A ‘Harvard Experience with Chastity,’ Explored Through Comedy

Weeks away from graduating, Alex J. Iascone ’16 is bringing his one-man show, “My Harvard Experience with Chastity,” to the Adams Pool Theater. The production, written and directed by Iascone himself, is sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club. He aims to entertain audience members with a comic retelling of the amusing antics of his college love life.

The show’s title notwithstanding, explicit topics will abound in Iascone’s monologues. “I’ve not personally taken a vow of chastity, but the whole show sort of revolves around this concept of having sex and not having sex and all these interactions that lead up to it, and sort of commenting on the whole dating and hooking up [experience] at Harvard,” Iascone says.

In just over an hour, Iascone plans to detail some of the best—and worst—moments of his amorous pursuits. And he isn’t deterred by the especially intimate nature of the show’s content. “I think [the stage] a really good place for comedy because it’s a place where you can really be vulnerable,” he says. “When you’re up there and telling something that’s personal to you and happened to you, the audience is automatically engaged in this human experience.”

According to Iascone, the main aim of the production is to do justice to some of the romantic situations played out on stage, presenting a fuller picture than typical representations of the same types of interactions. To achieve this, he will attempt to imagine experiences from all sides of scenarios. One area in particular that he plans to investigate is the issue of “real and fake” in hookup culture. “I really don’t like playing games and not saying what you mean,” he says. “You know the whole text thing like if you like a guy, and he texts you, you don’t want to text him right back, right, you’ve got to wait a couple hours? I hate that—that’s the worst thing in the world to me.”

Despite his efforts to give all perspectives a fair share in his telling, Iascone does not promise to flatter any audience members. “It’s going to offend a lot of people,” he says. “If you’re a final clubs bro, you’re going to be offended by a lot of the stuff I say. If you’re a feminist, you’re going to be offended by a lot of the stuff I say. No side or person is safe in this show.”

“My Harvard Experience with Chastity” will run April 22 and 23 in the Adams Pool Theater.