“The experience of working on The Laramie Project has been one of great sadness, great beauty, and perhaps most important, great revelations — about our nation, about our ideas, about ourselves.”
Moisés Kaufman’s reflection on the creation of The Laramie Project is equally apt for describing the audience experience at the production of the play by the Amherst Regional High School Theater Company earlier this month.
The play responds to the senseless and brutal murder, in October 1998, of Matthew Shepard, a student of political science, foreign relations and languages at the University of Wyoming, and a gay man. The script was compiled by Kaufman and other members of his New York based Tectonic Theater Project, from dozens of interviews conducted in the 18 months following the murder. Its power comes from those many voices whose collective wisdom, ignorance, and contradictions remind us of ourselves.
There were many difficult lines to hear. How much harder it must have been to speak them. But the actors willingly inhabited the roles. Like the authors, they took responsibility for telling this story with honesty and empathy. No individuals, not even the murderers, were depicted without an attempt to uncover their humanity.
Throughout we were reminded both how hard and important this is. A doctor who treated first one of Shepard’s attackers, injured in an unrelated fight the same night, and then the badly beaten Shepard, before learning of their connection, “was very struck! They were just kids!” He “wondered if this is how God feels when he looks down on us. How we are all his kids.”
The ARHS Theater Company production, presented in collaboration with the school’s Sexuality and Gender Alliance (SAGA), was designed as an immersive theater piece. Scenes were staged in different locations in the high school and the audience moved in and out of them, meeting Laramie residents just as the Tectonic Theater Company did, in their offices and homes, at the university and the local bar. The intimacy provided by sitting close and looking into the eyes of the people telling these stories made them even more compelling.
The play provides no easy answers. Where one local gay man saw an outpouring of support: “five hundred people marching for Matthew… Thank God I got to see this in my lifetime,” another objects that, “It’s been a year since Matthew Shepard died, and… at a state level, any town, nobody anywhere has passed any kind of laws, antidiscrimination laws or hate crime legislation, nobody has passed anything anywhere… What’s come out of this that’s concrete or lasting?”
It shocks when someone objects to calling this murder a hate crime, or questions the attention it got, yet we can understand the pain they feel for society’s apparent indifference to a more “ordinary” death in their circle.
We see how the media spotlight distorts, but even while calling outside journalists “predators,” a local reporter argues, “The media actually made people accountable, because they made people think.”
The brutality of the crime is met with the violence of the justice system. Even after death penalty is taken off the table — for one defendant by pleading guilty, for the other, thanks to the desires of Shepard’s family — one breathtaking monologue reminds us of the violence the guilty men can anticipate in prison.
A Catholic Priest argues that the killers have to be our teachers. We need to ask, “How did you learn? What did we as a society do to teach you that?” A young Muslim woman, raised in Laramie, tells us, “We have to mourn this and… we need to own this crime, I feel. Everyone needs to own it.” Although they are speaking of Shepard’s murder, there is much more in our society their comments apply to, and each “we” includes us all.
The CEO of the hospital where Shepard died acknowledges that, as a straight person: “I guess I didn’t understand the magnitude with which some people hate.” The breadth and depth of that hatred can easily cause despair. But a university student, a lesbian friend of Matthew’s, now an activist, offers hope, “I think, at times like this, when we’re talking about hatred as much as the nation is right now, that someone needs to show that there is a better way of dealing with that kind of hatred… And we are a group of people bringing forth a message of peace and love and compassion.”
The ARHS production of The Laramie Project brought forth such a message through a performance that was an impressive combination of documentary history, immersive experience, and an act of healing and community building. I am grateful to the theater program for taking on this project, and to the students, themselves just a few years younger than Matthew Shepard and his two killers, for sharing this story with such care and compassion.
Jim Oldham is the father of an ARHS graduate and a current senior, both of whom have greatly appreciated the school’s theater program.