The Laramie Project Calls a Town to the Stand

Photos: Erik Stuhaug

Where were you when you heard about Matthew Shepard? It's haunting to watch The Laramie Project, over a decade after the play was "ripped from the headlines."

It's haunting because it doesn't feel like ten years ago--the play parachutes you right back into the aftermath. The half-alive body has been found. People are shocked by the brutality, outraged by insinuations, struggling to make sense of the attackers' motivations...and some are trying to appropriate the attack for their own ends. It's as timeless as any Greek play.

Strawberry Workshop Theatre's production of The Laramie Project (through August 7) takes a rugged, spare approach that suits the play's spirit. The set is plain: a desk, a couch, some chairs. Against the back wall is a strip of aging newspapers that video projections play against. John Osebold delivers a lonesome, chiming score that seems to have vast Wyoming nights hidden between notes. The rest is funny, harrowing, thoughtful, and stirring.

Just five weeks after Matthew Shepard was beaten and left to die, tied to a ranch fence outside Laramie, Wyoming, Moisés Kaufmann and the Tectonic Theater Project traveled to the town of 27,000 and interviewed residents. They'd eventually spend a year collecting interviews. At the end, those  conversations, diaries of Tectonic Theater members, and court records were pieced together to form a mosaic of Laramie.

It is also--and here I differ strongly with people who say it captures "the end of last century," as if any of it is behind us--a cultural mosaic that describes town (Laramie) and city (theatre). The conflicting identities of town and city haven't changed much in the last few thousand years. They tend not to because of self-selection: The big city "immorality" that repulses townspeople is in another light the "cosmopolitanism" that welcomes artists and free-thinkers.

From the outset, director Greg Carter plays up Strawshop's performance of the Tectonics. For some minutes, the cast chats in clusters, before the narrator intones, "On November fourteenth, 1998, the members of the Tectonic Theater Project traveled to Laramie, Wyoming, and conducted interviews with the people of the town."

The cast has to play the Tectonic members doing the interviews, the interview subjects, and the Tectonic members "watching" their reenactments. It's such a strong ensemble work, alive with relationships stated and unstated, that you forget your familiarity with local actors Nick Garrison, Shawn Law, Alycia Delmore, Galen Osier, Marty Mukhalian, John Ulman, and Shanna Allman.

Each takes on three roles, from police working the case and the bartender who saw Shepard last, to a minister who thunders against homosexuality (and is not Fred Phelps--he arrives later), the University of Wyoming drama department head, a waitress, a social services worker. People in the know provide details on the case's progress and Shepard's fate, while people-on-the-street wonder how to reconcile Laramie's "hometown" reputation with a crime of such malevolence.

Was it gay-bashing? A robbery gone wrong? Drugs? Some residents protest that the media just assume that Laramie is homophobic, but that really everyone employs a "live and let live" motto. Still, one man pronounces himself satisfied that responsibility was 50/50, since he's heard that Shepard made a pass at one of his killers. Another woman protests that Shepard "was no saint."

Shepard is already a ghost, in the play. He's hovering over it in hearsay and recollection, but it's not his story.

The Laramie Project, seen more clearly at a distance, is a play that demonstrates what theatre can do, how it can actively seek out relationship with audiences. While Laramie was asking, How could this happen?, the interviewers were plying their craft, making explicit what is implicit in the social life of the town. People, learning that the play could come to Laramie, censored themselves--or seized the chance to say what they thought. A Catholic priest (who mentioned how his efforts to organize a candlelight vigil for Shepard were rebuffed by fellow Christian churches) asked the group to be "correct" with their account.

Near the end of the play, one of Laramie's gay residents notes that for all the hue and cry, no hate crime law had yet appeared in consequence. It would take eleven years for the Matthew Shepard Act to be passed.

I remember being instructed, in a history class, how to approach a stultifying list of Roman laws--"Just remember," the professor said, "no law gets passed if people already agree on how to behave correctly." His point was that a law is a visible signal of conflict.

The Laramie Project, as well, pulls not just the judgmental and shy citizens of Laramie into the theater, but also the loudmouths inclined to judge them back--a bunch of actors from New York. And while it may seem a huge argument, raised voices over "lifestyles" and bigotry, the play reminds us that it nonetheless fits onto a stage.