By Jamie Monroe
The MSU Theatre department will open its Fall season with The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later. It is a revisiting of the original play, The Laramie Project, which MSU produced in March 2003 to sold-out crowds.
“When we did the first one, that was one of the most satisfying, enlightening, uplifting experiences I’ve had in my 27 years of teaching,” said Professor Laura Jefferson, head of the MSU Theatre Department, who has directed both plays. “That play changed people’s lives.”
The Laramie Project is a play created by the Tectonic Theater Project that draws upon hundreds of interviews, news articles and personal journals to chronicle the community reaction in Laramie, Wy. after the brutal murder of Mathew Shepard. Shepard, an openly gay student who attended the University of Wyoming, was lured by two men out into a remote area east of Laramie, tied to a fence, beaten and left to die. He was found by a bicyclist 18 hours later, and died five days afterward.
The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later is, in a sense, an epilogue to the first play, and picks up ten years later with follow-up interviews with the original residents featured in the play.
It also features interviews with two characters not in the original: Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, the two men convicted of Shepard’s murder. Both plays deal with the aftermath in a small town: issues of homophobia, sexuality, hate crime and LGBT rights. However each play is a standalone piece.
The backstory will be explained at the beginning of the play, so the audience won’t need to have seen the first play or know Shepard’s story to feel the impact of this week’s production.
Jefferson calls the production “more of an idea play” in that it doesn’t follow a traditional play format.
The story is told through interviews rather than a linear storyline, and instead of having principal or lead actors, uses an ensemble cast.
While the play calls for four men and four women, Jefferson added additional characters, totaling seven men and eight women, because student interest in the play was so high.
“We had 45 people at auditions,” Jefferson said. “We chose to add characters, cast more so that more students would have the opportunity.” Visual projections and titles were also brought in to add to the play. Because the play focuses on real people and true events, it has been a different experience for the cast. “They are representing real people, this is what someone actually said. I’ve been on them about keeping their lines word-perfect,” Jefferson said.
Though many of the play’s themes involve gender and sexual identity, Jefferson stresses, “These are not ‘gay plays.’ This is about basic human rights. The constitution did not guarantee rights for all men except gays, blacks, women.” She says the play poses two questions: Was this truly a hate crime and how have things changed- and if so, how do you measure change in a community?
Those questions will be open for discussion at the conclusion of each play.
Several professors from across the university will serve as panelists for a talkback with the audience.
Their disciplines include mass communication, criminal justice, history, sociology and psychology, and different professors will engage the discussion each night. “These are the kind of plays we should be doing at a COPLAC [Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges] university, bringing professors in from other disciplines.”
Jefferson said she hopes that people will take away something positive from the play.
“If everybody would just stop and think every single day of their lives, before they say something hate-filled.”
“The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later” opens tonight at 7:30 in the Bea Woods Studio and will run through Saturday, October 1.
A matinee performance will take place Sunday, October 2 at 2:30. Seating is very limited, and tickets guarantee admittance but do not reserve any particular seat.
All seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. Doors open an hour before each show.