HADOS’s Laramie Project offers ‘great beauty, sadness’

We know about the horrific end of life suffered by gay university student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, USA before The Laramie Project even starts. The hours of torture and finally, his death are not the climactic moments of the three-act play in which as few as eight actors portray 60 characters. The play begins with the aftermath of a hate crime. It ends with a glimpse of hope as Laramie’s townspeople, Shepard’s family, media, medical and emergency teams and more both take hold and let go of the murder as they look toward an uncertain legacy.

The Laramie Project is unsettling, profound and questioning of US society, and probably societies beyond the US, as it explores the reactions of a cross-section of Americana to a heinous, highly personalised crime. It is verbatim theatre, based on more than 200 interviews conducted by the Tectonic Theatre Project theatre of inhabitants of the town, published news reports and company members' own journal entries reflecting their experiences and observations when they visited Laramie after Shepard’s murder. Visiting for the first time four weeks after the crime, the TTP team revisited Laramie several times over the next two years under the leadership of Moises Kaufman, director, playwright and TTP leader, to gather information and insights that could create a play.

Hertford Amateur Dramatic and Operatic Society’s 2023 production of The Laramie Project was recently recognised as an outstanding drama production by NODA East in its 2023 regional awards. With the focus clearly on characterisation, The Laramie Project not only gives theatre companies the chance to weigh in artistically on social issues, but it offers actors the challenge of portraying multiple characters with a variety of accents and points of view. It was a dramatic challenge that HADOS’s Anna Palmer was keen to take on. “I just pitched it and said, ‘Look, there’s a play that I’ve always wanted to do. I think it would be perfect for our (studio) space, because you don’t really need anything. But I knew it was going to be a challenge,” Palmer said, “mainly because it is in a style of performance that we haven’t tended to do before. As a society, I knew finding the cast was going to be tricky. And actually, that was the trickiest bit.”

Fellow HADOS member Gina Rogers stepped up to co-direct with Palmer, but at one point, the women doubted that they were going to do the show because casting was indeed proving difficult. “We really need quality people – we need commitment, we need time. it’s a big, big job,” Palmer recalled. But performers who already were on board encouraged them to stick with the production saying, “We need to do this. This is exciting because it’s so different. But also,” Palmer said, “I think they started to feel like it was going to be a very special experience.”

The scarcity of cast meant that Palmer herself took on roles within the play and eventually, The Laramie Project was cast. “And along the way, I made contact with the Matthew Shepard Foundation, and they were brilliant. They supported us with some resources; we have some lovely posters they gave us. And then I got an email saying, ‘Would you like to talk with Dennis Shepard [Matthew’s father]?’”

And of course Palmer and the cast did speak with Shepard senior, whom Palmer described as “an amazing, amazing man, still working to deliver the message of ‘Let’s be kind.’ He was open to talking about everything, and he shared, very frankly about what he felt.

I mean, by this point,” Palmer said, “the cast was fully invested in this powerful story. We felt privileged to be sharing it. And then after speaking with him [Dennis Shepard], we were all in tears. It was very emotional. And all of the audiences were deeply, deeply impacted by the play.”

The set was minimal, with a chair here or there and moved occasionally. A single chair was lit by a spotlight during the action to signify the fence that Matthew Shepard was tied to and beaten. Blocks of wood ringed the performance area, and characters might sit there as they transitioned on and offstage. “So, there was always movement,” Palmer said, “and the movement allowed people to make costume changes on the stage, in front of the audience. And they [costumes] were very simple so we asked all of the cast to find their own base costume – jeans, trousers, leggings so we added things for different characters like a jacket, a neckerchief, a hat. We did use an orange prison outfit for one actor when he was playing [murderer] Aaron McKinney, and a judge’s gown but that was it. We had a clothing rail on the set so all the costumes were there to be on, taken off, hung up.”

The sensitive nature of the play’s content could have proved difficult for the cast, Palmer acknowledged. “I think we really tried to check in with people because there were times when we all were finding what we were delivering quite moving, and the company really came together; I think people found it a safe space to be open about themselves, you know.”

In the early stages of preparing the production, “a few people who were on board to start off with chose not to continue” because, Palmer thinks,  they found the conflict between the points of view expressed in the dialogue “too tricky. Obviously, religion is challenged, sexuality is challenged. Even with the audiences, people I knew were listening to things that maybe they felt very personally about”.

The audience never meets a physical embodiment of Matthew Shepard, Palmer pointed out, saying, “It’s one of the things that is both beautiful and difficult about it. You get to know his character through different prisms, just what people share about him.”

Moisés Kaufman could have been speaking for Anna Palmer when he writes in his introduction to the play, “The experience of working on ‘The Laramie Project’ has been one of great sadness, great beauty, and perhaps most important, great revelations – about our nation, about our ideas, about ourselves.”

DeeDee Doke

NODA East