The Laramie Project Ten Years Later is something of a continuation play, a revision if you will, of a play with an almost harrowing focus on a small town and the private thoughts of its people after a very public crime. The play is two hours of soul-searching and questioning of a cross-section of Americans and their collective feelings about gay rights in this country.
The central unifying theme of this paper is what has and has not changed in Laramie, Wyoming, ten years after the beating to death of Matthew Shepard. The primary intent of the production was for the audience to hear, in the actual words of the residents of this small Wyoming town, the feelings, understandings, interpretations and opinions of where Laramie stands today in regards to its LGBT population. The background for the play is the original work, titled The Laramie Project, which was based on interviews with Laramie residents immediately after Mr. Shepard’s murder.
The first impression one gets from this job is that the words we hear, the script handed to us, are the real words of real people, people who even now live, work, play, worship, and interact with one another in a small town. western. The Laramie production Project Ten Years Later managed to maintain its central theme and portray the real residents of Laramie in a number of ways. Here is a brief synopsis of the work:
Set Design and Scenic Design: The cast consisted of twelve company members, each of whom assumed at least two roles. Some assumed up to four roles. The individual parties were actual residents of Laramie Wyoming who had agreed to be interviewed again. So the words were the voices of real people. The whole lends itself to representation in its austere, almost featureless design. A black backdrop behind the main stage, gray painted concrete floor and no weird scenery of any kind. It could be a windswept Wyoming prairie, unbroken by any natural or man-made object.
Each cast member sat in a simple chair behind their own lectern, on which their copy of the script was placed. They were all in street clothes, the outfit we would expect them to wear, with the exception of the Catholic priest who carried a small cross. The staging with chairs and lecterns had an interesting multiple effect: in the arrangement of the cast’s seats on the stage in two rows, all facing forward, each lectern parallel to its partner, the result was close to a jury in the trial, but also imprisonment, the same sentiment that many residents felt, and still feel, about the events of October 1998. Many expressed the sentiment, behind their own bars and on their own jury box, that the The city must move on, it must leave Matthew Shepard behind. death behind her and try to forget.
Another, possibly more interesting effect of the lecterns and chairs was to place each person behind a fence post of their own, evoking the fence post to which the victim was tied while being beaten. Laramie residents also appear to be involved with the murder and its aftermath. The warm stage lights overhead, like the traditional bare bulb of police investigations, and the narrator’s ethereal voice, offstage, heighten the effect of his apparent interrogation.
The pacing of the play is paced such that, during each interview, the speaker closely resembles what we imagine the real person to be like, complete with accents and mannerisms. It was not difficult to hear the real source of the answer to the interviewer’s questions. These are real people. At two hours, the only time the play was delayed was at the appropriate time, that is, when the killers were interviewed. In response to the questions put to them in prison, there was the expected shuffling, slurring, muttering and defiance latent in the voices of the two men who killed Matthew Shepard. One of them, Aaron McKinney, is the archetypal rude and vulgar underclassman, a man who uses drugs, knows about guns, peppers his speech with profanity, and holds interviewers in deep suspicion. The other, Russell Henderson, is emblematic of the rest of the Laramie population. Henderson is the “good guy,” the guy who “never got in trouble” but ended up in the wrong group. Hence the almost sleepy interviews, and the deliberate pacing at that point.
The pace picks up again as the victim’s mother is interviewed, and picks up noticeably as the play draws to a close.
As for the arc of the play, it proceeds from a simple introduction to the play, and why it occurs, through those people who knew Matthew Shepard only incidentally, that is, because of the murder, to those who knew him. right. It concludes first with her mother’s comment on her efforts to promote hate crime legislation, and then with the various ripple effects the Shepard case has had locally and elsewhere. Mixed in with the good news is a bit of the bad: there are still people in Laramie, and we’re assuming the rest of the United States, who refuse to believe that Mathew Shepard was killed because he was gay. The balance of that is the impetus that his death has given to the search for LGBT rights across the country.
As mentioned above, the effect was to have residents in a very small place secured to a witness stand, forced to account for the behavior of not just two of them, but also their personal beliefs and biases.
Regarding lighting and stage direction, scene changes are achieved with a slight dimming of the lights, to indicate the time of the next interviewee. Every time the lights go out, the narrator’s voice is heard offstage, calling out a name, a bit of recorded information, such as part of the police report, or an entry from the playwright’s diary. Once again, when the lights come on, the interrogation effect is startling.
With the interchange of roles within the play and the assumption of different characters by the cast, the impression is given of a place, in this case Laramie Wyoming, that has a diverse, colorful population rich in personality. The impression, almost inevitable, and probably on purpose, was that it could have been the Toledo Project, or the Spokane Project, or the Memphis Project. In that way, the work is a statement about the universality of prejudice and the need for self-examination in all of us. On the witness stand, the change that the play discovers in the interviewees is that, in effect, we need to ‘appropriate’ our beliefs and opinions, and understand the consequences of maintaining them. That none of us lives in a vacuum. As one of the characters, a young Muslim university student, says: “Don’t tell me you can’t believe it happened here. It happened here. Don’t say we’re not like that; We are that way. We are that way. WE ARE THAT WAY”.
The director’s unifying theme remained intact throughout the play, with each character reinforcing the fact that as much as things have changed for certain groups in Laramie, real and heartfelt change in some of its residents has not. . But each character addressed the issue.
The Laramie Project Ten Years Later gives us a real insight into the people of Laramie. They wish the death of Matthew Shepard had never happened. Some wish that for the right reasons, a young man would be killed simply because he is gay, and that should never happen in America; some wish it hadn’t happened because they hate the media glare; some deny that the murder was a hate crime and question the LGBT community who, in their words, is using the event for a gay rights agenda. Some of them just miss their friend, their son, their fellow student Matt Shepard.
It was also obvious in the play that the residents of Laramie were deeply moved by the murder and by the unforeseen storm that swept over them afterward, like the gales that hit Wyoming in winter.
The Laramie Project Ten Years Later occurred on October 12, 2009, exactly eleven years after the death of Matthew Shepard. The play was seen around the world on that date in more than 120 venues, from New York to Florida, California, Spain, England, Japan and Australia. Perhaps one of the results of the production is the realization that there is no such thing as a gay agenda; there is, instead, a need for hate crime legislation, and a need for fundamental recognition in America and elsewhere of the observance of human rights.