Current Event Theater.

ELLENZWEIG, ALLEN

The Laramie Project

Written by Moises Kaufman and the members of Tectonic Theater Project

MY much abbreviated Oxford American Dictionary defines "catharsis" as "the relief of the emotions gained through viewing the experiences of others, especially in a drama." This was certainly the effect of being in the audience for Moises Kaufman's 1997 Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. Kaufman and his remarkable troupe of actors gave us a series of courtroom dramas laced with Wilde's witty epigrams, themselves threaded through a postmodern web of contemporary newspaper accounts of the trials, the memoirs of Wilde's circle, and a century's worth of scholarly glosses on the downfall of the most famous homosexual of the Victorian Age--or any age. By the end of the evening, we'd grown to understand the mixture of folly and courage that impelled Wilde to his fate as he walked a tightrope between outright candor and shrewd subterfuge. Watching an intelligence so large and a heart so open become complicit in his own tragedy, we were forced to wonder what we would have done in the same situation.

In the fall of 1998, just a month after the horrible murder of Matthew Shepard, Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Project went to Laramie, Wyoming, where they began a series of interviews that yielded some 200 testimonies about the town's internal life and its response to the vicious homophobia of the two local youths who had put Laramie in the glare of a national media spotlight. The result is The Laramie Project, a three-act drama in which the actors play the parts of a variety of townsfolk, recreating the cadences of their speech and body language to express their attitudes.

The Laramie Project is thus akin to Gross Indecency in that it presents a sociological tapestry in which the diverse attitudes and reactions of individuals form a larger social pattern. In the Wilde play, the multivocal effect came from the mixing of literary sources and original documents from the trial. In the new play, the interviews were edited and shaped by Kaufman and the Tectonic group in a manner previously deployed to great effect by the brilliant performance artist Anna Deveare Smith (Fires in the Mirror; Twilight: Los Angeles). But while Gross Indecency was structured around a powerful figure of great rhetorical skill, Laramie cannot rely on the strength of any one characterization to hold it together. The martyr of the tale is a young man dead before his time; his absence haunts, but does not control, the production.

The strength of the play lies in the multiple "channelings" of Lararnie's townsfolk by the Tectonic cast. In one incarnation, Stephen Belber plays a colorful local man who had once taxied the young Shepard all the way to a Colorado gay bar; he comes away with an unerring respect for the young man's directness. In another incarnation, Belber is the Laramie bartender who, being among the last to see the polite Shepard leave with two aimless local boys in tow, regrets not having interceded. In a production that allows cast members to cross genders, Amanda Gronich plays a Baptist Minister and his wife, all politeness and unswerving biblical rectitude, while the lanky Kelli Simpkins plays a young man out for a bicycle ride who unexpectedly comes upon the dying Shepard and calls the police. He will forever be haunted by the sight of Shepard's crucified body, and wonders what purpose God had for choosing him to make this discovery.

Thus the play delivers a cross-section of local characters, not just social types: the straight college student who, hoping to become an actor, defies his parents by auditioning with an excerpt from Tony Kushner's Angels in America; the guileless young lesbian activist who's determined to drown out a homophobic demonstrator by enlisting her friends to surround him in white costumes complete with angel wings; the female sheriff's deputy who handles Matt's bloodied body despite recent cuts to her hands--only to find that she must undergo HIV testing to determine if she's been infected.

But there are tactical problems that prevent The Laramie Project from being more than a highly absorbing oral history. To be sure, we get a demographic cross-section, and there are dramatic moments and effects. To enlarge the spare production's visual power, a screen on the back wall lights up occasionally to provide filmed images from the town. This is used most chillingly as one of the suspects describes Shepard ensnared in the truck that will lead him to his death, while the video moves us forward in grainy black-and-white on the two-lane road, starkly lit against an uninflected night sky. But while Gross Indecency (also a spare production) used a powerful frontal geometry to present its players at a long table as if in the bar at court, Laramie never settles upon a consistent visual perspective for the audience.

By the same token, the play never sets a clear emotional course that might lead to a cathartic experience equal to the event that sets the play in motion. Broken up by two intermissions, the play is twice drained of the dramatic momentum it was building. When the emotional climax comes in the final act--the decision by Matt's father to speak out against the death penalty for the killers--it is weak in drama, however true to fact. No other climactic moment is provided, though there are several grace notes in the final moments of the play. The Laramie Project is certainly a tribute both to a fallen martyr and to an American town that was suddenly caught in the grip of self-examination. Yet while the Tectonic players may hold a mirror to human nature, we feel that some deeper human meaning, in fact some deeper human mystery, continues to elude us, some truth the discovery of which would have produced a final catharsis as the play ended and we left the theater.

Allen Ellenzweig is the author of The Homoerotic Photograph (1992) and a frequent contributor to this journal.