‘The Laramie Project’ Revisited: Theater as Journalism

When members of the Tectonic Theater Project descended on Laramie, Wyo., a few weeks after the murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard in 1998, local residents didn’t quite know what to make of the actors and writers trolling around town with tape recorders. They weren’t “real” journalists, after all. When told that the troupe would be writing a play about Shepard’s death based on their interviews, some citizens shrugged—what would the effort really amount to? Some might have imagined a shoestring production in some dark basement on the Lower East Side of New York, said Moisés Kaufman, Tectonic’s cofounder and artistic director.

But when the drama group showed up in town 10 years later for a follow-up, that initial work, The Laramie Project, had become one of the most frequently produced plays in America, and Shepard’s death had come to define the community in ways Laramie could not have imagined in those first raw months after the killing. This time, “people were editing themselves a lot more,” Kaufman said—if they consented to interviews at all. The local newspaper even ran a pointed editorial aimed at Tectonic's efforts: “Laramie is a community, not a project.”

That reticence and veiled hostility are very much a part of the troupe's new work Laramie, 10 Years Later, which debuted with a reading in New York on Monday night, the 11th anniversary of Shepard's death, and simultaneously in 150 other theaters in all 50 states and in 14 countries.

Kaufman had previously demonstrated the power of using real quotes and court transcripts in his 1997 play Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. When I first saw Laramie in New York in 2000, the gruesome descriptions of Shepard’s mangled body, based on recollections of the first people on the scene, were as powerful as any imaginary dialogue dreamed up by the best playwright. As Kaufman said Monday night in New York, his medium for telling a story isn’t a television screen or a newspaper, but actors who bring these real characters to life with the Laramie residents' own words—since the actors interviewed the subjects in person, the audience is only one degree removed from the townspeople.

This time around, the documentary format that seemed so fresh in the original production initially felt a little dated. But as the evening unfolded, it became clear that the method itself is largely timeless. It’s the story that matters here, not the medium, and Laramie in 2008 provides just as intriguing a tale as did Laramie in 1998.

We encounter a character from the first Laramie Project, a University of Wyoming professor who has since run for office and become the first openly gay state legislator, helping to battle an effort in Wyoming’s House of Representatives to define marriage in the state as between a man and a woman. And after a long battle, the university finally passed domestic-partner benefits for employees (though they won’t be enacted until the economy improves).

And even more riveting, this time the convicted killers agreed to be interviewed for the piece. In the show’s most gripping segments, Russell Henderson is full of remorse, sad that he didn’t do more to stop what transpired. Aaron McKinney also has regrets but, tellingly, not for killing Shepard.

Tired of being known as the hate-crime town, many Laramie residents seem to have concocted a revisionist version of what transpired—in 10 Years Later, they believe variously that Shepard’s murder wasn’t a hate crime, that it had nothing to do with his sexual orientation, that it was a drug deal gone bad, and that the two men convicted for his death had been high on meth for several days before the incident, even though none of the trial evidence supports these theories. As a folklore expert in the play explained, damaged communities try to control their own story and protect their own reputation by creating alternate histories, often based on nothing more than rumors. Residents could accept that Laramie might be home to drug crimes (what town isn’t?), but mindless hate? No way.

This perception gained credence, the new play suggests, after a 2004 segment by Elizabeth Vargas on ABC’s 20/20 that presented the case as more about drugs than homophobia. The new Laramie seeks to undercut that point of view by presenting testimony that implies that the 20/20 producers came to town to debunk the hate-crime explanation, regardless of what the evidence showed.

Of course, whether they're journalists or dramatists, interviewers alter the way a story is told just by their mere presence, a dilemma an audience member asked the Tectonic cast about at Monday night's debut. Yes, Kaufman acknowledged, the presence of his troupe no doubt affected how Laramie residents behaved and how they answered questions, doubly so the second time around, 10 years after the murder. In the end, the best any interviewer can hope to do is to be as unobtrusive as possible, and to retell the story as faithfully as possible.