The set is a performance space. There are a few tables and chairs. Costumes and props are always visible. The basic costumes are the ones worn by the company of actors. Costumes to portray the people of Laramie should be simple: a shirt, a pair of glasses, a hat. The desire is to suggest, not re-create. Along the same lines, this should be an actor-driven event. Costume changes, set changes, and anything else that happens on the stage should be done by the company of actors.

ABOUT THE TEXT

When writing this play, we used a technique I developed called moment work. It is a method to create and analyze theater from a structuralist (or tectonic) perspective. For that reason, there are no scenes in this play, only moments. A moment does not mean a change of locale or an entrance or exit of actors or characters. It is simply a unit of theatrical time that is then juxtaposed with other units to convey meaning.

ACT I

MOMENT: A DEFINITION

NARRATOR: On November 14, 1998, the members of Tectonic Theater Project traveled to Laramie, Wyoming, and conducted interviews with the people of the town. During the next year, we would return to Laramie several times and conduct over two hundred interviews. The play you are about to see is edited from those interviews, as well as from journal entries by members of the company and other found texts. Company member Greg Pierotti:

GREG PIEROTTI: My first interview was with Detective Sergeant Hing of the Laramie Police Department. At the start of the interview he was sitting behind his desk, sitting something like this (he transforms into Sergeant Hing):

I was born and raised here.

My family is, uh, third generation.

My grandparents moved here in the early nineteen hundreds.

We’ve had basically three, well, my daughter makes it fourth generation.

Quite a while.… It’s a good place to live. Good people—lots of space.

Now, all the towns in southern Wyoming are laid out and spaced because of the railroad came through.

It was how far they could go before having to refuel and rewater.

And, uh, Laramie was a major stopping point.

That’s why the towns are spaced so far apart.

We’re one of the largest states in the country, and the least populated.

REBECCA HILLIKER: There’s so much space between people and towns here, so much time for reflection.

NARRATOR: Rebecca Hilliker, head of the theater department at the University of Wyoming:

REBECCA HILLIKER: You have an opportunity to be happy in your life here. I found that people here were nicer than in the Midwest, where I used to teach, because they were happy. They were glad the sun was shining. And it shines a lot here.

SERGEANT HING: What you have is, you have your old-time traditional-type ranchers, they’ve been here forever—Laramie’s been the hub of where they come for their supplies and stuff like that.