There’s a party going on this weekend, and instead of a hangover, its guests will leave with knowledge about dangerous college drinking.

“Drink, Drank, Drugged,” an interactive performance about college drinking, will run March 27 to 29 at the Empty Space theater in Tempe.

Desiree Rowe, a doctoral candidate in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, directed and wrote the performance based on research conducted by Linda Lederman, dean of social sciences in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

“I took the research and filtered it into four key scenarios that students encounter at undergraduate gatherings,” Rowe said. “The audience moves through these scenarios and interacts with the cast.”

Rowe said audience members are assigned to different narrators, who guide them through the “party.”

“It’s kind of like if your best friend is going, and you’re sticking with them because you don’t know anyone at the party,” she said.

The audience gets a sense of what types of students the actors are and whether they’re heavy drinkers, she said.

“I tried to stage it so that the audience sort of develops a bond with the cast,” Rowe said.

After moving through the party, the audience members sit with Aaron Hess, a communications postdoctoral research fellow in Wellness and Health Promotion, who discusses the issue of college drinking on the ASU campus.

“Underage and dangerous drinking by college students has long been recognized as a major problem in American higher education,” Hess said. “It poses risks for safety of the individual and other members of the community, and can interfere with academic performance.”

Rowe said people should have these conversations about ASU’s relationship to drinking on campus, including the positive and negative effects of drinking.

“The image that freshmen sort of think about when they enter college for the first time is socialization and hanging out with friends and meeting people,” Rowe said. “Talking about safe ways of doing this and the challenges to health becomes really important.”

Rowe said she took a class with Lederman and became interested in her research on college drinking.

“One of the things that ASU has done is developed this method for trigger scripting [a performance that’s meant to trigger a response in the audience],” she said. “You’re scripting a show so that the audience has questions and wants to talk about it, and Lederman’s research really lent itself to this.”

Lederman said her research is about the decision making that students do around college drinking.

“What I mean by that is, how often and how much do students drink?” she said. “And how much of their drinking is an expression of wanting to be part of the student culture?”

Lederman said she wants to help students understand they can be part of that culture without drinking a lot.

Everyone has choices, and there are consequences to those choices, she said.

“There are others who may be making better choices than we are,” Lederman said. “And it’s great to learn from them.”

Elizabeth Eger, an organizational education graduate student who plays the party’s host, said she worked at a police department and saw what can happen when people aren’t drinking responsibly.

“I thought this could be a good way to get involved,” Eger said. “It seemed really poignant to do a performance that would directly help.”

She said she hopes people who participate in the performance will be reflective of their own experiences and pass on the information they hear to their friends and family.

“The show isn’t saying to never drink,” Eger said. “It’s more to get people thinking about it and understanding the culture and myths of college drinking.”

Karla Rasmusson, a psychology sophomore who plays a “normal, laidback” girl at the party, said she thinks dangerous college drinking isn’t discussed as much as it should be.

“It’s talked about a lot, but it’s never really discussed between peers,” Rasmusson said. “You never talk about social pressure or how much you actually drink in a night.”

Rasmusson said she hopes people would begin to think about what they’re doing while it’s happening instead of just reacting to the consequences.

“After seeing this performance, maybe people will be able to prevent certain situations from happening,” she said.

The performances are 7:30 and 8:30 p.m. on March 27 and 28, and 3:30 and 4:30 p.m. on March 29. For information or to reserve tickets, e-mail asucomtickets@gmail.com.

Reach the reporter at charlsy.panzino@asu.edu.