The Independent Weekly, February 27, 2003
Real-life tragedy makes for shockingly good theatre
By: Rachel Bokhout
Forget about Mamma Mia, or The Lion King, or any other piece of musical mush that could, as Toronto playwright Sky Gilbert famously put it, "actually make you stupid."
The best show in town - and it folds in a week - is Artword Theatre�s The Laramie Project.
It�s a miracle that the play is happening at all.
Toronto producers have been, in tandem, dragging their feet about mounting a production here, despite its US success, and despite the chilling murder of David Buller two years ago, which could have easily fuelled a �Toronto Project� to match.
But Studio 180 - the group of mostly U of Waterloo grads producing the show - believed in it so strongly that they�re doing the show for free.
It�s a move in turn laudable and embarrassing - the later for the companies who waffled on staging the play.
The Laramie Project is crafted from an avalanche of interviews - more than 200 - with the townspeople of Laramie, Wyoming.
In case that doesn�t ring any bells, Laramie is the town where Matthew Shepard, a gay university student, lived... and was brutally killed.
In the year and a half following the murder, members of the Tectonic Theatre Project talked to Laramie citizens in all walks of life.
They crafted the script directly from these transcripts, and in doing so present a picture of a town in conflict.
Characters range from the members of the troupe to the police officer whose efforts to save Matthew exposed her to HIV; a gay faculty member; the clergy of the local Baptist, United and Catholic church; anti-gay protester Fred Phelps; a local student who wins a scholarship through his performance of a scene from Angels in America; a jail mate of the two men convicted of Shepard�s murder; and the town cab-driver.
It�s a difficult show to stage in an interesting manner. Like other monologue-driven scripts, The Laramie Project could have easily turned into a readers theatre, chairs-and-music-stands production.
Thankfully, director Joel Greenberg and designer Michael Gianfrancesco have a few moments of delightful inventiveness, particularly when a row of straight back chairs - the only furniture, other than two tables - turns into a fence.
Sometimes Greenberg�s efforts are a bit over the top: there�s a moment when the actor playing Phelps stays on stage, in character and gesticulating wildly, throughout a monologue by another character.
Phelps is so deplorable that the audience can�t help but want him off; and his silent miming in the background divides attention unnecessarily.
There are several exceptionally strong performances, particularly from Jonathan Goad.
With more than double-duty, Goad snaps between the doctor who tends both Shepard and his killer, to the student who wins a scholarship on the strength of his performance in a scene from Angels in America, to an empty and rather terrifying portrayal of the killers themselves - all the more disturbing for his timidity and reluctance to speak.
Unavoidably, the poignancy of the script outshines all other elements of the play. Its strength makes it hard to single out weak moments, and makes most criticism feel petty.
Even in a room full of hardened critics (Richard Ouzounian to the left of me, Kate Taylor to the right), surreptitious tears were shed into sleeves.
And while there was no standing ovation at the media preview - the worn and tired critics� handbook says such is inappropriate - I think we all left feeling somewhat heartened.
How often can a critic - or actor or audience member or director or producer - honestly say that it�s important for a show to be seen?
Especially a critic writing for a student paper, where the normal fare is American comedy written in the late seventies/mid-eighties.
Cutting the rhetoric short, let me simply say that The Laramie Project was a smart choice for a new company�s first production - and the best choice for a night on the town this week.