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Big Opening for Epilogue to ‘The Laramie Project’
The creators of “The Laramie Project,” the acclaimed play about the 1998 murder of a 21-year-old gay man, Matthew Shepard,
are finishing work on an 80-minute epilogue to the original work that
will be given its debut simultaneously at dozens of theaters across the
United States on Oct. 12, the 11th anniversary of Mr. Shepard’s death.
Moisés Kaufman,
the playwright and director who, with his Tectonic Theater Project
company, wrote and produced the first “Laramie Project,” said the
epilogue would explore the impact of the Shepard killing on the
residents of Laramie, Wyo., where it occurred. The dialogue will be
drawn from interviews with dozens of people there, some of whom were
involved in the crime, including Aaron McKinney, who was convicted of
murdering Mr. Shepard and who gave an interview to the Tectonic artists.
“We
wanted to see what occurs in a small town in the long run when it’s
been subject to such a devastating event,” Mr. Kaufman said in an
interview. “What has been the long-lasting effect of this watershed
moment? Is the fallout of these events positive, negative or perhaps a
better question, is it measurable in those terms?”
In holding
multiple premieres of the play on the same night, Mr. Kaufman said he
was taking a page from the Federal Theater Project, the New Deal
program that often opened plays in a multitude of cities on the same
night.
Tectonic’s goal is to recruit 100 regional theaters,
universities and other arts organizations to hold staged readings of
the work, which is called “The Laramie Project — 10 Years Later.” More
than 40 theaters have committed to the readings, including Arena Stage
in Washington, Seattle Repertory Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theater
and the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles. The Tectonic company will hold
its performance in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center.
“We’re
also taking advantage of contemporary technology so that at the New
York performance we’ll be connected to the other productions across the
nation via the Internet,” Mr. Kaufman said. “We’re giving each
production a video recorder so that they can document the event, and
we’ll be answering questions live from across the country,” after the
performances on Oct. 12, a Monday.
Mr. Kaufman and his epilogue
co-writers — Stephen Belber, Leigh Fondakowski, Andy Paris and Greg
Pierotti — returned to Laramie last fall to reinterview several
townspeople who originally gave accounts to Tectonic in 1998 about Mr.
Shepard, Mr. McKinney and the events preceding and following the
murder. Those accounts were threaded together verbatim to create “The
Laramie Project,” which has had several thousand productions since it
opened Off Broadway in 2000.
In writing the new work Mr. Kaufman
and his colleagues said they would reflect the range of views currently
held by Laramie residents and others about whether Mr. Shepard’s murder
was a hate crime by two homophobic men (Mr. McKinney and his
accomplice, Russell Henderson) or the result of a botched attempt by
the two men to rob Mr. Shepard.
Some Laramie residents, in
defending their community during the interviews last fall, argued that
they had come to see the motives and circumstances leading to the
murder as more complicated than a hate crime. But others there insisted
that Mr. McKinney and Mr. Henderson had been driven by their personal
disgust toward Mr. Shepard, who was well known as an openly gay man in
their town.
Mr. Kaufman declined to reveal details of the
interview with Mr. McKinney, who, like Mr. Henderson, is now serving
two consecutive life sentences. The two men lured Mr. Shepard from a
Laramie bar on the night of Oct. 6, 1998; Mr. Shepard was ultimately
tied to a fence, pistol-whipped and left to die.
“As always, what
we found defied expectations,” Mr. Kaufman said. “It’s a fallacy to try
to define Laramie the way one would describe an individual. There are
27,000 people in Laramie. There are at least 27,000 Laramies.”
“But
one of the things that was very clear from the start is the question of
how does one measure change,” he continued. “Is it in the number of
public monuments that have been erected? Is it in the number of laws
that have been passed? Is it in the number of people whose views have
been changed?”
Natalie Bohnet, executive director of UApresents, which will stage the reading at a 2,500-seat theater at the University of Arizona,
in Tucson, said the campus is expected to sponsor other events in
conjunction with the performance in hopes of turning that Columbus Day
weekend in October into “a major learning experience.”
“We’ll
have some professors of constitutional law holding a forum, and
students on campus are expected to hold their own events, so we can
look more deeply at hate crimes in America and issues of justice,” she
said.
It is unclear if the new work will be performed on that
October night in Laramie, but it will be produced as close as Denver,
about two hours away by car, at the Newman Center for the Performing
Arts. Stephen Seifert, executive director of the Newman Center, at the
University of Denver, said he chose to hold a reading in part because
of the theater’s proximity to Laramie. (Mr. Shepard died at a hospital
in Fort Collins, Colo., several days after the attack.)
“I was a
history major in college, and my focus was the history of the American
frontier,” Mr. Seifert said. “No matter what differences of opinions
exist about Matthew Shepard, his murder is now a part of the West’s
history, of American history.”