The Laramie Project
by Moises Kaufman and the Members of the Tectonic Theater Project
Presented by the University Theater, University of Georgia
(Notes written in November, Year 2)
In the summer of 1965 I worked in a plant making stable (nonradioactive) isotopes. The union didn't want me because I was a short-timer, but I did get to read their newspaper, and on my word of honor it included a cartoon showing a Top-Hatted Industrialist (not just any Industrialist but a Top-Hatted one, which I guess you all know is the worst kind) treading on the rights of the Working Man. Being surrounded at the moment by Management and Its Minions, I laughed off the image, but the experience left me aware of an important paradox about ideological art: All but the best of it fails if it's mocked; all but the best of it mocks itself.
I therefore went to The Laramie Project with my heart down around knee level. The play ("if play it is," thinking to myself) is an investigation into the beating death of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay university student, in Laramie, Wyoming, in the fall of 1998. Tectonic members went West to conduct some 200 interviews with everybody from the governor of Wyoming to bar patrons in Fort Collins, Colorado, then returned to New York to turn the results into a script. Now it's widely known that young theater people come chiefly from areas other than Wyoming and that they speak virtually with one voice against the murder of gay men. Hence: political theater. With ten-gallon hats instead of toppers.
The property is in three acts and uses a company of thirteen (in this production; I'd guess the the number can vary) playing, in all, eighty-two roles. The characters include the Tectonic group, people who give them interviews, the men accused of Shepard's killing, and two narrators. The opening did not promise much satisfaction for me as members of the cast began with a lah-di-dah movement exercise and a symbolic tableau of a rustic fence and huddled victim.
Directors speak of "given circumstances" as one key to understanding a scene. When Arsenic and Old Lace begins, for example, Abby and Martha's given circumstances include their old house and their relationships with Teddy and Mortimer but also the lonely gentleman in the window seat. An actor who forgets the given circumstances is said to display the fault of "not being in the moment." What I saw in The Laramie Project was a fine example of staying in the moment and following the given circumstances wherever they lead.
The Tectonics put themselves in the play as absorbers only, not as movers of the action or authorial voices. Their "outsider" characters speak to describe interview situations and remain present to ask questions and record answers, but they do not offer us reactions (or even their reasons for going to Laramie). It would be silly to forget that they later selected and shaped the material, but onstage they take the stance of listeners, and it is this choice that transforms the play from political theater to, well, theater. Such a simple thing, being in the moment.
Take the first interview, with a Laramie police officer. He'd rather not be on-mike, and he doesn't speak with care; indeed, he probably says a lot that he later wishes he hadn't told some smartass subversive kid from back East. Me, I cringe, waiting for the snapper when the interviewer reveals that the sergeant wears a top hat while out with his buddies treading on the rights of homosexuals. And it doesn't come. The sergeant says what he says, and because the only other person in the scene simply listens, you listen too. The sergeant gets to speak, as do the shopkeepers, professors, judges, preachers and other people of Laramie . . . and you listen. Given circumstances everywhere you look, and the Tectonics let them come.
Laramie does have the form of political theater. An edgy playwright, a collective here, seeks a property in the aftermath of an atrocity. The subject cries out for a sermon. The Tectonic interviews, properly worked up, could have made a searing message play about a middle-class Wyoming town as the microcosm of a world that doesn't care to protect some of its marginal people. Powerful stuff, maybe no Death of a Salesman but good, bankable material. The hard choice and the saving of the project was the decision that Laramie could speak for itself, that the place really is a microcosm but the world it reflects is not as simple as top hats versus tool belts. An awful thing happened; here is what people said it did to them; go home.
Really I think this is one of the best shows I've seen from the University Theater. The production had weak points, mainly things that went on before and between acts. And the ominous slow-mo dance at the top, I definitely could have done without that. But the script was outstanding, the setting appropriate and well-executed, and the cast gave some fine performances. The doubling (82 divided by 13 equals more than just doubling) meant that everybody had to get inside a roomful of characters, so we got to see a great deal of technique along with the actors' evident devotion to the play.
Edward Norris played, among others, Jedadiah Schultz, a high-schooler who regrets that his parents refused to see him play a scene from Angels in America in competition. Willowy build, white turtleneck, breathy voice, graceful movement style: Is Jedadiah flamboyantly straight or in the closet? It was a lovely and effective performance and a key to the structure of the play, for in the last scene we learned that he got the part of Pryor in a later college production. Brooke F. Bennett ably played a salty-tongued Muslim woman, of all things, with an opinion about everything. Matthew Suber entered the courtroom in Aaron McKinney's prison jumpsuit, then unhurriedly stripped it off, put on a wedding ring and became Matthew Shepard's father addressing the chair from which he'd just risen. It made a deeply touching moment; if anything argues against Laramie as political theater, it will be that onstage change. In a wonderful scene in Act 3, Melanie Julian, as police officer Reggie Fluty, told how she was exposed to HIV while giving aid to Matthew Shepard, then how she reacted to getting a virus-free report from the lab. Jake Dogias, as limousine driver Doc O'Connor, provided comic relief as he guided us to Laramie people and places; Jake's a very skilled guy and a University Theater favorite.
As usual, I can't tell you to go and see this production, because it has closed by the time you read. I bet The Laramie Project will show up at your neighborhood theater before long, though, so you get a second chance.
| Approved Ben Teague web site |
 |
The Laramie Project