New Play “Hazing U” Brings Fraternity Drama to the Stage
Noah Golden
Zachary Harris Martin has been an actor for almost all his life. The Canadian performer grew up doing theater in his native Toronto and later studied at Sarah Lawrence College. Since graduation, he’s worked steadily, performing in Off-Broadway shows, regional musicals, summer stock productions and staged readings. With “Hazing U: A Modern Greek Tragedy” Martin has added a new column to his resume: playwright.
The play, which will premiere at the end of 2019 as part of New York Theater Festival’s Winterfest, was inspired by a slew of articles Martin kept seeing about scandals happening on college campuses, including the recent case of a Penn State student who died during a frat party. “Fraternity hazing is an epidemic in the United States and Canada,” Martin said during a phone interview, “It’s talked about a lot in the media but, surprisingly, I don’t think this issue has been explored in the theater before. A play about bros is very rare.”
To rectify that, Martin decided to start writing his own about a year ago. After three readings, after which he work-shopped and revised the piece, the play is finally ready for an audience. Although he was tight-lipped about the plot, Martin explained that “Hazing U” takes place during one night at a frat house during ‘hell week,’ the initiation trial period where hazing its most severe. By the morning, things have gone horribly wrong for the frat brothers.
I spoke to Martin during their first week of rehearsals and he was ecstatic about the progress they’ve already made. “I'm just blown away by the production team and the talent of the cast,” he said, “I could really tell that every single person in the room was really, really behind it.”
Martin is also starring in the premiere production of “Hazing U” but says the jump from writer to performer has been an easy transition. His writing style has definitely been influenced by the years of performing other people’s dialogue and reading his favorite playwrights. “I really love Annie Baker [“Circle Mirror Transformation,” “The Flick”],” he told me, “her work is so conversational, so fluid and natural that you wouldn't even think it’s a scripted play.” That style is one he wished to immolate with his own work. The dialogue not just rings truer to the ears of contemporary audience members, Martin says, but makes it easier for actors to give natural performances.
Part of making the dialogue authentic wasn’t just “adding ‘likes’ and ‘ums’ and pauses” but making sure he didn’t spare any details in softening the toxic masculinity that can run rampant in frat culture. “Some of the language is very offensive,” he told me, “originally, I was very concerned about that but after the table read, the feedback I got was ‘the whole point of it is to be brutally real and if you hold back, you're not going to be authentic.’” Although the resulting play is “very, very disturbing,” Martin said he hopes it starts a conversation about a timely and important issue.
Although Martin has only started rehearsals for “Hazing U,” he’s excited and confident about the play’s future. “The next step will be getting this out there into the world and seeing how well it does with the festival. I’m definitely very open to feedback and recommendations from the audience. I can definitely see it changing,” he told me. After the New York Theater Festival, Martin says he hopes the play will be produced regionally or in New York. “Broadway is a bit far off,” he said with a smile I could hear over the phone, “but I’m pretty passionate about it. The ultimate goal is to go big or go home.”