Chapters (12)
The idea of The Laramie Project originated in my desire to learn more about why Matthew Shepard was murdered, about what happened that night, about the town of Laramie. The idea of listening to the citizens talk really interested me. How is Laramie different from the rest of the country, and how is it similar?
Shortly after the murder, I posed the question to my company, Tectonic Theater Project. What can we as theater artists do as a response to this incident? And, more concretely, is theater a medium that can contribute to the national dialogue on current events?
These concerns fall squarely within Tectonic Theater Project’s mission. Every project we undertake as a company has two objectives: (1) to examine the subject matter at hand, and (2) to explore theatrical language and form. In an age when film and television are constantly redefining and refining their tools and devices, the theater has too often remained entrenched in the nineteenth-century traditions of realism and naturalism. In this sense, our interest was to continue to have a dialogue on both how the theater speaks and how it is created. Thus, I was very interested in this model: A theater company travels somewhere, talks to people, and returns with what it saw and heard to create a play.
At the time I also happened to run across a Brecht essay I had not read in a long time, “The Street Scene.” In it Brecht uses as a model the following situation: “an eyewitness demonstrating to a collection of people how a traffic accident took place.” He goes on to build a theory about his “epic theatre” based on this model. The essay gave me an idea about how to deal with this project, in terms of both its creation and its aesthetic vocabulary.
So in November 1998, four weeks after the murder of Matthew Shepard, nine members of Tectonic Theater Project and I traveled to Laramie, Wyoming, to collect interviews that might become material for a play. Little did we know that we would devote two years of our lives to this project. We returned to Laramie many times over the course of the next year and a half and conducted more than two hundred interviews.
This play opened in Denver at the Denver Center Theater. Then it moved to New York City, to the Union Square Theatre. And in November 2000 we took the play to Laramie.
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.