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[Theater reviews]

Our town
BTW’s powerful Laramie Project

BY CAROLYN CLAY

The Laramie Project
By Moisés Kaufman and members of Tectonic Theater Project. Directed by Nancy Curran Willis and Jason Southerland. Set design by Ruth Neeman. Lighting by Karen Perlow. Costumes by Molly Trainer. Sound by Jeremy Wilson. Projections by Jon Sachs. With James Barton, Kent French, Anne Gottlieb, Tom Lawlor, Laura Napoli, Sheila Stasack, Holly Vanasse, and Forrest Walter. Presented by Boston Theatre Works at the Tremont Theatre through November 11.

" Laramie sparkles, " remarks a cowboy-hatted limousine driver in The Laramie Project, a play by Moisés Kaufman and Tectonic Theater Project built on the Wyoming town where a young gay man named Matthew Shepard was the victim of a vicious hate crime. The driver is speaking, sincerely if somewhat grotesquely, of the twinkling townscape Shepard would have seen in the distance before losing consciousness on the October night in 1998 when he was tied to a fence and beaten beyond repair. But the play, too, sparkles with a cold, folksy ferocity that is ably captured in the Boston Theatre Works production, its area premiere.

Simple and intimate, yet not without an elegiac formality, this is a staging once removed — with local actors standing in for the Tectonic company members who originally played themselves, as well as the myriad characters they interviewed on six separate trips west in the wake of the Wyoming tragedy. Yet the BTW production retains the immediacy one imagines attended the play’s 2000 Denver premiere, when many of its dramatis personae were in the audience. Moreover, in its New York creators’ compassionate attempt to probe the heart of a Western town previously identified with railway pitstops and cowboy ethos, The Laramie Project becomes the first theater piece I have seen in the past six weeks that, albeit hatched before September 11, seems informed by it.

Moisés Kaufman, artistic director of Tectonic Theater Project, first came to wide attention with his 1997 Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (presented in Boston by the Huntington Theatre Company). Like Gross Indecency, which was culled from the actual trial transcripts and other sources, The Laramie Project is " documentary theater " in the manner of Bertolt Brecht and the German director Erwin Piscator. Presenting more than 60 characters, from friends and relatives of Shepard and his two 21-year-old assailants to gutsy medical and law-enforcement personnel to citizens of assorted stripe and persuasion, the street-clothed actors don’t so much inhabit as represent the people with whose words and quirks they are entrusted. And at BTW, an ensemble of eight performers (only two of them Equity-affiliated), under the direction of Nancy Curran Willis and Jason Southerland, sketch their characters with surprising warmth and deftness, sometimes switching personae in a breath and a hat change. The main character, Laramie itself, is represented by an Oz-like lick of highway and an ever-changing landscape of projections that includes the by-now-iconic image of the buck fence in the middle of nowhere to which Matthew Shepard was tied for 18 hours before being found.

The Brechtian approach does not keep The Laramie Project from becoming a social and political mosaic of accumulative emotional power. Yet the division of the piece into three parts, with two intermissions, drags it out. Perhaps the idea is that we should have time to reflect on its intricate interplay of horror, grief, readjustment, and healing, its map of the craters made in the American landscape by folklore, fundamentalism, and class. Still, there’s no way that The Laramie Project, suspended as it is between America the Beautiful and the Heart of Darkness, can avoid packing an emotional wallop.

A central difference between Gross Indecency and Laramie is that the former coheres around a single, flamboyant presence (one actor plays Wilde and is supported by eight others in multiple roles) whereas the later work circles a tragic and conspicuous void. Matthew Shepard does not appear in the play, though his presence hovers over it. As a memorial, then, The Laramie Project is both grievously sad and oddly optimistic. Shepard, the " blunt little shit " who loved Heineken and would give you the shirt off his back, will never ride again in the cowboy town that his unfathomable murder painfully changed. But as is hauntingly, agonizingly, sometimes even comically borne witness to here, Laramie has had to open its doors to both stigma and tolerance. And the town may just be big enough for both of them.

Issue Date: October 25 - 31, 2001