Fake Friends is a Brooklyn-based theater and media company led by Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley. Cat Rodríguez and Ariel Sibert are core members.
Fake Friends work together, sometimes. When they do, they usually mix and remix original text with material drawn from modern drama, pop culture, method acting, technology, and dance, pastiching from performance forms like reality TV and capital-R Realism. Through thick and thin, Fake Friends push personal, political, and theatrical boundaries, negotiating the screens and prosceniums that dominate our daily lives.
Before the pandemic, they worked with screens on stage. Their work has been presented by Ars Nova, NYTW Next Door, the Prelude Festival, Exponential Festival, Little Theater, and more.
Beginning in June 2020, they began experimenting with the stage on screen. Circle Jerk, a critically-acclaimed live-stream hybrid theater experience produced with Caroline Gart and Jeremy O. Harris, was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Drama and Best of 2020 by Vulture (Helen Shaw), Exeunt (Best COVID live streams, Nicole Serratore), The Playlist (Kyle Turner), and The Miami Times (Juan Barquin). The work was nominated for a Drama League Award 2021 in “Outstanding Digital Theater, Individual Performance.”
Their next digital work was This American Wife, which live-streamed from a mansion in Great Neck, NY. Juan A. Ramírez for the New York Times profiled the show as “a semi-improvised, high-concept dialectic on identity and ‘realness.’” Charles McNulty called “an ingenious hybrid of stage and screen” in the LA Times.
FOUNDING MEMBERS
Michael Breslin (creative director) is a writer, performer, and producer who works in theater, film, and television. His plays have been presented by New York Theater Workshop, Ars Nova, Exponential Festival, Queer New York International Arts Festival, Dixon Place, and the Yale Cabaret. Outside of Fake Friends, some of his favorite collaborators include Em Weinstein (Arden, Candace), Jeremy O. Harris (…the feels, kms), and Amauta Marston-Firmino (YELL!). With Patrick Foley (can you believe it?), Seaview Productions, and Jeremy O. Harris, he recently co-executive produced and co-wrote the book for Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, which raised $2 million for the Actors Fund.
Education: Yale School of Drama (MFA dramaturgy, DFA fellow), Hamilton College. He has trained with Carmen Morgan and artEquity, and through Hamilton’s Bristol Fellowship 2013-14 he traveled to Poland, Brazil, and Indonesia exploring how different people use gender in performance.
Patrick Foley (creative director) is an actor and writer working in theater, film, and TV. He has performed at New York Theatre Workshop, Ars Nova, Incubator Arts, Judson Memorial Church, the Tank, the McKittrick, Chautauqua Theatre Company, Yale Repertory Theatre, Shakespeare Theatre Company and more. As a writer, his work has been produced at New York Theatre Workshop, Prelude 2019, The Exponential Festival, Little Theatre at Dixon Place, and Ars Nova where he is a Makers Lab resident artist. He received the 2019-2020 Davey Foundation grant for his short film Presence Work, to filmed in 2021. Patrick was awarded the Constance Welch Memorial Scholarship at Yale School of Drama where he received an MFA in Acting in 2018. He also holds a BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. www.patrickmfoley.com
Catherine María "Cat" Rodríguez serves collaboration, community, and lqqks wherever the art takes her and whatever stage it’s in. Cat’s craft entails bringing discernment to decision-making and Joy to the process. Black / Latinx feminisms as well as collectivist organizing methods fundamentally inform her arts practice and pathways through the world. She's a "people person" with a politic and a love for the ridiculous. A freelance artist, she considers herself a nomad but always names New Orleans and Nicaragua home.
www.catlikemeow.com Twitter: @latinadramaturg
Past creds: The Public, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, O’Neill National Playwrights’ Conference, NYTW Next Door, Ars Nova ANT Fest, The Old Globe, Two River Theater, Yale Rep, Baltimore Center Stage, El Círculo Teatral (México), Borderlands, and Steppenwolf, among others.
Ariel Sibert (dramaturg) is a dramaturg, a producer of film and performances, and a critic. She is an associate professor of Theater Studies at Quinnipiac University, a Teaching Fellow at the Yale School of Drama, Yale University, and a visiting critic in the department of Graphic Design at the Yale School of Art. Her collaborations with Fake Friends and artists Hito Steyerl, Sara Cwynar, Savas Boyraz, Ayham Ghraowi, Evan Yionoulis, and Shadi Ghaheri have been presented at the Park Avenue Armory, the Performa 2021 Biennial, New York Theatre Workshop, BAM, Ars Nova, Exponential Festival, Dixon Place, Spectrum Arts, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Yale Repertory Theatre, and Theater Mitu.
In the past, she was the Associate Editor of the journal Theater (Duke UP) and taught undergraduates in the Department of Theater Studies at Yale University. Her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Los Angeles Review of Books, Theater, American Theater, and Text and Presentation. Education: Yale School of Drama, MFA Dramaturgy, DFA Fellow; Princeton University, BA Art History.
RESIDENT COMPANY
Rory Pelsue (Resident Director) is a director of new and classic plays, musicals, and operas. With Fake Friends, he directed the live-stream productions of This American Wife and Pulitzer Prize Finalist and Drama League Nominee Circle Jerk. Recent and upcoming credits include the world premieres of Read to Me at Portland Stage, The Show on the Roof at Boise Contemporary Theater, and Deathbed Edition at Ars Nova ANT Fest; workshops of Circle Jerk at Ars Nova Makers Lab and Alumni Relations at South Coast Repertory Theater; and assistant directing at the Metropolitan Opera, Roundabout Theater Company, McCarter Theater, and Yale Repertory Theater Colombari. Artistic leadership experience includes serving as artistic director or associate artistic director of Yale Cabaret, Yale Summer Cabaret, MaineStage Shakespeare, and Oxbridge Opera. Originally from Newburyport, Massachusetts, Rory received his MFA in directing from the Yale School of Drama, where he received the Julian Milton Kaufman Memorial Prize for directing (rorypelsue.com)
HISTORY & PROCESS
Michael, Patrick, Cat, and Ariel met as graduate students in a vocational school in Connecticut. Given the circumstances, they hit it off (or pretended to until they actually did).
Fake Friends locate themselves as queer theater artists—more specifically, as gay, queer, and straight-”passing” people—more specifically, as one actor and three dramaturgs who swap roles and wigs according to the occasion. They work in the lineage of queer theater that arouses the crises and delights of artificiality.
Dramaturgy, in its myriad manifestations and contortions, serves as the critical bedrock of their collaboration: a sense of critical rigor, self-critique, and a love for research, as well as giddy depravity, undergird their collaborations. Acting, in its myriad manifestations and contortions, also serves as an entry point to their process.
The company adapts their process for each project and invites additional artists, performers and technicians to collaborate on particular works. Often but not always, they generate work through improvisation, collage, and found text, rapidly oscillating between non-hierarchical communitarianism and deeply hierarchical screeching.
They have taught workshops for undergraduates at Hamilton College, Wesleyan University, and Yale University.