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The Laramie Project, Ten Years Later
. . . last weekend, I headed up to Austin’s Zach Scott Theater to catch The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, which also has yet to see a San Antonio production (although it would fit in nicely at, say, the Jump-Start).
I wasn’t
entirely sure what to expect: reviews and previews sometimes described
the play as a sequel or epilogue to the original Laramie Project,
but neither moniker exactly inspired confidence in the evening’s
artistic merits. (I mean, is there any term less exciting than
“epilogue”? Appendix, maybe. Or Nachschrift.) But it turns out that The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later is
not only a fully-realized and intelligent work of theater, but that,
in many ways, it’s a more substantial and rewarding piece than even the
original play.
The first Laramie Project certainly
had novelty going for it: most American audiences had never been
exposed to the type of theater-as-sociology-experiment represented by
Moisés Kaufman’s Tectonic Theater Company. (Happily, there’s now an
off-shoot of that movement in SA, at the AtticRep’s Forum Theater
Project.) Seeing a theater company descend on a town—microphones and
videocams in tow—represented something new and exciting, as actors
transformed the raw transcripts of their interviews into an affecting
docudrama about the shocking murder of Matthew Shepherd: a young gay
man brutally beaten and left for dead, shackled to a fence in Wyoming.
The piece thus explored the intersection of homophobia, politics, and
rural identity at the turn of the millennium.
At first,
the sequel presents itself almost identically to the original play:
troupe members return to Laramie, Wyoming—with the same sort of
idiosyncratic self-narration that characterizes the first piece—and
begin the long (and doubtless, tedious) process of field work. But then
the piece takes a startling turn. In 1998, the Tectonic Theater
Company was not only new to American audiences, but new to Laramie: the
troupe’s other-ness helped to establish its credibility as a
dispassionate recorder of human experience. By 2008, however, the
observers had clearly affected the observed—and the observed are
hopping mad. (“We’re a town, not a project,” the local paper objects.)
And as the Tectonic Company discovers, there are darker undercurrents
afoot: in the first play, it was obvious that Matthew Shepherd was the
victim of anti-gay violence—indeed, the trial transcripts are
conclusive on this point. By 2008, however, the town is well on its way
towards re-inventing history: after an (odious) episode of TV’s
“20/20,” much of Laramie is happy to think of the murder as merely a
drug deal gone bad. (No homophobia here in Laramie, thank you much.) And that’s just the remembering; even worse is the forgetting,
signified not only by literal excision of Shepherd’s fence, but by the
clueless freshmen at the University of Wyoming who have only the
vaguest idea of who Shepherd was, or why anybody should care.
The
first Laramie Project was permeated by a sense of a single crime’s
injustice: the second, by the inexorable and cruel suppression of the
discourse of homosexuality within an entire system. The first looked at
the plight of a solitary gay man at a single, terrible, instant in
time; the second, at a pattern of injustice against gays that
permeates all available media (newspapers, TV, theater) and that uses
every postmodern trick in the book: re-writing, re-membering,
re-presenting. Dave Steakley’s elegant and understated production
employs the spare set design—a table and chairs—to good advantage; the
ugliness of human nature plays out against the natural beauty of
Wyoming, as illuminated in Colin Lowry’s subdued projections. The
acting of the eight-person company is generally fine: it’s always a
pleasure to see Jaston Williams (of “Greater Tuna” fame), though
sweet-faced Frederic Winkler is somewhat miscast as neo-Nazi murderer
Aaron McKinney. (That interview is still the most horrifying and
gripping scene in the play, however.) The evening’s single intermission
makes more dramatic sense than the original’s double intermission.
It’s a powerful evening of theater.
The Zach Scott is presenting both parts of The Laramie Project in repertory for another week, so if you haven’t seen the original, you can (and should,
dammit) take in a twofer on Saturday. For unless one of the theaters
in San Antonio programs it soon, Alamo City audiences will have to wait
until The Laramie Project: Twenty Years Later.
-- Thomas “Bouquets” Jenkins, Current Theater Critic
