Eye Weekly, February 20, 2003
The Laramie Project
By: Christopher Hoile
In 1998 in Laramie, Wyoming, openly gay university student Matthew Shepard was kidnapped, brutally beaten, tied to a fence in an isolated area and left to die in freezing weather. Eighteen hours passed before he was found. By the time he died five days later, his case had brought hate crimes against gays to international attention. A month later, New York writer Mois�s Kaufman took his theatre company to Laramie where over the course of 18 months they interviewed more than 200 people. The play based on these interviews opened in Denver in 2000 and only now receives its Toronto premiere.
Kaufman's strategy is to focus on Laramie itself, its response to Shepard's death and the trial of his two assailants. It is a fascinating portrait of a small town undergoing a crisis of conscience. We meet more than 60 characters -- Shepard's friends, police, clergy, ordinary folk, the murderers themselves -- covering all points of view from justification to horror. Kaufman's interview excerpts bring out the poetry in everyday speech and the contradictions found in even the most well-meaning people.
The downside is that we learn little about Shepard himself except that he was short, slight, gay and HIV-positive. Like the media he criticizes, Kaufman is unfortunately more willing to view Shepard as a victim and a cause than as a person. When the play portrays the process of making the play itself, it adopts a cloying air of earnest self-importance.
Joel Greenberg's direction makes imaginative use of a set consisting solely of five tables and a few chairs. Of the eight actors, only Lesley Dowey, Deborah Drakeford and Kimwun Perehinec are fully adept at differentiating their numerous roles and delivering the low-key naturalistic performances the text demands. Though his playing is otherwise too big, Jonathan Goad makes the second killer's confession truly chilling.