Written by Moisés Kaufman and the Members of Tectonic Theater Project
In October 1998, Matthew Shepard was bashed and left tied-up as a scarecrow to die in Laramie, Wyoming, by two local boys. Their trial has become one of the more celebrated uses of the ‘gay panic’ defence in America, and focused worldwide attention on hate crimes. The writers of The Laramie Project travelled to Laramie one month after Matthew’s death and returned there numerous times over the next two years, interviewing over two hundred locals, students and outsiders to weave together a performance.
It is a show performed in a theatre by a group of young actors, suggesting rather than inhabiting an ensemble of over sixty characters. This play is a famous example of ‘documentary’ or ‘verbatim’ theatre – a show constructed solely of interviews and testimonies of witnesses to an event or people concerned with a particular topic. In using real events to form the basis of theatre, verbatim shows are often more ‘real’ than fictional pieces and have a slightly rawer quality – the words on stage are not manufactured by an author, but words of real people caught up in events, as edited by a dramaturge and the company.
The Laramie Project is a story which ultimately transcends the circumstances of its crime and the sexuality of the victim, to become a potent meditation on effects of casual prejudice, and the way in which young people are conditioned to think in the twenty-first century.
The Laramie Project was originally performed by So What? Productions in April 2008, as the Major Production of the Sydney University Dramatic Society, in Sydney’s Seymour Theatre Centre.
So What? Productions revived The Laramie Project in November 2008 at Sydney’s Newtown Theatre. This production of The Laramie Project was the only Australian production coinciding with the tenth anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s death and the Tectonic Theater Project’s first journey to Laramie.
Performed
1 – 22 November 2008 (Newtown Theatre)
9 – 19 April 2008 (Seymour Theatre Centre)
