"Laramie Project Cycle' in Brooklyn

Fifteen years ago, on the night of October 6-7, 1998, a gay student at the University of Wyoming named Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered by two Laramie residents who were his contemporaries. That shocking event coined the word "hate crime" in American consciousness and changed forever the way Americans view violence against gays.

Or did it?

The Tectonic Theatre Project, under the courageous leadership of writer/director Moisés Kaufman, has dedicated a decade of its artistic life to answering that question. In the year following the murder, eight company members made six trips to Wyoming, where they interviewed more than 200 Laramie residents. Using these interview transcripts, court documents and media reports, they created a dramatic work called The Laramie Project. It opened in 2000, became one of the most performed theater pieces in the U.S. (over 850 productions to date), and was adapted into an HBO film.

Ten years later, many of those same company members returned to Laramie yet again. Using the same techniques, they documented the changes in that college town. That new work, The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, premiered in October 2009 simultaneously in more than 150 productions in all 50 states, as well as in Tel Aviv, Melbourne and Hong Kong.

Brechtian approach

The Tectonic troupers had accomplished their decade-long mission: to bring this crime and its aftermath to international consciousness. But what they discovered, and ultimately dramatized, is far more disturbing than they could have anticipated.

These two works, performed together last month for the first time under the umbrella title The Laramie Project Cycle, tell the story— shocking, moving, baffling, and ultimately inconclusive— in a Brechtian fashion. Playing themselves (as actors and interviewers), the company members also assume the roles of the subjects they interviewed: family and friends of Matthew Shepard, Laramie police officers, prominent Laramie citizens, the accused (Aaron McKinley and Russell Henderson) and their family members. Kaufman and his actors weave the narrative seamlessly from testimony to testimony, introducing each other, playing the various roles of the interview subjects, and addressing the audience directly.

The stage is empty (nothing but some desks, chairs and a fence and a wheat field as backdrop), but the power and magnitude of the story is overwhelming.

Nightmare on the plains

Step by step, the shocking event is retold. A young gay college student is offered a ride home from a town bar late one night by two male residents (one of whom was a father), driven to a remote ranch, tied to a fence, robbed, pistol-whipped, tortured and left, bleeding and disfigured, to die. Henderson subsequently pleaded guilty and was given two consecutive life sentences. McKinney was threatened with the death penalty; however, Shepard's parents intervened ("It wasn't what our son would have wanted"), and McKinney is now serving two life sentences as well.

The horrific narrative of the murder and its cathartic aftermath is traumatic enough. But what emerges is a story in which Laramie itself becomes the chief— and tragic— protagonist. Indeed, The Laramie Project Cycle might be viewed as a version of Our Town turned nightmare— a "gem of the plains" (as Laramie has been called) gone terribly wrong.

"'How does God feel?'

"It's a good place to live, lots of good people, lots of space," is a phrase repeated over and over in the first 15 minutes of Part I, as various residents introduce their town. That leitmotif changes dramatically, once the crime is reported.

"We don't grow children like that here," protests one ashamed resident. "What did we do to produce two murderers? What did we as a society do to teach these two boys to do that?" asks another. "I wonder if this is how God feels, looking down on us?" cries the devastated doctor who examined Matthew's mutilated body.

"Everyone needs to own this crime," says yet another. But the question is: Do they?

Making amends

According to the testimonies in Part II, yes, there has been some change in Laramie. The fence where Matthew Shepard was tied became a shrine. The town created an AIDS walk; the high school now has a gay alliance. The University passed a "partner benefit initiative." A bill in the state legislature defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman was defeated.

On the national scene, Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crime Prevention Act in 2009. "We are the state of Matthew Shepard and Brokeback Mountain," remarks one resident, in a rare moment of wry humor.

On the other hand, it's disturbingly clear from Part II that the town has tried hard to distance itself from the event that has defined it. The memorial fence has been torn down. One of the murderers (McKinney) changed his confession, saying that he killed Shepard because of Shepard's sexual overtures.

Changing the narrative

Most disturbing has been the growing consensus in the town that the murder was a drug-related robbery gone wrong. This new interpretation was prominently broadcast in ABC's "20/20" report in 2004. An editorial in the Laramie newspaper on the tenth anniversary supported this belief, asserting that the Shepard murder wasn't a gay hate crime at all.

That same year, only 50 people attended the University's tenth anniversary memorial service for Matthew Shepard. When asked today, students express only vague familiarity with his name. Meanwhile, according to one reporter interviewed, anti-gay hate crimes are rising in America.

Unanswered question

So what lessons have we learned from these heroic efforts of the Tectonic Theatre Project? "I never understood the magnitude of some people's hatred," laments a Laramie doctor.

That line haunts me. Thinking of Matthew Shepard, a mere five-foot-two and 100 pounds, what could possibly have possessed those two young men to brutalize him so?

Looking back on his brief life, it was reported that Matthew Shepard himself played the part of the "boy" in a high school production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. How could he have possibly imagined what his real town would be capable of?

Other plays, like Athol Fugard's Master Harold and The Boys, or stories like Shirley Jackson's The Lottery and William Golding's Lord of the Flies, address these anguished questions. But The Laramie Project Cycle eschews dramatic metaphor. Its questions are real and present; it poses them directly and urgently, and we can't evade them.

The lasting value of the Tectonic effort is in showing us how stories are told, how history is made and interpreted, and the role that theater plays in this process. We may never know the truth of what really happened at that fence in Laramie in 1998 or why it happened. What we do learn is that the lives of three young men— all residents of, God help us, "our town"— were destroyed. It's the theater's responsibility to tell that story, and ours to hear it.