MUST SEE … The most remarkable thing is how even-handedly he treats his characters in a setting less talented writers would populate with broad stereotypes … a winner
Two years after a gay-bashing scarred the fraternity’s reputation, how will the brothers react when someone comes out of the closet?
Bring this powerful award-winning play to your campus.
Meet Dan Bernitt, the creator of Phi Alpha Gamma.
Know this: Phi Alpha Gamma is about far more than homophobia.
In the video above, he discusses how this play can help start a conversation on your campus about creating, holding, and honoring boundaries—and how to build stronger relationships and communities of respect and dignity.
REMARKABLE
INTENSE
CHILLING
A RICH, DEEPLY MOVING EXPERIENCE
Explore the range of audiences, academic disciplines, and student services you can involve
The play explores the fears underneath hatred. As a gay man, it was difficult for Dan to be compassionate for the people who were hostile toward him. He realized through writing that love was the path to understanding.
Joining Greek life, or any social club, can be enormously beneficial and build a profound sense of community. The play shows what can happen when honesty, integrity, and compassion are tossed aside.
Instead of a lecture talking at students, use the power of a dramatic story to drive home important first-year student skills like responsibility, decision-making, cultural sensitivity, and handling conflicts
Dan's creative work focuses on why people behave the way they do. Several social science fields of study will see their concepts revealed in the story, including psychology, sociology, gender and masculinity studies, organizational behavior, criminal justice, and violence.
Our ethics and morals guide how we approach our lives and resolve conflicts. In the play, we see what can happen when we deny others empathy or fail to connect with our emotions.
As students begin their careers, they'll work with a variety of personalities in the workplace. True leaders listen, plan, and engage. In the play, we witness the fraternity's leadership spiral from fear and ultimately make destructive decisions.
Dan's play takes place on a college campus. Being a student can be fraught with life changes, stress and anxiety, and crises. Some lessons of the play are to work through emotional issues, nurture strong relationships, and establish boundaries with those who try to deceive us.
Writing this play fundamentally changed Dan as a person and a writer. By seeking to understand perspectives he opposes, not dismissing them, he learned to use language and emotion to build a bridge instead of furthering a divide.
In addition to his work as a touring performing artist, Dan has worked in marketing, sales, project management, and human resources. He brings an interdisciplinary approach to how the performing arts can inform a variety of career paths.
Dan Bernitt makes performance work that puts audiences inside systems of belief and asks how ordinary people, inside ordinary institutions, arrive at cruelty, crisis, or collapse. His shows don’t explain these systems from the outside. They inhabit them, finding the internal logic that makes violence, conformity, and self-destruction feel, for a moment, completely reasonable. That’s what makes them useful long after the curtain comes down.
His solo performances Yelling at Bananas in Whole Foods, Phi Alpha Gamma, and Thanks for the Scabies, Jerkface! have been presented at universities, festivals, and performance series throughout the United States and in Ireland. Phi Alpha Gamma enters the interior world of a college fraternity reckoning with homophobia and complicity. Yelling at Bananas in Whole Foods tracks how certainty curdles into isolation. Both have generated sustained conversation on campuses about masculinity, belonging, and the cultures institutions build without meaning to.
Bernitt has taught creative writing at Amherst College, Christian Brothers University, and the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts. He founded Sawyer House Press, publishing the debut poetry collections of writers who later found homes at Bloomsbury, HarperCollins, Northwestern University Press, and Penguin Random House. His writing has been supported by an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council and a residency from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. His work is documented in For the Gay Stage (McFarland, 2017), a comprehensive history of gay theatrical performance from Aristophanes to the present, as a bridge between solo performance pioneers and the multi-character work that followed.
He lives in Memphis, where he continues to make work that arrives before institutions know they need it.
In the clip above, we meet one of the characters: Aaron, a young man now in prison for committing a gay-bashing. He’s writing a letter to one of the brothers still in the fraternity.
Dan let me see that even if I’m writing about a topic people would turn away from or would hate me for it that it was okay to write it. He let me know that I can write about my culture even when most people would shut me out and ignore the words that I had written. He encouraged me to write more about it and let the world know that I cannot silence my voice.
Student
Dan broke down walls we didn’t even know we had, got us to feel strong emotions, and then channeled those emotions into our writing. He taught us how to dig deep within ourselves so that our audience can feel what we feel.
Student
You encouraged me to find my voice in a way that I had never imagined. Your prompts and speeches led me to new edges I didn’t know existed for myself, and I’m glad to say that I have confidence in tackling them after working with you.
Student
Thank you for contributing to a conversation that goes beyond the basic principles of tolerance and diversity. It’s a long process and I’m so glad you were here to further it.
LGBTQ Coordinator
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All that’s required to start a conversation is your name, email address, and phone number—but if you have everything else, that’s great, too!