Chap’s play follows traditional absurdist theatrical convention to discover the lengths four boys — Drew, Micheal, Toby and Errol — will go to complete a pledge task: fucking a goat.

Chap’s play focuses on characters Michael — Wyatt Fishman ’27 — a brash, masculine, carries-a-big-stick personality; Drew — Leo Levitt ’28 — his level headed high school friend; Toby, a conscientious but out-of-place personality — Shivraj Singh ’28 — and Errol — Harry Lowitz ’28 — a comedic pledge consumed by the shame of his own virginity and the allure of male comradery. 

Among a media climate that has seen the resurgence of stories about female-friendships like “Girls” or “Sex and the City,” “Fuck the Goat” prompts a lot of reflection on the dearth of friendship stories between men. Would we even watch a show about four guys just talking to each other? 

Most friendship-centric media featuring men revolves around adolescence: “Stand by Me,” “Goonies,” “The Sandlot.” But why are there so few depictions of what these spirited adolescent friendships might have grown into as their characters move into early adulthood? 

One of the play’s strongest elements is Toby being explicitly gay. Toby regales the other boys with the story of his high school girlfriend, only to reveal that he’s actually only dated her because it felt like an apt performance of social ritual. 

The girlfriend, strategically on Chap’s part, is never named. Toby says that he was never in love with her; though in the same breath, claims that “It would’ve killed me to not have her around.”

This sparks an immense debate about the boundaries between intimate friendship and romantic love — and Errol’s expositive interest in Toby’s high school sex life. Singh’s character also sticks out as the most nuanced: a convention-obsessed frat bro who was somehow raised by liberal Californians who do tantric yoga and use charcoal toothpaste. 

Toby’s character as a whole is subtle but invokes a deep curiosity about how he has become the person he is in the play. How could someone raised by such progressive parents still become trapped by such a monolithic performance of masculinity? 

While Chap only includes one openly gay character, Toby’s sexuality presents the audience with a kind of red herring. She tricks the audience into ascribing heterosexual identities to the other boys because there couldn’t possibly be more than one gay character in a four-person fraternity play. 

Because of this, viewers nearly miss the homoerotic undercurrent of Micheal and Drew’s friendship. After Errol pukes on Micheal during a game of poker, Drew takes off his shirt to clean up after them.

Drew’s urge to expend his own resources to clean up after Micheal and Errol — an action later compounded by a monologue about Micheal’s lack of care for their friendship — presents Drew as deeply domestic. 

His character ends up being pretty derivative of Ralph from Lord of the Flies who, even in the face of world collapse, can only bring himself to focus on his friendship with Jack. 

Both the best writing and acting in the show is one of Errol’s monologues — the crux of which is essentially, “Why do we have to pretend to like each other all the time?”  

The commentary on the social performance to which fraternities commit themselves, making the brotherhood seem bigger than it is. The play also points to the ritual of social performance that men commit to in individual friendships; why is the axis of so many male friendships suffering? And why do men go to such lengths to impress each other? 

“Fuck the Goat” prompts us to wonder at the efforts and stakes involved in male friendship. Men may not seek out community due to necessity, but why must men take elephant walks and eat live goldfish to make friends? 

In her playwright’s note, Chap concedes that “[her] own friendships with boys are a slim testament to what they have with each other.” Much of what Chap finds so mystifying about male friendship is her lack of interiority to male friendships compared to those between women. 

Even in close friendships with men, she writes, her experiences with them are initially screened through her female identity. “Fuck the Goat” is a best guess at the landscape of male platonic intimacy — a faint but protective estimate of something so enigmatic you can only comprehend if you live it yourself.

The post REVIEW: In Fuck the Goat, “Sex and the City” meets “Lord of the Flies” in a frat basement appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Columbia-Walsh’s ambitious interpretation of “Fear and Trembling” serves as a dramatic companion to Kierkegaard’s lyric, written under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio.

The text is a philosophical exploration of the biblical verse Genesis 22, in which an angel instructs Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. It uncovers tensions between faith, logic and ethics.

“Fear and Trembling” is a nuanced, loving testament to drama, faith and existentialist philosophy that melds the intellectual with the romantic. It is also the culmination of Columbia-Walsh’s journey with the text, an intellectual and spiritual exorcism spanning two years of study.

In Columbia-Walsh’s interpretation, three professors, each representing different schools of thought, study the verse and play Abraham within a cast-within-the-cast. The general physical setting is twofold. First, there is a non-descript university where the three protagonists converse. Secondly, there is 2000 B.C. Canaan, where the three variations on Genesis 22 are explored.

Kierkegaard, a Danish 19th-century philosopher and theologian, is considered the father of existentialism. “Fear and Trembling” is widely considered the entry point to Kierkegaard’s intellectual corpus on faith.

The text issues four fallacious interpretations of the verse and dissects each; at its core, “Fear and Trembling” encourages viewers to take a leap of faith from the cliff of logic.

The Dome is an abnormal space for theater. It lives up to its name, a broad oval of a room floored by faintly lacquered hardwood. Audiences are placed in a somewhat unconventional seating arrangement: two rows of four concentric arcs interrupted by four walkways.

In part due to this space, the play carefully incorporates a metatheatrical environment where the cast is never truly offstage. The precarious acoustics make actors’ footsteps a presence at all moments, necessitating character be upheld and dynamic contrast in line delivery made clear. Both were executed excellently.

“Fear and Trembling” attracted an audience across the academic spectrum, from STEM students to Directed Studies professors to North America’s top Kierkegaard scholars. As a storied playwright, Columbia-Walsh knows his audience. He uses comic relief to distill moments of heady academic dialogue that reflect the philosophical content as succinct humor. 

In Act 1, scene 1, the spotlight shined on a rigid Fr. Malone, played by Columbia-Walsh himself, who knows when to project his voice, filling the hall with booming praise of Abraham’s unwavering faith. But he also knows when to keep his silence. The space between his sentences is prolonged in moments of tension, forcing the audience to tremble in the awkwardness of absence. 

The spotlight again shined on the opposite side of the stage, revealing a spiffy Dr. Ezekiel Young, played by José Sarmiento ’25. He is mid-lecture on modern rationalism, lamenting reason’s fall from grace in philosophical tradition. Playing an impassioned, erudite professor, Sarmiento’s contained voice is a stark antithesis to Columbia-Walsh’s congregational stupor.

The ensuing narrative interplay and development between Dr. Young and Fr. Malone is perhaps Columbia-Walsh’s most creative and effective narrative device in “Fear and Trembling.” Fr. Malone speaks to more theologically inclined audiences, while Dr. Young speaks to the secularly inclined. Their on-stage interactions reveal where each character fails.

The characters’ flaws also represent the flaws of the doctrines they represent. 

Dr. Young’s wife, Mary — played by Nneka Moweta ’27 — leaves him because she says his condescending attitude and obsession with ideas have clouded their marriage. Dr. Young tries to reason with her, but in doing so, he mistakenly goes beyond love. Faith and love begin where thinking leaves off. Columbia-Walsh expresses this notion with great tact throughout the show.

Fr. Malone’s reliance on faith hinders him from connecting emotionally with his colleagues. In attempting to counsel Dr. Young through his romantic plight, Fr. Malone’s advice to him is brusque: “Expect her back.”

However, there is a flaw in this foil depicting faithful concord and romantic dissonance — audiences have little reason to care about Mary Young. In the more than two-hour runtime, Mary Young has sparse interaction with Ezekiel. Other than simply being Dr. Young’s love interest, Mary Young comes just short of compelling.

Overall, the play’s reliance on biblical narrative and intellectual dialogue overlooks what could be one of the most captivating facets of the play: its depiction of love between two people.

By contrast, Professor Spengler, played by Wesleyan undergraduate Alex Glotzer, reads more as a Machiavellian realist. He represents the ethical struggle between force and faith.

While Spengler seems to be a mediator between the two poles of Malone and Young in the first act, the second act makes it clear Spengler belongs to a deviant third ideology, one that values “movers and shakers.” Ironically, he can do nothing to get through to his son, whom he loves dearly but has not spoken to in years. 

Professor Spengler is steadfast in his beliefs and, yet, is powerless to enact the force he espouses to regain his son. He falsely interprets Abraham as a tragic hero compelled to kill his son, when in fact, Abraham faces no tragedy at all. He must merely maintain faith, not enforce divine will. Thus, Professor Spengler’s misreading of Genesis 22 partly reflects his mistakes with his son. 

The female characters display different levels of metatheatricality. For instance, Sarah, played by Alika Osadolor-Hernandez ’25, remains uncomfortably fantastical and deeply engaged in the suspension of disbelief at all moments, whereas Tillie, played by Emma Fusco ’26, appears to be somewhat aware of the audience’s presence. 

While the show can be a stimulating intellectual exercise, the two-hour and ten-minute runtime may detract from audience engagement.

In putting together the show, Columbia-Walsh acknowledged the material’s academic and literary complexity with lightness. He notes that the audience for any show is whoever comes to see it, meaning the experience is certain to vary tremendously. His incredible performance as Fr. Malone demonstrated an awareness of his identity as a playwright and director in tandem with his identity as an actor.

Clear lighting is key for making lengthy and complex dramatic works visually engaging. The Dome is a demanding location for a theatrical production, but the lighting was lackluster. 

All actors, except for Sarah, took on two, three, four or even five roles. While lighting changes attempted to signal shifts in chronology, narratives and characters, there weren’t enough or sufficient lighting cues. Further, as there was no true backstage, it was at times difficult to understand when actors were staying in character or becoming new ones.

Although Columbia-Walsh’s production is incredibly well-choreographed, a space with better lighting would spotlight the riveting scene composition.

The play remains loyal to the main tensions and themes that Kierkegaard’s philosophical treatise explores. It could benefit from digressing further from its source material to make some characters more compelling to audiences. At the same time, the play makes masterful use of dramaturgical techniques like comic relief, a literal romantic allegory and the breaking of the fourth wall to ground the show in reality.

The Dome at Schwarzman Center opened in fall 2022.

The post REVIEW: Columbia-Walsh’s “Fear and Trembling” is an ingenious, faithful but challenging take on Kierkegaard appeared first on Yale Daily News.

These student groups, most of which were not present at Yale’s overall extracurricular bazaar, fall under Dwight Hall, which focuses specifically on funneling Yale resources and student energy into the New Haven community. Student Co-Coordinator Rena Liu ’26 told the News that Dwight Hall’s social impetus is composed of two main goals: addressing the history of inequity in Yale’s relationship with New Haven and how students can use their careers to serve the public good. 

“Community members should feel just as welcomed here as Yale students,” Avery DeWitt ’26, another student co-coordinator, told the News. “The entire point of service is to support one another and so many of us here at Yale are not from New Haven — one of the most important parts of being here and being a Yale student is not only to consider that relationship but to give back to it.”  

Each group featured at the bazaar was dedicated to a particular social policy niche or sphere of the New Haven community. Many groups echoed the idea that Yale is “a bubble,” with New Haven residents being physically close to campus but having no emotional tie to the University. 

Organizations like the Yale Urban Improvement Corp, or YUIC, are seeking to change this by creating opportunities for New Haven public school students to engage with the campus.

“The most important part is having them come to one of our centers. It’s important that they have a space to be comfortable in and somewhere they belong as well,” said Jesse Lawless ’25, a coordinator for YUIC. “It’s a great space that they know they can come into if they ever have homework or questions.”

Another concern that many groups identified as a core issue for New Haven was resource disparity.

Group leaders from Yale Migration Alliance and Yale Undergraduate Prison Project said that while lack of resources is a symptom of many problems in New Haven, resource distribution needs to be coupled with support and systematic realignment or “upstream work” to hold real weight.

“A lot of the work that Yale does right now is reactive to problems like houselessness but as we combat those we also want to be doing upstream work,” Zoe Kanter ’27, a First-Years in Support of New Haven coordinator, said. “If we can get socks and shoes to someone who needs them that’s great but if we can prevent someone from needing socks and shoes that’s even better.” 

Dwight Hall has also pledged to continuously renew Yale’s commitment to New Haven and ensure the University continues to make equitable investments in the city.

According to Roan Hollander ’26, another First-Years in Support of New Haven coordinator, while Yale’s “bubble effect” on New Haven makes the prospect of getting involved in the community relatively intimidating, students should form individual relationships with the community that extend beyond Yale. 

“[Students’] relationship with the city doesn’t have to be defined by whatever Yale’s relationship with New Haven is — it doesn’t have to be clouded by however the university as a whole operates,” said Hollander.

Dwight Hall is located at 67 High St. 

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