There are some works of art that move you so deeply as to be indelible in your conception of yourself and the journey you decide to embark on. The Laramie Project was that work of art for me.

The Laramie Project is constructed from a series of interviews Moises Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project conducted with residents of Laramie, Wyoming regarding the murder of gay student Matthew Shepard in 1998. Matthew was abducted, beaten, tied to a fence and left to die on the outskirts of Laramie. The play deals with the town’s relationship to this violent incident.

It seems tragically appropriate that Powder and Wig’s staging coincided with national attention regarding queer youth who committed suicide because of homophobic bullying. In some ways it is wonderful, this new national attention to homophobic bullying.

In some ways it is frustrating that only now are we realizing the depth to which homophobia cuts down kids (regardless of their sexual orientation). Queer kids have been killing themselves and have been killed by homophobia for far longer than when we decided to wear purple to show our support.

Sitting in the dark theater as a senior in college all I could think about was being a senior in high school four years earlier. Then came those lines that moved and changed me so much:
“The only place he did not have blood on him, on his face, was what appeared to be where he had been crying down his face.”

I am sixteen again. I am surrounded by strangers at a performance of The Laramie Project as an assignment for my senior English class. I am discovering for the first time that gay people exist. I am discovering, for the first time, the kind of violence perpetrated against an entire group of people who I had no idea existed. What a terrible world. I feel the tears coming.

Directed by Andrew Cox ’11, Powder and Wig’s production of The Laramie Project was simply staged: the town and the theater company are performed by 11 actors. With a handful of props handled by actors, who change into and out of clothes on stage to represent their different characters, the play makes the audience extremely aware that this is a dramatization, but without an alienating effect. In fact, the opposite is true. Despite its intentional discontinuities and its pastiche texture, the play keeps its emotional grip on you throughout.

Kudos to Cox’s direction in this play for preserving the aspects that make it so effective. The play could be staged so as to turn didactic, even melodramatic, but Cox recognized its power rests in its quasi-journalistic bent, its sense of removal combined with intimacy.

The play captures the humanity of this town. You never really know the residents as characters (which is not the point), although you remember some quite well. But they make up the town, and together, in their complexities and contradictions, you get an idea of this town. Laramie might be middle-of-nowhere, small-town America, but it is complex, despite the idealizations we project on it.

The play is also effective because it does not (per se) project judgments on the residents, even when they say homophobic things, or continue to be narrow-minded. The audience gets the impression, and is allowed to make its own judgments based on each audience member’s experience.

Student actors handled their difficult parts well, transitioning between multiple characters, sometimes even in one line and capturing their characters’ horror, ugliness, confusion, anger and spirit. At this point in the review, I just want to publicly thank the entire cast and crew of Laramie for making it so excellent and for carrying the weight of its responsibilities.

Although the ensemble  played off each other extremely well, I want to single out Rhiannon Ledwell ’11 in her turn as the hospital administrator at the hospital in which Matthew died.

Ledwell was excellent and emotionally beautiful and complex. We hear her character reflect on his expectation to be professional, his own distaste for the “homosexual lifestyle” but his ultimate breakdown on national television when he announced Matthew’s death. Because whether or not he disagrees with homosexuality, he knows someone is never going to be able to tell her child she loves him again.

I did a Google image search of Matthew Shepard afterwards; I wanted to see his face. I have always been struck by the sequence which takes the audience through finding Matthew’s body: First with the bicyclist who found Matthew, initially thinking his body was a scarecrow, not a real person. Then the  officer who first responded, anguished that the only clean part of his face was where his tears washed away the blood. Finally, the doctor who first treated Matthew, grappling to understand that the sheer brutality that disfigured Matthew’s face, was perpetrated by another person.

Matthew’s face is one of the most transcendently beautiful faces I’ve seen: glowing, androgynous, intangible, vulnerable; a face that would inspire a work of art. Not beautiful in the shallow, sexualized form of the word, but a beauty that makes you recognize a shared humanity and makes you feel at peace. That kind of beauty.

I imagine (and hope) that Matthew and so many uncommemorated beautiful human beings who lost to homophobic violence can inspire a kind of transcendent humanity. This play’s existence and the fact that I was not the only one crying softly in the end, certainly suggests they have.