The Laramie Project

In October of 1998, a twenty-one year old student at the University of Wyoming was kidnapped, severely beaten and left to die, tied to a fence on the outskirts of Laramie, Wyoming. His name was Matthew Shepard, and he was the victim of this assault because he was gay. Moisés Kaufman and fellow members of the Tectonic Theater Project made six trips to Laramie over the course of a year and a half in the aftermath of the beating and during the trial of the two young men accused of killing Shepard. During theses visits, the Tectonic Theater Project conducted more than 200 interviews with the people of the town. Some people interviewed were directly connected to the case and others were citizens of Laramie. The resulting play chronicles the town of Laramie in the year after the murder.

A company of four men and women will play the many residents of Laramie in the NSU Theatre production of The Laramie Project. They are: Raphael Duncan, Zered Felt, Tony L. Kollman, Greg Parmeter, Mary Dodson, Nancy Hyams, Sara Pillatzki and Heather Woehlhaff.

The production is directed by Daniel Yurgaitis, NSU Director of Theatre, and the scenic design is by Larry Wild, NSU Technical Director. The production stage manager is Rory Behrens, the assistant director is Joe Fisher and student DeWayne Davis contributes the lighting design. The Laramie Project will be performed April 23 through 26 at 7:30 pm nightly in the main theatre of the Johnson Fine Arts Center.

Tickets will go on sale in the NSU Bookstore beginning Monday, April 14th. Ticket prices are $8.00 for adults, $7.00 for seniors and non-NSU students. Group rates of $6.00 for groups of ten or more are available. Because of adult language and mature themes, The Laramie Project is not recommended for children. Tickets are also available by mail. For additional information, contact the bookstore at (605) 626-2655 or the NSU Theatre Department at (605) 626-2563.

Moisés Kaufman is the founder of the Tectonic Theater Project. For Tectonic, he directed Women in Beckett, the collection of Samuel Beckett's short plays for women performed by a cast aged 65-80; In the Winter of Cities, his adaptation of Tennessee Williams' later one-acts; The Nest by Francis Xaver Kroetz that utilized a hyper-real diorama of a set and imaginative use of puppetry, named by the Village Voice as one of the top 10 theatrical works of 1994-95; Marlowe's Eye by Naomi Iizuka, among others. Mr. Kaufman's staging of his play Gross Indecency: The Trials of Oscar Wilde ran in New York, Los Angeles (Mark Taper Forum), San Francisco (Theater on the Square), Toronto (Canadian Stage) and London's West End (Gielgud Theatre). The play has been produced in over 40 cities in the US and in dozens of cities abroad including Paris, Stockholm, Montreal, Mexico City and Budapest. Mr. Kaufman won the Lucille Lortel Award for Best Off-Broadway Play, the Garland Award (Los Angeles) for Best Play, the Carbonell Award (Florida) for Best Play, the Bay Area Theater Critics Circle Award for Best Direction, the GLAAD Media Award for New York Theatre, and the prestigious Joe A. Callaway Award for Direction given by his peers in the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers.

The Tectonic Theater Project, a non-profit theater dedicated to exploring theatrical language and form established in 1991, also won an Outer Critics Circle Award as original producers of Gross Indecency: The Trials of Oscar Wilde, and the published version of that play (to which the troupe dedicated two years to the development of) won the Lambda Book Award. The original production of Gross Indecency: The Trials of Oscar Wilde transferred to Off-Broadway and ran there for 18 months.

When he first heard news of the murder of Matthew Shepard at the hands of two young men from Laramie, Kaufman described the tragedy as one of those watershed moments in history "that acts as a lightning rod for a lot of ideas, beliefs, philosophies and idiosyncrasies floating around a certain culture at a certain moment… There are 18 to 20 reported gay homicides a year, but this one resonated. All of a sudden the whole nation was talking about it. If we could record people talking about it, we would create a very strong document, so that a hundred years from now you could see American people talking about homosexuality, violence, discipline, class, education, religion- all of these things." So one month later, Moisés Kaufman and fellow members of the Tectonic Theater Project embarked on a series of extended trips to Laramie, Wyoming to begin to create that different kind of theatrical "project"- right at ground zero.

Kaufman had stated, "I was interested in the ways that theater can be made. I wanted to know what people were thinking and talking about in this town. I wanted to explore what is the role that theater plays in the … community." Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project initially worried about what might come out of these interviews. How would Laramie react when confronted by a group of outsiders from New York, many of them gays and lesbians, walking around their town armed with tape recorders and lots of questions? The group originally discussed the idea of only conducting interviews in pairs, but once in Laramie they fanned out across the community, since "someone was interested in finding Matthew's friends, someone else wanted to talk to Aaron McKinney and [his accomplice] Russell Henderson's friends, others were interested in the ranchers or the University of Wyoming students." The group soon learned that their fears were unfounded. Kaufman discovered that the people of Laramie "really wanted to talk… Time and again, they complained about how unfairly the media had portrayed them. But one has to understand that the media just did its job and left, while we sat down with them and gave people the chance to really express their feelings. You know, there is a university in Laramie, and to our surprise, we encountered a diverse community of farmers, university professors, 80 year old cowboys and, yes, even lesbians and gays." The only two people the troupe decided to not interview were Matthew's parents, wanting to focus the document on the townspeople only.

Eleven members of the Tectonic Theater Project (just three or four at a time) would travel to Laramie for extended visits, to find and interview the citizens touched by this tragedy. Showing up on the scene so quickly after the murder, the actors found themselves becoming "adjunct" members of the community. Kaufman notes, "Talk about life-changing experiences! A year after the murder we attended McKinney's trial. By that time, we knew a lot of the people who were testifying. So we were rooting for them to do a good job on the stand. We sat behind Judy Shepard [his mother] when they brought out the gun [Henderson and Russell used to pistol-whip Shepard] as evidence. It was incredibly emotional."

Ultimately, over 200 interviews and the court transcripts would be collected to provide the raw material for the theatrical event that was to be entitled The Laramie Project. "Everybody had become very close to their interviewees, and they wanted their voices to be heard in the play." That kind of closeness to material might have been less desirable in another kind of project, but actually assisted the company in arranging the play into what would become three distinct through-lines: one, describing Matthew from the time he arrived in Laramie until his death, a second, that voices the effect the murder had on the community and a third, explaining the company's own experiences. The editing and shaping of the words was crucial, and Kaufman admits that what was finally seen onstage was about "5% of what we got."

The play premiered in Denver at the Denver Center Theater in February of 2000, close enough to Laramie for many of the townspeople portrayed in the play traveled to see the premiere. At an initial running time of three and a half hours, the play was edited down to its current format of two and a half hours plus two intermissions. Kaufman remembered "almost everybody who's portrayed in the play came to see it when we were in Denver. Laramie is only two and a half hours away, so on opening night, there were ten people in the audience who are portrayed in the play. I was astonished. One told me, 'Thank you for giving us our town back.'" From there it moved to the Union Square Theater in New York in May of 2000. The troupe took the play to Laramie in November of 2000.

In January of 2002, the Sundance Film Festival screened the world premiere of the film version, produced by HBO Films and directed by Moisés Kaufman and featuring members of the Tectonic Theater Project as well as a number of prominent film and television stars. At the Sundance opening, Kaufman told an interviewer that when the HBO trucks rolled into Laramie to begin filming, some of the initial hostility was reawakened, as one local resident yelled at the crew unloading equipment "haven't we had enough?" On the second day of the film shoot, the production company found themselves shooting in the same courtroom where the trial actually happened. Kaufman was struck by a fact as he looked around the room at his cast "all of them actor's actors" and that "there was this wonderful sense that everyone wanted to be there, wanted to be a part of telling this story." In March of 2002, HBO premiered the film for cable viewers. The film received several Emmy nominations, including one for outstanding Made-for-TV film.

In an article at the time of the initial airing of the HBO film, Kaufman told the interviewer "Matthew's murder was one of those moments in our culture where something happened that kind of changed things. His name became a sign. [His story} resonated because we as a culture were ready to hear it. I think that if Matthew had been killed 10 years ago, it would not have had the impact or the repercussions that it had now. I've spent three years on this project. I don't want to sound pompous, but The Laramie Project is the second most performed play in America. How magnificent is that?"

Discussing the emotional effect that The Laramie Project has had on audiences (and the company) with the Village Voice prior to the New York opening, Kaufman described what happened to Jedediah Schultz [a University of Wyoming student and a person in the play]. "He's a Baptist, and he's 19 years old. When we arrived, his views about homosexuality were very conservative. He's say things like, 'My parents say it's wrong. I think it's a sin. It's bad.'" The year following the murder became a time for reflection and consideration for Schultz, as he began to reevaluate his parents' views. He then gets involved in a production of Angels in America that the University of Wyoming is presenting. "Before we opened in Denver, Jedediah came to one of the rehearsals. As we're going through the play, we get to some of his text and I look up to see him sobbing hysterically. So I stopped the rehearsal and went over and asked him, 'What, Jed, did we do something wrong? What's the matter?' And he tells me, 'I can't believe I said those things. I was part of the problem, wasn't I?' The Greeks believed that the reason to do theatre is to achieve catharsis. When I read about it in school, I was like, 'Yeah, sure, catharsis.' Jedediah's reaction made me feel like our work was done."

"The Laramie Project was written through a unique collaboration by Tectonic Theater project. During the year and a half development of the play, members of the company and I traveled to Laramie six times to conduct interviews with the people of the town. We transcribed and edited the interviews and conducted several workshops, in which members presented material and acted as dramaturges in the creation of the play.

As the volume of material grew with each additional trip to Laramie, a small writers group from within the company began to work closely with me to organize and edit this material, conduct additional research in Laramie, and collaborate on the writing of the play. This group was led by Leigh Fondakowski as Head Writer, with Stephen Belber and Greg Pierotti as Associate Writers.

As we got closer to the play's first production in Denver, the actors, including Stephen Belber and Greg Pierotti, turned their focus to performance, while Leigh Fondakowski continued to work with me on drafts of the play, as did Stephen Wangh, who by then had joined us as Associate Writer and self-proclaimed 'bench coach.'"