NARRATOR: Moisés Kaufman:

MOISÉS KAUFMAN: The company has agreed that we should go to Laramie for a week and interview people.

Am a bit afraid about taking ten people in a trip of this nature. Must make some safety rules. No one works alone. Everyone carries cell phones. Have made some preliminary contacts with Rebecca Hilliker, head of the theater department at the University of Wyoming. She is hosting a party for us our first night in Laramie and has promised to introduce us to possible interviewees.

MOMENT: REBECCA HILLIKER

REBECCA HILLIKER: I must tell you that when I first heard that you were thinking of coming here, when you first called me, I wanted to say, You’ve just kicked me in the stomach. Why are you doing this to me?

But then I thought, That’s stupid, you’re not doing this to me. And, more important, I thought about it and decided that we’ve had so much negative closure on this whole thing. And the students really need to talk. When this happened they started talking about it, and then the media descended and all dialogue stopped.

You know, I really love my students because they are free thinkers. And you may not like what they have to say, and you may not like their opinions, because they can be very redneck, but they are honest and they’re truthful—so there’s an excitement here, there’s a dynamic here with my students that I never had when I was in the Midwest or in North Dakota, because there, there was so much Puritanism that dictated how people looked at the world that a lot of times they didn’t have an opinion, you couldn’t get them to express an opinion. And, quite honestly, I’d rather have opinions that I don’t like—and have that dynamic in education.

There’s a student I think you should talk to. His name is Jedadiah Schultz.

MOMENT: ANGELS IN AMERICA

JEDADIAH SCHULTZ: I’ve lived in Wyoming my whole life. The family has been in Wyoming, well … for generations. Now when it came time to go to college, my parents can’t—couldn’t afford to send me to college. I wanted to study theater. And I knew that if I was going to go to college I was going to have to get on a scholarship—and so, uh, they have this competition each year, this Wyoming state high school competition. And I knew that if I didn’t take first place in, uh, duets that I wasn’t gonna get a scholarship. So I went to the theater department of the university looking for good scenes, and I asked one of the professors—I was like, “I need—I need a killer scene,” and he was like, “Here you go, this is it.” And it was from Angels in America.