Ask a member of the heterosexual community who Matthew Shepard is, and more often than not you draw a blank. For those of us in our community old enough to remember, Matthew Shepard’s name remains forever etched in our memories as the young gay man who, in 1998, was beaten and left hung on a fence to die outside the town of Laramie, Wyoming.
Following Matthew Shepard’s death, Moises Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Company travelled to Laramie, where they conducted over 200 interviews with local residents. These interviews, along with excerpts from the journals kept by the theatre company, court transcripts and news reports at the time were then woven together to create the script for The Laramie Project. Interestingly, the play has become the second most performed piece of theatre across the United States.
This month The Laramie Project comes to PICA, in a production by the Black Swan Theatre’s 2007 Be Active BSX Theatre HotBed Ensemble, under the guidance of director Adam Mitchell.
Mitchell is excited about the project, ‘I find it just incredible how they went about the project, and incredibly brave. The company travelled to Laramie only two months after Matthew’s death. The thought of approaching a town so soon after these kinds of incidents would be really terrifying. They [the Tectonic Theatre Company] had a wonderful rapport with the town, they made three trips and by the third trip they’d actually built up quite a relationship with certain members of the town. They’re actually quite honest and I think that’s the reason why the text is so successful, the people who the Tectonic Theatre Company are interviewing are brutally honest, but so are the Tectonic Theater project members,’ he said.
Mitchell added that ‘Laramie had a population of 20,000 or so. Wyoming’s the largest US state and it’s the least populated, so there’s a lot of parallels with Western Australia really.’ Researching statistics on gay hate crime, Mitchell discovered that we have just as much hate crime here as they do in the states, commenting ‘I was appalled by the level of hate crime. I thought we’d come a lot further, I was a little bit shocked.’
The Laramie Project has a cast of eight, and each actor plays about 8 -10 characters – a challenging task that Laramie Project cast member Michelle Anderson describes as being ‘ like multi-tasking to the nth degree.’ Adam Mitchell explained that ‘they change characters line to line, there’s no scene change, no set change so the audience sees it all it happens before their eyes,’ adding that ‘right from the moment the doors open, the audience will be dealing with the actors as people’.
Michelle Anderson believes that the script and its documentary style are challenging for audiences, explaining. ‘It presents everyone’s perspective, and that where I think the audience comes in. They really have to work out how to filter that. I think you watch all these people reflect on their value systems. You see some of the characters change over the space of the play, because two years on from the murder they’ve changed their views. You just get swept up in th emotional journey of a community turning a mirror on itself, saying who are we, what are we? And you can’t help but question could this happen and how do we feel about it.
The Laramie Project, directed by Adam Mitchell, opens at PICA on Friday March 16th, and runs until Tuesday – Saturday until April 5. Tickets through BOCS.
Adam Mitchell and Michelle Anderson spoke to Zoe Carter
