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Dec.12 - Dec.19, 2004 |
Engrossing Laramie
Actors excel in Matthew Shepard play within a play
By Bruce Raymond
Originally Published: 2004-03-21
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A scene from the Laramie Project
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The name "Laramie" evokes memories of cowboys, sheriffs and saloons with rooms upstairs where ladies entertained menfolk for a modest fee. Fights invariably broke out in those fictional saloons, but after all the bodies had been cleared away, rough Western justice had won the day - until tomorrow.
Western justice won the day for real in Laramie, Wyoming when two drunken youths were put away for two consecutive life sentences after kidnapping and brutally beating young Matthew Shepard, an openly gay college student, and leaving him to die, tied to a fence post.
The story made international headlines, was turned into a play, the revival of which is currently on stage at the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, and eventually turned up in a movie version on HBO.
Laramie is a small community of some 26,000 souls. It was built as a railway stop when the west was being settled and towns were built just as far apart as it took a train to travel without needing water or fuel. Nearly everybody in Laramie is only once removed from everybody else, and most folks spout a cracker-barrel philosophy that may talk equality, love and tolerance but in reality they walk a different walk - like folks everywhere.
Shortly after the Shepard murder, the members of the American Tectonic Theater Company went to Laramie and started to interview the townspeople. Over a one-year period they interviewed about 200. The result was a three-act play in which eight actors deliver the words of over 60 people, some actors playing 10 different roles, but all speaking with exactly the same words the Tectonic actors heard when they conducted their interviews.
This particular production is a Canadian one, which is to say that the performers are not the original band who went to Laramie but are nevertheless so immersed in their roles that it would be easy to accept them as originals and not just as hired performers.
As all the actors except one have been in this play before, it is not surprising that the three acts go by seamlessly. There is no point in singling out any one actor. They are all completely believable and commanding as they relive the aftermath of that brutal event in an otherwise sleepy American whistle stop. Some of them I have enjoyed before, such as Mark McGrinder who gave such a delightful performance a couple of years ago at the Shaw Festival's She Loves Me and Deborah Brakeford whom I last saw in Zadie's Shoes. But all of them seem to have stepped out of Laramie as if they had been there all their lives.
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