The Fratrilogy is a three-part performance investigation into college frat culture and its metaphoric representation of contemporary masculinity.  The trilogy features raw performances by real frat boys, dramatic re-enactments, video documentation, and drunken party stunts constructed as performance art. The three performances are structured in the arc of a frat house party. Sometimes unbearably raucous, and other times painfully intimate, the piece offers no easy answers when placing the audience in the often overwhelming position of having to navigate this extreme world of alpha-masculinity. How much do they wish to engage in the fracas and to what extent are they repelled by it? From rites of initiation, hazings, keggers to candid revelations on the nature of manhood, sexuality, and fraternity, the trilogy weaves the fantasies of the subjects with the realities of their frat lives to create an equally poignant and horrifying portrait of youthful masculinity.

Act 1: Takes Two Men to Make a Brother (the pre-drink)
Harbourfront Centre’s Studio Theatre, Toronto
HATCH: emerging performance projects
April 6-7, 2009

Conception: Jordan Tannahill
Direction: Nathan Schwartz
Featuring: Cody Campanale, Lucas Carravetta, Alexander Carson, Cameron Rufelds, Jeremie Saunders
Technical Direction: Rebecca Powell
Assistant Technical Direction: Benjamin Carson
Lighting Design: Nick Rose

5 frat boys invite the audience into a recreation of their rec-room onstage to share a keg and talk about the inner-workings of their house, their dreams, fears, desires, and views on masculinity and sexuality. This play-within-a-play was created by the boys themselves. To start off the trilogy, here it is from the horses’ mouth…


 

Act 2: Ragnarok Out with Your Cock Out! (the party)
The Theatre Centre, Toronto
Scotiabank Nuit Blanche
October 3, 2009

Conception: Jordan Tannahill
Direction: Nathan Schwartz
Featuring: Cody Campanale, Lucas Carravetta, Alexander Carson, Cameron Rufelds, and dozens of assorted Toronto fraternity and sorority members
Technical Direction: Nick Rose
Stage Management: Acey Rowe

Five frat houses are tasked with recreating the world’s most famous performance pieces (for the pleasure of Nuit Blanche art-going crowds). This 12-hour immersive frat party-performance-social experiment oscillates raucously from the unscripted manic of cock rock bands, inter-frat house competitions, one-on-one showdowns of masculine superiority in a central sumo ring, and the odd practical joke or initiation ceremony gone terribly, terribly wrong…

Act 3: Michael Kruger, This One’s For You (the morning after)
Coming the summer of 2010

Conception and Performance by Jordan Tannahill
Based on recordings of two dozen anonymous fraternity brothers

After one of their own is found hanging by a necktie in his bedroom, dozens of anonymous fraternity brothers deconstruct the incident and reflect upon their own culpability in a series of disarmingly intimate audio recordings. These are played overtop one solo performer’s attempt to drink an entire keg of beer. The trilogy’s devastating (and inevitable) conclusion.

Available for touring.

Takes Two Men to Make a Brother in Eye Weekly
(click to be taken to the article)

August 6 - 16 @ 8pm (except August 10 @ 6pm and August 15 @ 10pm)

Rolly’s Garage (124 Ossington Ave; 3 blocks north of Queen St. West)
SummerWorks Theatre Festival
$10

Conception and Direction: Jordan Tannahill
Featuring: Adam Burgess, Sarah Finn, Tawiah M'carthy, Amelia Sargisson, and Marika Schwandt
Technical Direction: Rebecca Powell
Assistant Technical Direction: Nick Rose
Set Design: Julia Chemij
Hand-Drawn Animation: Bruce Tannahill


The Art of Catching Pigeons by Torchlight invites you into a massive blanket fort where you will come face to face with various real-life figures from Toronto ’s night shift. Through projection, shadow puppetry, and a-capella singing, the secrets, desires, and dreams of high school janitors, male prostitutes, Tim Horton’s workers, and obstetricians come to life. Part DIY-planetarium, part anthropological mystery tour… it’s a sleepover ghost story in your best friend’s basement, this time with all of Toronto invited.

Awards and Reviews
The Spotlight Award (SummerWorks 2009)
“NNNN” – Critics Pick, NOW Magazine (click here)
“…a captivating performance” – Eye Weekly (click here)
“…a unique, fascinating piece of theatre” – The Torontoist (click here)

June 27, 2009

Canadian Stage Company’s Berkley Street Theatre (26 Berkley St.)
Festival of Ideas and Creation
Free

Created by Jordan Tannahill
Co-created and Featuring: Bryde MacLean, Tawiah M'carthy, and Marika Schwandt

"…well you would get up there and you sign in and stuff and it’s all surreal and you don’t really believe it, and you’re walking around and people are comforting you, like, you know, like saints and shit are, are like, “it’s okay, it’s okay.” Aaaand they take you to some station cuz you have to work. You have to work up there, so they take you to some station and everyday you, uh, you go to work and it’s a 9 to 5, Monday to Friday and work is basically um, watching over your loved one. And it’s one loved one and you watch over them, and you guide them through. And you don’t like, you know, protect them from bullets and shit, however, you do have small, you do have a small, you do have this like really faint power to guide them the right way. Who would I be? I’d be guiding you. I would guide you.”We asked family, friends, and stangers to describe Heaven. This is what they said.

Written by Jordan Tannahill
Inspired by war resistor Skyler James’s escape from her Tennessee barracks in a white-pick up truck

Performed in workshop by Bryde MacLean at CanStage’s Raw! Raw! Raw! Festival on December 10th, 2009.

We are pleased to announce Alisa Palmer will be directing the play as part of Roseneath Theatre's 2009-2010 season (www.roseneath.ca). The piece will tour local high schools in the Greater Toronto Area in November, 2009.

After Private Skyler James was found-out as a lesbian her life became a living hell at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. But when she began fearing for her life she knew she had to escape. In the middle of the night she loaded all of her belongings into a white pickup and just started driving north…

Written by Jordan Tannahill
Inspired by The Brant’s of Pembroke, Ontario who grew the world’s largest squash the summer of 2007

Performed in workshop by Jordan Tannahill at the 2008 Rhubarb! Festival at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.

Fraser works at the local Wal-Mart. His parent’s are growing the world’s largest squash. And he’s talking with his brother Andrew in the backyard… only Andrew is hundreds of miles away in a military prison inculcated in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan.