater flips scripts. But what can it offer us when it feels like the world has the lost the plot?
Circle Jerk springs from these culturally contagious screened and staged stories, and takes on their historical ability to make us laugh our way into tragedy.
In Circle Jerk, politics (made in the bedroom) and pleasure (found on a screen) empowers 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 group-shaming of groupthink, popular among young, white men in the US.
This circle jerk pits our collective gaze at our inherited supremacies and the white, dimpled underbelly of our cult of culture. Co-writers Michael and Patrick, who are nevertheless still willing to identify as white, gay, and men, with collaborators Catherine María Rodríguez and Ariel Sibert, attempt an (impossible?) exhibition, an experiment in exposing violence without reproducing harm.
The show combines quick changes and deep fakes, theatricality and the post-COVID livestream, to take on the laptop-orchestrated shitshow that is online life and its political discontents. The result is a new form made of old parts: An experimental film. A hijacked Instagram story. A queer, deranged live-audience sitcom featuring Gen-Z TikToks and Millennial memes.
The mark of a bunch of queer theater artists working together in the time of COVID, of uprising, of our lives.
-- from the production website
