FREE PRESS SAYS KEEP IT ALIVE

CHICAGO FREE PRESS
The Laramie Project
By Louis Weisberg, Staff writer
March 1, 2006

The brutal 1998 murder of 21-year-old University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard riveted the world’s attention on anti-gay hate crimes like no such incident has before or since. In the aftermath of the tragedy, Moises Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project made six trips to Laramie and conducted more than 200 interviews with local people about the crime. They distilled their work into a piece of theater as stirring as it is authentic.

“The Laramie Project” is ultimately a searing portrait of America’s hypocritical view of homosexuality. Like most Americans, the good people of Laramie say they hate the sin but love the sinner. They can’t understand how this attitude could have led to a heinous crime that brought the eyes of the world peering in shock and disapproval over their backyard fences.

“Laramie’s live and let live,” says a character early in the play. “We don’t grow children like that,” says another, referring to the killers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. This denial is repeated over and over.

As the townspeople cast about searching for God’s meaning in an effort to put closure to the horrible experience, they look everywhere but in the mirror. Finally, toward the end of the play, Muslim college student Zubaida Ula, who knows a thing or two about Laramie hospitality, dares to utter the obvious: “People were going, ‘That’s not how it is here.’ Well, how is it here?” That line, even more than the convictions of McKinney and Henderson and the raw courtroom speech of Dennis Shepard, marks the climax of this work. If only the townspeople knew it.

Like Lanford Wilson’s “The Rimers of Eldridge,” another play that shined a scorching light on small-town bigotry, “The Laramie Project” is presented with minimal props and staging. The actors play multiple characters and switch in and out of them without a pause. This makes for a complex and difficult undertaking, and Janus Theatre Company’s young cast, under the direction of Sean Hargadon, does an admirable job of keeping it believable and absorbing.

“The Laramie Project” is a play that every GLBT person must see, and this capable production provides an excellent opportunity. Kudos to Janus for keeping this story and its message alive.