If you went to college, would you write a play about it? To feel that you are the first to ever experience anything so radically transformative, while walking through a campus hundreds of years old, is the quintessential Yale experience. It’s deep in our bones, beneath all those layers of freneticism and ambition and dreams. Given its universality, dramatizing this profound angst may seem redundant, or indicative of needless navel-gazing, coming from artists without a strong confidence in the novelty and strength of their voice.
Notably, Brennan Columbia-Walsh, TC ’26, has that confidence. College Play, which ran Feb. 11-13 in the Off-Broadway Theater, is a play about his college experience—what it was, what it is, and what it, in memory, will become. His friends, girlfriend, and mother play themselves (as well as some storied figures of Yale’s past). The play’s structure follows that of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, with three acts conducted and narrated by a Stage Manager character, here also played by Columbia-Walsh. But instead of celebrating the loves and lives of small-town, blue-collar New Englanders, College Play is concerned with five housemates at Yale who study the humanities and fear the future.
The first act is where Columbia-Walsh commits to his premise. He takes us from 7:30 a.m. until late in the evening in fall 2024, as he, alongside his housemates Leo Greenberg, George Baily, Oleg Laskov, and Marty Bukowiec, shift from bartering for shower time in their home on 17 Edgewood Avenue to attending pretentious humanities classes (including one taught by Deb Margolin, played spunkily by Talia Namdar-Cohen, MC ’27) to insufferably debating the resolution “Man Should Be Overcome” at the Conservative Party. Even those audience-members with no personal connection to the cast can identify the scenework as self-parody: by casting his real-life housemates as versions of themselves, Columbia-Walsh’s script elevates the peculiarities of each into well-observed caricatures of both themselves and the sort of Yale man they represent. While they are all presented as somewhat charming, Leo comes across as sycophantic and ambitious, George as aristocratic and aloof, Oleg as nonchalantly intellectual, and Marty as their punching bag.
In fact, aside from a lame spat and some boyish joshing around, all negative emotion in this first act is directed towards poor Marty. Maybe it’s just easiest that way, with no real-life consequences, given that Marty is entirely invented. He’s their imaginary friend, explained Columbia-Walsh. He was nobody, he was anybody, it didn’t matter. In a play apparently striving to capture their lived reality, where the only other fictional characters are farcical stereotypes like the Dean (performed with perfect comic bluster by Emma Fusco, JE ’26) and an English professor (a highly committed William Barbee, SM ’26), the inclusion of this fictional fifth housemate was a striking indication that the play’s ambitions lay far beyond just the egotism of theatrical autobiography. In his first dramatic role since Into the Woods in fall 2024, Eason Rytter, TD ’27, shines as Marty, lending an earnestness to the sweet character constantly demeaned and ignored by his housemates. The unkindness they show him serves little purpose plotwise or thematically, and flails as a comic gesture. Does their relationship to him serve as a stand-in to the disrespect they may show each other, but were apprehensive of putting onstage? Is it a crack in the self-parodic veneer, a stand-in showcasing Columbia-Walsh’s perspective on those Yale students with less ambition or interest in sheer intellectual politics? Or is it just a simple failure in comedy?
In a deft bit of plotting, however, Marty becomes the subtle protagonist of the second act. On the day of their upcoming graduation, the housemates sit in a row downstage, each delivering a lengthy monologue beneath awkward overhead spotlighting. Marty’s is first and undeniably the longest, rambling from deep uncertainty into some strange sense of absolution before returning, after what must be fifteen minutes, back to shrugging, trembling uncertainty. Rytter is a magnetic enough performer to capture that emotional range, and the language would have been deeply moving if I was not aware that another four long monologues may follow.
Follow they did. Brennan’s speech regarded his relationship to his faith, and how remembering that God believes he is enough should be enough for him. It’s a showcase less of his talent as an actor than as an orator, but was nonetheless compelling. Then went George, whose speech priggishly demeaned the fears of his housemates; then Leo, who lacked any earnestness as he claimed he loved his friends; then Oleg, who, by putting on voices and playing with his chair, seemed merely a puppet for College Play to flex its metatheatrics.
Altogether, these monologues lasted maybe forty minutes. And while each monologue effectively served as a kaleidoscope twist on the fear of aging out of undergraduate life, the dense language and long, lecturing presentation lost my interest. I recognize that all of their anxieties are deeply felt, at least by Columbia-Walsh. Education is the only vocation most of us have ever held; to meaningfully burst out, and stand face-to-face with the fact of choosing our next one, is the terror underlying the latter years of college. I feel this fear deeply, and would have related to the young men’s speeches were they spoken from different lips. Instead, from these young men, whose appearance, attitude, and apparent beliefs Yale would have readily accepted at any point in its history, the point came off moot. I attend Yale on the sacrifices of my family and my community, and fear a world in which I cannot improve their lives in return. The fears of these characters, however, were tied into whether or not they would impact the world and become Great Men like the Yale men of old. They seemed to see their time at Yale as a means to begin a life of creating a legacy, and little else.
Only Marty seemed honest in his reflection. Despite the rambling density of his speech, his fears were expressed earnestly, from elastic, trembling cheeks. College Play’s most touching moment came when Marty, in line to graduate, gets cold feet and runs downstage. He was met by Meg Columbia-Walsh, the playwright’s mother, playing herself with tremendous, infectious pride. Her advice: You’ll be fine. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, and good friends. The young man glances back, and sees, along with the audience, the bullies who’ve undercut his college life with disrespect.
In the third act, ten years later, Marty’s dead and the other four are back together for his funeral. Their conversation in Grove Street Cemetery is awkward and stilted; they mourn not their former housemate, but the loss of their collective youth, and the ease it once brought. As Marty watches them try and fail to remember him, you cannot help but know that if one of their four had died instead, an overwhelm of anecdotes would flow forth, with Marty leading the remembrance. He was the best of them, a fact with which none of these characters nor the playwright seemed willing to reckon. Instead, they knock on the door of 17 Edgewood, bother their way into someone’s home, try to play a round of cards, and get pushed away by the new generation.
A decade of maturation would lend one some perspective, I’d hope, but the playwright has only lived until the end of his first act. You cannot fault his ambition, nor his talents, nor even his courage in writing a play so overtly personal. But College Play is stuck in the selfishness of its youth, and leaves empathy out of its periphery.