Courtesy of Kate Ortiz

“Fuck the Goat,” Chesed Chap’s ’25 senior thesis, opened this past weekend in the Morse College Theater. It is a 70-minute, no-intermission exploration of male friendship, faint homoeroticism and the sacrificial nature of brotherhood.

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.