Theater Review - Their town
The Laramie Project is a stark investigation into Matthew Shepard killing
A century and an ocean separates Moises Kaufman’s most recent plays, both of which qualify as nonfiction. Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde draws on 19th-century journalism, correspondence and historic record to dramatize the 1895 legal cases that essentially destroyed the life of the writer and wit.
Equally acclaimed, Kaufman’s newest work, The Laramie Project, could be called a piece of oral history or “theatrical journalism. With help from members of his Tectonic Theater Project, Kaufman conducted interviews in Laramie, Wyo., about the fatal beating of Matthew Shepard, and the subsequent trials and media coverage. The play is grounded in a procedure comparable to the kind of current-event inquiries Anna Deavere Smith is known for — one that involves interviewing the disparate individuals surrounding a public episode (as she did with the L.A. riots in Twilight: Los Angeles 1992) before offering portrayals of them on stage. But unlike Smith’s one-woman shows, The Laramie Project is an ensemble piece. And it enjoys a stark and engrossing Southeastern premiere at Actor’s Express.
The script is derived from the interviews and testimony of the people of Laramie, and from notes by Kaufman and his colleagues. The visiting artists initially find Laramie — at least in appearance — to be a friendly-looking college town in the land of Wal-Marts and chicken-fried steak. The citizens, still recovering from the horror of Shepard’s death and the disorienting media glare, prove wary at first. But they gradually tell their stories.
All of the actors take on multiple parts, though some play similar types of characters. Justin Welborn portrays both quirky eyewitnesses and criminals; Hope Mirlis, judges and authority figures; Brit Whittle, professors, a Unitarian minister and Kaufman himself. David Crowe is a sheriff, a detective, a hospital spokesman and a gay Laramie resident with doubts about the town’s homophobic element. The cast also includes Shontelle Thrash, Jeremy Cudd, Alexandra Price and Laurie Strickland.
Directed by Claudia Zelavansky, The Laramie Project maintains a somber, clinical tone, staged before a screen depicting a black-and-white horizon, against which are projected words like “Live and Let Live. The floor boards are plain and background noise is prevalent; the quiet rush of wind in the first act and the low, ominous hum through much of the rest of the play come courtesy of sound designer Laurie Oliver.
The show’s most chillingly memorable image takes place near the end of Act One. After hearing folks describe Shepard — diminutive, extroverted, amiable — Laramie’s witnesses recount the moments when he left a bar in the company of two strangers. Actors tell of the discovery of Shepard’s mortally injured body; he’d been savagely beaten, tied to a fence and left in the cold for 16 hours. As different actors react to the news, each leaves an up-ended wooden chair on the stage. They form a row that resembles a fence, representing the site of the crime scene in a way that’s difficult to shake.
The second act deals with the reactions of friends and strangers to the violent act and the ensuing media blitz. The final section includes Shepard’s funeral and the trials of the accused.
Laramie is not a short play — it lasts about two hours and 40 minutes and has two intermissions. But it shifts so frequently among such a breadth of characters and points of view that it consistently commands your interest. It proves most gripping the closer it stays to the most serious events: the crime, Shepard’s medical care, the police investigation and the trials. But when it focuses on the playwright and actors themselves, it seems a bit self-important if not self-congratulatory — and that may be unavoidable. Every mention of how many trips were made to Laramie (six) and how many interviews were conducted (200) distracts from the real significance of the play itself, like a painter’s ostentatious signature drawing attention from a portrait.
With the cast members shifting among so many roles, some of the performances come off like acting exercises, emphasizing more mannered traits (like the stoner-type dude who finds Shepard’s body). But the cast takes pains to avoid stereotyping the Laramie residents as either amusing hicks or brutal rednecks. Many of the actors have vivid moments, especially Cudd as anti-gay demonstrator the Rev. Fred Phelps, Welborn as a bartender with a quirky vocabulary, and (particularly) Whittle as Shepard’s father.
The Laramie Project isn’t intended to expose the intolerance of America’s heartland, but it does reveal, with admirable balance, a community’s multiple facets. Thrash reacts with anger when someone says, “Laramie isn’t the kind of place where things like this happen. “But it did happen here, Thrash asserts. Laramie conveys how the repercussions from a single crime can have a magnitude as big as all the outdoors.
The Laramie Project plays through Oct. 20 at Actor’s Express, King Plow Arts Center, 887 W. Marietta St. Show times are 8 p.m. Thurs.-Sat. and 5 p.m. Sun. (2 p.m. the Sept. 23 and Oct. 7). $20-25. 404-607-7469. www.actorsexpress.com.