News
The Laramie Residency has something to offer everyone, no matter their background or residence
November 5, 2010
Both ‘Laramie’ projects share the stage in Philadelphia
by
Larry Nichols
Philadelphia Gay News
slideshow
With the nation focused on the issue of antigay bullying and the recent
teen suicides that have resulted, two plays have become more timely
than ever as they explore the impact the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard
had on the town of Laramie, Wyo., and the nation at large.
The
Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts will host Tectonic Theater
Project as it presents both “The Laramie Project” and the new companion
piece “The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later,” Nov. 11-13.
Philadelphia
is one of the few cities where both plays are being performed on
Tectonic Theater Project’s current tour. Greg Pierotti, who helped to
write and acts in both performances, said the project — based on
interviews with Laramie residents a decade after Shepard’s murder — is
more relevant to what is happening in the LGBT community today.
“Particularly
in part two, there’s material that resonates with the suicides that are
being reported,” Pierotti said. “I mean, they have been happening since
forever, but for some reason the national media has started paying
attention to them now.”
Moisés Kaufman, the director and one of
the writers of the Laramie plays, explained how seeing both of the plays
together deepens the understanding of them.
“There’s something
rather epic about both of them being together,” he said. “It becomes a
very large American story. It becomes the story of an American town over
10 years of its existence. The first play has a more immediate kind of
feeling. The second play lets you see what happens over the course of 10
years.”
Both Kaufman and Pierotti conducted some of the
interviews for the plays and were shocked at how time had distorted the
facts and the sentiment in Laramie toward Shepard’s murder.
“A
lot of the quick interviews we did on the street, walking up to people
asking them what they remember about Matthew Shepard, were kind of
shocking too,” Pierotti said. “We were walking up to kids on the campus
and some kids hadn’t even heard of him. That was a little bit shocking
to find on the University of Wyoming campus. Then there were all the
people that were telling a wildly different story about what happened to
Matthew: that it was a drug deal or a robbery that went bad. One person
said that he heard that Matthew was a drug dealer. Those were kind of
shocking things to hear. I guess the most surprising interview for me
was when I interviewed Aaron McKinney in prison. I found a lot of that
interview quite shocking. He’s become a white supremacist since he went
to prison. I wasn’t really expecting that. He wasn’t able to articulate
any remorse for what he did to Matthew, which I was pretty shocked by
after 10 years.”
Pierotti added that traveling the country and
experiencing the mixed and sometimes contradictory reactions to “The
Laramie Project,” which can range from acclaim to protests, can be
baffling.
“It’s very confusing for me to be going around the
country and engaging with these communities because my faith in each
community that we’re in is so disparate,” he said. “Certain days I feel
like there’s hope and then on other days I feel like, what is happening
in this culture? It depends who you talk to. There’s too wide of a
discrepancy between people who are concerned for the wellbeing, safety
and equal rights of gay people and people who could give a shit. I find
all of this in every single community that we’ve been in, but I feel a
little bit like maybe I’m naïve. Living in New York, I always feel like
things are better than they are.”
Kaufman said he isn’t surprised by the different reactions to their work.
“I
find that that is kind of a representation on where the country is at
this moment,” he said. “We are divided, literally, down the middle
almost around issues of social justice and acceptance. Depending on the
poll, half the people in the country believes in gay marriage and half
the country is against gay marriage. We are in the middle of a battle
and I think it’s irrefutable that some progress has been made in the
last 10 years. I think every time that we encounter some progress
there’s always a backlash.”
Even if the impact isn’t always what
the creators of “The Laramie Project” would hope, Pierotti said both
plays have something to offer for both gay and straight audiences no
matter what their background or residence.
“Some of us have had
antigay violence directed toward us growing up. For gay audiences,
there’s a lot more identification and people are moved by a shared
situation, but I think straight audiences are pretty provoked by the
play to kind of change their own attitudes, and I think often people are
shocked by how unsafe it really does feel in the world for gay people.
Because I think a lot of the straight audiences that come see the play
aren’t homophobic: They have a heterosexual privilege and they just
haven’t questioned how easy that has made things for them.”
