Make It Work

with Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley of Fake Friends

August 4 – August 10

In this workshop, participants will create new work for the American stage and/or internet in collaboration with the facilitators and other students. The workshop is based on the theater-generating process of Fake Friends, a theater and media company known for our live-streamed and queer comedies. Following in multimedia performance traditions, from the Wooster Group to the Ridiculous Theatrical Company to the Real Housewives, the company mashes up different performance modalities and technologies to unveil frictions, comedies, paradoxes, hypocrisies, and possibilities–– reality television confessionals, classical dramatic texts, ASMR, lip sync videos, makeup tutorials, and digital music production. Make It Work challenges participants to excavate their own experiences with contemporary life to generate original performances or plays.

The week-long workshop will immerse participants in a rigorous artistic and physical daily practice of ensemble-generated and solo-driven work. The ensemble will respond to a canonical play, which Michael and Patrick will assign prior to their arrival (past texts include Hedda Gabler and Vieux Carré). We will guide the ensemble in our process of grappling with, screaming at, dragging (and ultimately learning from) the historic work. Participants also enter the week with new ideas for individually created theater projects. In a laboratory setting, Michael and Patrick will guide each artist in performance critiques and real-time workshopping to excavate and, potentially, radically reframe their approach to their material. Underpinning much of the work will be a practice of self-scripting, writing, and improvising from a place of autobiography.

As a group, instructors and participants will confront questions of dramaturgy, acting, directing, and playwriting: How do contemporary technologies like social media, live-stream video, theatrical projections, and digital sound impact how we create contemporary theater? What modes of performance emerge from interacting with these technologies, and how can they be used to create new dramaturgies and structures? How do artists represent “the self” in an age when avatars, aliases, finstas, and deep fakes rule the online world?

We seek artists who have:

  • A new idea for a play, video, livestream, or performance
  • A history with and passion for theatermaking as a writer, actor, director, dramaturg, or designer
  • A curiosity about how to expand, refine, shake up, and complicate their work
  • A sense of danger

Through the week, each artist will receive:

  • Three to five group work sessions
  • Two solo work sessions for the ensemble
  • A private one-on-one meeting with the facilitators
  • A short presentation of one element of their new piece on the final day

The goal of the workshop is to create a laboratory in which participants receive and share tools to make work that feels personal and unique to their contemporary experience of living in our mediated era. Thus, we will tailor the workshop to the specific bodies and identities that come into the space. By the end of the workshop, students will share either solo pieces or collaborative pieces, which we respond to and suggest how they can develop further––with the dream and hope that they will.

Past participants have gone on to present or further develop their works generated in the workshop at the Exponential Festival, Frigid Festival, the Civilians, the Brick, Prelude Festival, Dixon Place, and more.

I am so grateful for this experience. As someone who had stepped away from performance and creative projects for a few years, I feel legitimately invigorated and inspired. The group of people in this workshop were able to create such meaningful work with the expert and irreverent guidance of Michael and Patrick. In five days, we cackled with laughter, danced, got weird, and queered everything. I’m obsessed.

-Gabriela Trigo-McIntyre (2022 workshop participant)

Cost

Workshop with standard double-occupancy room with early bird discount: $900
The early bird discount (10%) expires on April 2.

Workshop with single-occupancy room: $1,500
There is no early bird discount for single-occupancy rooms.

Note: A $400 deposit is required when you register for a double occupancy room. A $750 deposit is required for a single occupancy room. The remainder of your balance will be due upon your arrival at Celebration Barn.

Registration

We use Humanitix for you to fill out your application and submit your deposit.

  • Head to Humanitix and select your reservation type.
  • Fill out the application questions.
  • Complete your purchase.
Register here

After completing your purchase, a member of our team will be in touch to confirm the status of your application within 5-7 business days.

Note: A $400 deposit is required to reserve your space for a double occupancy room in a workshop. A $750 deposit is required to reserve your space in a single occupancy room.The remainder of your balance will be paid upon your arrival at Celebration Barn. See our General Info Page and Student Life for more information about the workshops and learn more about

  • Housing
  • Travel
  • Refund/Cancellation Policy
  • What to bring

Images

Production Photographs from Fake Friends’ This American Wife (2021), featuring Michael Breslin, Patrick Foley, and Jakeem Powell. Photos: Nina Goodheart

Michael Breslin

Michael Breslin is a writer and performer whose play Circle Jerk, co-written with Patrick Foley, is a 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist. With Foley, he is a creative director of Fake Friends, a theater and media company who also recently developed and produced the acclaimed internet show This American Wife, which was featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and more. They are commissioned by Ars Nova, Seaview Productions, and FourthWall Productions. The duo is developing two television shows. Recently, he executive produced and co-wrote the book to Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, which raised $2 million for the Actors Fund.

Photo by Patrick Foley

Patrick Foley

Patrick Foley is an actor and writer working in theater, film, and TV. His play Circle Jerk, co-written with Michael Breslin, is a 2021 Pulitzer Prize Finalist. With Breslin, he is a creative director of Fake Friends, a theater and media company credited with pioneering digital theater, who recently developed and produced This American Wife, which was featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, and ArtForum, and named as one of the “Best Performances of 2021” by the New Yorker. He executive produced and co-wrote the book for Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, which raised $2 million for the Actors Fund. Foley and Breslin are commissioned by Seaview Productions, FourthWall Productions, and Ars Nova, where they are resident artists. They are developing two television projects.

Photo by David Noles

About Fake Friends

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 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, New York. 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 it “an ingenious hybrid of stage and screen” in the LA Times. Michael Schulman named it as one of “The Best Performances of 2021” in the New Yorker. Fake Friends has previously taught workshops at Yale College, Wesleyan University, Queens College, and Hamilton College. They have been guest lecturers at Columbia University, Amherst College, and The University of Chicago.