THE LARAMIE PROJECT: ANALYSIS AND CRITICAL COMMENTARY
NARRATIVE
Structure:
· Chronological (the actors arrive; description of Laramie; description of the crime; the investigation; the vigil and Shepard's death; the funeral; the trials)
· Episodic: three acts divided into "moments"
· Time: one year
· Space: in and around Laramie
"A theatre company travels somewhere, talks to people, and returns with what they saw." Laramie vi
"The production told the ethnographer's story more fully than it did Laramie's." Dolan 127
"The company's working process in generating text for the play thus becomes an explicit part of the play's narrative, with the various tensions and misapprehensions engendered by their presence in Laramie being explored, self-critically, alongside the Shepard story itself …" Bottoms 65
"The story of the small town of Laramie and what happened there." Tigner 139
"[T]he telling and re-telling of accounts of a story for which the reader or audience already knows the basic facts and, certainly, the outcome, it is not the plot but the juxtaposition of the individual voices that comprise the story." Baglia and Foster 131
"The Laramie Project is more a chronicle than a narrative." Freeman 109
"[T]he researchers are searching for a specific part of the story that can enhance the narrative they are constructing, either consciously or unconsciously." Hopkins 10
Agon (conflict)
"The essential agon arcs between Laramie and the outsiders." Dolan 118
"Laramie is defined negatively in contrast to the East by those who come from the most urban of spaces--New York." Tigner 141
"The dramatic agon is whether Laramie is more homophobic than any other town in America." Solomon 6
GENRE
Documentary: performed ethnography
Pastoral: "those from the epitome of civilization leave society and enter into a wilderness, a rural landscape, or a pasture, and then disguise themselves as local country folk. While in this guise their main occupation is storytelling … " Tigner 140
"As a pastoral elegy, The Laramie Project tells of the community attempting to come together after the tragic death of Matt Shepard (a name coincidentally evocative of the pastoral)." Tigner 141
Western: "… the cultured outsider, who is encoded as an Easterner, comes to the West to flee the burden of industrialization and slowly begins to take on the costume and the customs of the 'untamed' Westerner." Tigner 140
CHARACTERS
· Actor/ethnographers: from New York City
· Laramie residents: often identified by profession and name
· The voice of reason: Father Roger Schmitt
"[The play] miscalculates some strategies, most flagrantly by maintaining a binary of rural/urban that keeps the tragedy distanced, 'othered' from those who consider themselves more sophisticated big-city dwellers." Dolan 114
"[T]he play creates a conversation among people who might not otherwise have spoken to each other …" Dolan 113
"The play absents Shepard from its structural heart, if not its emotional one--the play's singular focus on what happened to everyone else, before and after his beating and murder, peculiarly displaces what happened to him." Dolan 114
"Admittedly Kauffman's docu-drama may engage in sufficient de-centering of character to make the tragic hero of this play the community itself …" Casey Charles, 242
IMAGES
Media
"The texts overlap to create a kind of media cacophony. This moment should feel like an invasion …" Laramie 46
[It] begs the question of why the ethnographers' presence, too, shouldn't also feel like a breech in the rightful boundaries of townspeople's homes." Dolan 116
"[T]he arrival of an HBO film crew in the company of recognizable Hollywood stars is itself a media invasion to a town the size of Laramie." Baglia & Foster 137
"While the play presents itself as a corrective to the tabloid excesses of broadcast media, it makes the same narrow and profoundly political choices about what is worthy of attention … " Solomon 6
"[The] first acknowledgement in the play of the queer orientation of many of the Tectonic company members raises the uncomfortable question as to whether they too--like the media--are simply in Laramie to capitalize on an 'angle' they have a vested interest in pursuing." Bottoms 66
Angels in America and Our Town (intertextuality)
"The references to Kushner's play illustrate the transforming power of the theatre and show how a Westerner, the university theatre student Jedadiah Schultz (played by Andy Paris), changes his moral principles…. [when] the University of Wyoming Theatre Department produced Angels in America and Jed played Prior Walter. Jed has completely changed his opinion about homosexuality--no longer does he consider it deviant…. Jed's discussion of Angels also interacts with Romaine's [Patterson] 'Angel Action' and the narrative of her own transformation." Tigner 148-149
"At the end of Act Two, The Laramie Project visually quotes the funeral scene in Thornton Wilder's Our Town…. The production's image of black umbrellas cannot help but recall Our Town." Tigner 149
"[The third act] set design has been co-opted from the third act of Our Town: all the chairs on one side of the stage to denote the cemetery. Our third act begins with Matthew Shepard's Funeral…. By visually referencing Our Town, we are posing questions about the relationship between Laramie and Grover's Corners. How does our iconic image of a small American town match our current reality?" Kaufman (in Loewith) 192
The West
"[T]he play inadvertently exoticizes Laramie--sometimes belittling it and sometimes romanticizing it …' Dolan 118
"We are meant to understand, and we do, that this tragedy of the West, of Matt, is really a universal tragedy that occurs all over America." Tigner 154
"… the image of Laramie as the Wild West and Matt as the Western heroic yet tragic figure. The specific details of the crime follow the typical Western scenario: two outlaws meet a young man (in a metaphorical white hat) in a bar, take him out of town and beat him with a pistol (the Western weapon of choice)." Tigner 140
STAGING CONVENTIONS
Epic/Brechtian: Direct audience address, multiple narrators (announce the characters before performing them), visible transforming (actors play multiple characters including themselves), multi-media, metatheatrical, non-illusionistic
"The set is a performance space. There are few tables and chairs. Costumes and props are always visible. The basic costumes are the ones worn by the company of actors. Costumes to portray the people of Laramie should be simple: a shirt, a pair of glasses, a hat. The desire is to suggest, not re-create….Costume changes, set changes, and anything else that happens on stage should be done by the company of actors." Laramie xiv
"Each part, each sound bite from the participants, is deliberately placed into relationship to the whole by selecting and placing one voice next to the other in what Moises Kaufman calls 'moments." Baglia and Foster 131
"[T]he audience is positioned to see through their outsider's eyes and to reflect implicitly from a distance on the events that the townspeople in Laramie suffered." Dolan 116
"For the original production … the researchers from the TTP who interviewed the people of Laramie performed their findings. … The bodies of subsequent performers stand in not only for the people of Laramie but for the researchers as well. Joseph R. Roach (1996) calls this process of layering identities 'surrogation,' as the bodies substitute and stand in for other bodies." Hopkins 17
"[T]he [original] actors had studied the taped interviews and had fashioned their depictions after the vocal cues the tapes provided." Baglia and Foster 130
SOCIAL CONTEXTS
Laramie, Wyoming
From "A Boy's Life," by JoAnn Wypijewski, 1999 statistics:
· "Laramie was founded [1868] on sex and railroad"
· Population--Laramie: 27,000, Wyoming 480,000; lowest population density in the USA
· University of Wyoming, a state school, the only university in Wyoming
· UW symbol is a rodeo rider; sports teams are the Cowboys and Cowgirls; mascot is Pistol Pete
· Median household income: $26,000
· High incidence of domestic violence
· Methamphetamine use: higher use among Wyoming's 8th graders than 12th graders nationwide.
"Good people—lots of space." "Live and let live." "Hate s not a Laramie value."
Violence in America
“When the message out there is so horrible that to be gay you can get killed for it, we need to change the message” Ellen DeGeneres, 29 Feb 2008
"[T]he play offers the almost-last word to an uncontested plea for hate-crimes legislation, which does nothing to prevent queer-bashings and instead increases the already excessive imposition of mandatory sentences and the death penalty…. The Laramie Project joins the swelling American cry for 'victims rights' and vengeance as a principle of meting out justice." Solomon 6-7
"This 'context' is not the town of Laramie, or even rural America, but a heteronormative, masculinist hegemony that equates power with aggression" Baglia and Foster 139.
Columbine massacre (April 20, 1999) in Littleton, Colorado, 140 miles from Laramie: "Through that crime ran a thread from every high-profile school shooting over the past two years. Springfield, Pearl, Paducah, Jonesboro, Conyers--everyone of those boy murderers or would-be murderers, had been taunted as a wuss, a fag, a loser, or had been rejected by a girl, or was lonely and withdrawn, or had written harrowing stories of mayhem and slaying." Wypijewski 74
Christianity in America: The Laramie Project's Baptist, Mormon, Unitarian and Catholic Churches
"There's no sexual deviation in the Mormon Church. No—no leniency. We just think it's out-of-bounds." Doug Laws
"I hope that Matthew Shepard as he was tied to that fence, that he had time to reflect on a moment when someone had spoken the word of the Lord to him—and that before he slipped into a coma he had a chance to reflect on his lifestyle." Baptist Minister
"You think violence is what they did to Matthew—they did do violence to Matthew—but you know, every time that you are called a fag … that is the seed of violence." Father Roger Schmit
"God hates fags." Fred Phelps, Westboro Baptist Church
FOR FURTHER STUDY
Baglia, Jay and Elissa Foster. "Performing the 'Really' Real: Cultural Criticism, Representation and Commodification in The Laramie Project. Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (Spring 2005): 127-145.
Bottoms, Stephen. "Putting the Document into Documentary: An Unwelcome Corrective?" The Drama Review 50 (Fall 2006): 56-68.
Casey, Charles. "Panic in The Project: Critical Queer Studies and the Matthew Shepard Murder." Law and Literature 18 (Summer 2006): 225-253.
Dolan, Jill. "The Laramie Project: Rehearsing for the Example." Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre. Univ of Michigan: 2005.
Freeman, Roger. "Solving the Laramie Problem, or, Projecting onto Laramie." Theatre Symposium 15: 107-122.
Kaufman, Moises. The Laramie Project. Vintage 2001.
Hopkins, Boone J. "Embodied Encounters: Ethics, Representation and Reiteration in Ten Years of The Laramie Pro Performing Ethos: An International Journal of Ethics in Theatre & Performance 2 (Jan 2011): 5-20.
Loewith, Jason. The Director's Voice, Twenty Interviews, Vol. 2. Theatre Communications Group, 2012.
Solomon, Alisa. "Irony and Deeper Significance: Where are the Plays?" Theater 31 (Fall 2001): 2-11.
Tigner, Amy. "The Laramie Project: Western Pastoral." Modern Drama 45 (Spring 2002): 138-156.
Wypijewski, JoAnn. "A Boy's Life: For Matthew Shepard's Killer, What Does it Take to Pass as a Man?" Harper's Magazine 299 (Sep 1999): 61-74.
Home | The Laramie Project Synopsis + Kaufman bio | The Laramie Project Timeline (the crime, the trials, the play) | Sentencing & The Death Penalty
Homophobia & the "Gay Panic" Defense | Documentary Theatre | The Laramie Project: Analysis & Critical Commentary |
The Laramie Project: A Devised Ethnodrama? | The Tectonic Process | The Matthew Shepard Foundation | Hate Crimes Legislative Timeline & Debate