The Laramie Project
A month after the crime, Moises Kaufman and members of New York’s Tectonic Theater Project (which Kaufman founded) made the first of six pilgrimages to Laramie, where they interviewed townspeople. They ended up creating a play not only about Laramie–its response to the crime and its aftermath, its soul-searching, its debate over values–but about their own changed perspectives on small-town America. The Laramie Project premiered last year in Denver and was subsequently presented overseas, off-Broadway, and around the United States, from La Jolla to Laramie. It’s now receiving its Chicago-area premiere in a beautifully crafted production notable for its emotional restraint, which makes the story far more moving than any melodramatic moralizing would have.
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Among those we meet are two members of the university’s theater department: the teacher who helped round up interviewees for the New York visitors (and who moved to Wyoming because she thought it was safer and friendlier than the midwest) and a student who starred in a school production of Angels in America despite his conservative parents’ disapproval. A female cop recalls fearing she contracted AIDS while trying to resuscitate the blood-soaked Shepard (who was in fact HIV positive, though he may not have known it); a police officer’s wife is angry that the death in the line of duty of one of her husband’s colleagues merited scant attention in the press while Shepard’s murder was front-page news. The bartender at the tavern where Shepard met McKinney and Henderson agonizes over what he might have done to prevent the killing; the UW student who discovered Shepard while biking wonders what divine purpose brought him to the spot; a lesbian student decides to become an activist after leading candlelight vigils for Shepard. Wyoming’s GOP governor decries the murder but also frets that hate-crimes legislation would confer “special rights” on gays; a hospital spokesman recalls his tears on camera when he announced Shepard’s death–and the E-mails that mocked him for crying for a faggot. A liberal Catholic priest sternly admonishes the Tectonic company to “say it right”; a Mormon minister explains his decision to offer Henderson spiritual counsel after he was excommunicated by church elders; a Baptist preacher expresses hope that Shepard had time to consider his sinful ways before he lapsed into a coma. And Shepard’s father reflects on his son’s final hours of consciousness as he hung from the fence–not alone, the father says, but surrounded by “friends,” the stars and the sunrise–before requesting life imprisonment for McKinney instead of execution. The killer and Laramie itself were spared the obscenity of the death penalty. Lucky thing for the Tectonic crew, who were able to end their play with an upbeat message of love and healing coming out of horror and pain.
