Review: The Laramie Project

The Laramie Project tells the story of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old who was pistol whipped to death on the prairie outside the town of Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998, an attack labelled ‘homophobic hate crime.’

We don’t see Matt himself, but are introduced to him through the words of his friends and neighbours. Composed of extracts from over 200 interviews with Laramie locals, Kaufman’s play deals with the murder, the community it overturns, and the theatre company which arrives to make it a play.

The Laramie Project is not just about homophobia in a mid-west state but about the responsibilities laid on those who record it.

The cast of nine populates the stage with a town’s worth of idiosyncratic characters, each performance building a sensitive picture of a warm and turbulent community.

James Kitchen deserves a special mention for his mature, intensely moving speech as Shepard’s father and Josie Richardson and Leonie Nicks are especially funny as a pair of gossipy old-time grannies.

However, the Wyoming accents often draw the actors into typecasts and repetitive patterns of speech. This hampers the play’s rising intensity: the preachers in particular need to be more charismatic.

The audience sits in the stage area while the performance takes place between the fold-down seats, and at one point the full force of stage lighting is directed at the audience.

Although this restricts the actors’ movements – the space could have been used more imaginatively – the directors’ interesting staging skilfully confuses the dynamic between the watching and the watched.

As you enter you are recorded on camera for others to watch on a TV downstairs. This is a clever idea but it never reappears. With more time, the TVs could have evoked the pressure of the media on Laramie’s inhabitants.

Photos: Vicki Lampard

Other aspects of stage design are better developed. The committed guitar player plucking lazily throughout, along with the abundance of plaid and baggy jeans onstage, creates a sleepy-town atmosphere that is far removed from Oxford in February and yet doesn’t distract from the interviews.

The Laramie Project is powerful and morally complex. What emerges from the shocked community (“we don’t grow children like that here”, says Tanner Efinger’s character, of the killers) is not only a story of evil and good.

Religious moral vision conflicts with human empathy. Some characters could easily be made crude bible-thumpers but the actors treat them sensitively.

This is just as well, because the meta-theatrical aspect of the play encourages a critical response to the process of making a play out of a tragedy.

Responsibility lies not only with the playwrights to “tell the story right” (as one townsperson implores them) but on the audience to watch it right.