This afternoon and evening I was in Boston for performances by The Tectonic Theater Project of the two plays mentioned in the title of this post. "The Laramie Project" was written by them after the murder of Matthew Shepard. They visited Laramie several times and interviewed a number of people and constructed the play from the words of those interviews, their own journal entries, and written materials about the event. For "The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later" they returned several times to Laramie and conducted more interviews, including interviews in prison with the two perpetrators.
The original play is very moving, as people with a range of attitudes toward homosexuality seem to come to understand that the crime was inexcusable. One Muslim young woman who grew up in Laramie comments that people wanted to say, "This isn't Laramie." But she says, it happened in Laramie, so to say it isn't Laramie is nonsense. But of course, it isn't something most people in town would have done. And it's something not too different from what has happened elsewhere. So if it's Laramie, it's also the United States and the world. But the overall impression, through tears for what Matt suffered, is one of hope, that the people of Laramie have learned a lesson we all need to learn.
The second play is distressing. It seems that in the interim the news program "20/20" had done a revisionist piece putting forward the preposterous notion that Matt's death was the result of a drug deal gone bad. And when the members of the Tectonic Theater Project arrived there for the tenth anniversary, they found that many residents had bought into the notion that it was a drug deal or a simple robbery, totally unrelated to the fact that Matt was gay. The local paper published an editorial in that vein, and would not publish a letter from a friend of Matt's pointing out that the revisionist story was inconsistent with the evidence gathered at the time and the testimony at the trials of the perpetrators.*
Of course, it's understandable that people would not want the crime of two people to forever define the town and its other 26,000+ residents, and that is fair enough. But to deny what happened is unnecessary and in fact speaks much worse about Laramie than the original crime.
Both plays are well worth seeing, in my opinion. They are informative, poignant, and thought-provoking.
*
Note added October 2, 2010: The newspaper in question, the Laramie Boomerang, ran a five part series two years ago, in observance of the tenth anniversary of the murder. There was also an article a few days earlier about the dedication of the memorial bench on the university campus in Matt's honor. I've read the articles, and they contain no suggestion that there was any drug-related aspect to the case. They refer to the murder as an anti-gay hate crime. Much of the articles consists of interviews with residents. There seems to be general agreement that there is greater acceptance of homosexuals now (i.e., in 2008) than in 1998, although homophobia still exists. There is also a general consensus that the problem of anti-gay violence is not a Laramie problem, but a universal human problem.
