When the Frat Recruited a Jew: Reliving a Painful Past

As a 62-year-old playwright and director, Steve Karp carried around one story from his college days that he knew had the makings of a play: the moral anxiety he felt back at Tufts University in 1961, when Delta Tau Delta, a popular fraternity with a history of racial, religious and ethnic exclusion, recruited him and another Jewish classmate for membership.

Much as he longed to belong to a fraternity filled with campus leaders and star athletes, he was not sure acquiescing was the right thing to do or that he was acting in the best of motives. Was he interested in being the example that would help other outsiders who would follow? Or was he looking to shed his Jewish identity and blend in?

Unsure how to tell the story and unsure how he would fare in the telling, Mr. Karp instead wrote six other plays and screenplays and threw himself into starting the Stamford Theater Works, a professional regional theater he runs out of a converted barn on the grounds of Sacred Heart Academy here.

At the theater, he put on issue-oriented plays and avoided revisiting his formative religious experience. "I was a little afraid, I think, to confront myself on this issue," said Mr. Karp, who describes himself as an occasional participant at a Conservative synagogue in town. "I didn't know how I would come out as a Jew."

But a few years ago, he changed his mind when he figured out how to capture the story on stage and grew old enough not to care anymore what anyone, including himself, might have to say about the younger Steve Karp.

The result is a heavily autobiographical 90-minute work titled "Fraternity," which has been appearing here in an extended run, through Sunday.
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When the Frat Recruited a Jew: Reliving a Painful Past - New York Times