FOOTAGE FROM NATHAN SCHWARTZ AND JORDAN TANNAHILL’S RECONNAISSANCE MISSION

Jordan Tannahill lives in a house with eight other guys but he’s never before been a member of a fraternity or even visited one; he goes to Ryerson where they’re not allowed. So when he and his theatrical collaborator Nathan Schwartz, also unlettered, decided they wanted to do a performance piece on frat boys — the final frontier of unexplored secret societies in North America, not counting the psychological depths John Belushi brought to Bluto in the seminal (perhaps in all senses of the word) Animal House — they started touring the Greek-infested mansions along St. George Street. Their mission was to recruit real-life frat boys for a multimedia docudrama that will manifest itself for two nights, March 6 and 7, at Harbourfront’s Studio Theatre as part of its HATCH program for emerging artists.

Putting on their dude-ist personas — Tannahill was careful not to mention that he’s gay — they started knocking on doors. The first house was dark and empty. At another they were told everybody was too busy because they were in the midst of a nine-week initiation. At another, they were told the Grand High Zeta, who handled such things, was not available. Finally they gained entrance to a house and were taken upstairs to the bedroom of the fraternity’s leader, who had “minions” sprawled on his bed and his furniture, sorority girls hanging off his arm and an attitude lifted directly from Don Corleone.

“The house was in quite ill keeping. There were bedrooms without doors. It looked like a tenement during the war in Bosnia,” says Tannahill, an Ottawa wunderkind who started writing plays when he was 13. “The leader was about 20 and I’m 20, too. This is my peer group but I’m not living in the same world as he is…. Did you know the sorority girls cook for them?”

Tannahill and Schwartz started their project with the high-minded purpose of examining masculinity and how the rituals and brotherhood of fraternities turn boys into men. In a society that values autonomy above collective action, the duo wanted to look at what is gained when young men spend a period of their lives in a same-sex milieu. Frat life is full of tensions: the secret rules and the public lawlessness, the homophobia and the homoeroticism, the hierarchy and the anarchy, the solidarity and the degradation. But listening to the two scrawny artsy boys recount the process of making the show, it’s hard to blame them for losing their artistic distance in a kegger of Dionysian debauchery.

“As part of our reconnaissance, we went to a giant toga party,” says Tannahill. “There was tarpaulin on the ground so if any beer was spilled they could just clean it up afterward. There were garbage bags on the windows. There was a keg room and [eventually] … we’re in there with these three guys serving the kegs.”

“It was Jordan’s first blue-collar job,” says Schwartz, 26.

“They were spraying beer into each other’s mouths with hoses,” says Tannahill. “We were like, ‘Guys, don’t you think that’s really gay, pumping your hoses into one another’s mouths?’”

“That’s intense,” interrupts Schwartz, “but being put upside down on a keg and held there while you drink through a hose without a chance to breathe? That’s amazing!”

Through their adventures, the duo collected video footage and recruited five frat boys to appear on stage in rehearsed monologues and re-enactments. They held regular meetings where the participants were encouraged to share their deepest, darkest secrets, sometimes through a megaphone. If it smells a little like Borat, Tannahill insists it’s about deconstruction, not mockery.

“It was created largely by the guys and for them,” he says. “In some ways we’re empowering them. We’re portraying each of them as a complex individual.”

Plus, in a demonstration of universal brotherhood, there will be a keg and onstage drinking during the show. As Bluto would say, “Toga! Toga!”