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ABOUT THE PLAY On October 6, 1998, twenty-one-year-old University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard, a gay man, was brutally attacked, bound to a fence and left to die in the windswept hills outside of Laramie, Wyoming. He was found the next evening and died on October 12. The eyes of the nation and the world were on Laramie as the news media focused their attention on the murder and people everywhere tried to come to terms with what this event signified about our culture and its various ways of thinking about homosexuality, individual rights, violence and acceptance of diversity in society. Four weeks later, playwright/director Moises Kaufman brought members of his Tectonic Theatre Project to Laramie with the aim of developing a theatre piece from interviews with Laramie residents. Over a period of a year and a half, Kaufman and the nine actors returned six times and conducted over two hundred interviews. They spoke to people who had known Matthew Shepard, people who knew his two attackers, police, doctors, attorneys, witnesses and clergy involved in the case, family members, University of Wyoming personnel and students, and a host of other Laramie voices, each of which added an essential thread to the emerging tapestry. This wealth of material was edited and shaped by Kaufman and his company, and the resulting script has both the immediacy of a documentary piece and the emotional arc of classical tragedy. In his introduction to the script, Kaufman says that he was interested in the question, "How is Laramie different from the rest of the country, and how is it similar?" Although some of the characters in the play wear cowboy hats and talk about concerns specific to their region, in general the voices of Laramie are voices that could be found anywhere in the United States. As the New York Times said in its review, "This play is Our Town with a question mark, as in 'Could this be our town?'" The Laramie Project premiered in Denver in February 2000. It moved to Off-Broadway (the Union Square Theatre) in May 2000, and in November of that year went back to Laramie for a brief run. It has since been produced by countless regional, academic and community theatres and has been adapted into a film version by HBO. The Hunterdon Diversity Council production will be the first in Hunterdon County, New Jersey and has been scheduled to mark the fifth anniversary of Matthew Shepard's death. |