Arts Entertainment

LITTLE TOWN

ON THE PRAIRIE

South American
Jewish playwright
Moises Kaufman's play
"The Laramie Project,"
about the Wyoming home
of Matthew Shepard,
whose murder put a
boy-next-door face on
hate crimes, will be
staged by JET as part
of its season-long
"Stop Hate" campaign.

ANNE MARIE WELSH
Copley News Service
oon afterrnild-mannered student Matthew
Shepard was found savagely beat-en and
tied to a fence 4:1 Laramie, the media
descended upon the Wyoming town.
Round-the-clock reports came during a national
vigil as the gay 21-year-old slowly died, and the
nature of the hate crime became clear.
Within a month of the October 1998 beating,
New York writer-director Moises Kaufman knew he
wanted to explore the death and the community in
which it happened.
"There was the immediate horror and sadness and
the brutality of it, of course. You couldn't look in
the newspaper for many days that year and not see
Matthew Shepard's face," says Kaufman, a theatrical
innovator.
"It became a watershed moment for the nation and
for my work. I'm interested in those moments when
a culture turns, when a community or society
becomes aware of its actions and must change itself."
Kaufman's thoughtful and enormously successful
play Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde
(1992) was about that kind of moment, when Wilde's
prosecution and imprisonment for homosexual acts
became a public referendum on English hypocrisy.

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2/15
2002

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So just a month after the murder, Kaufman and
nine members of his company, the Tectonic Theater
Project, flew to Laramie to get a feel for the land
and to interview as many people as they could.
"We weren't journalists, obviously, in that our pur-
pose was not to write anything journalistic, but to
create a very personal piece of theater," Kaufman says.
The company made seven trips to Laramie, conduct-
ing 200 interviews. Kaufman's mission for his Tectonic
company is to explore the-
atrical themes and form.
Moises Kaufman:
"We're a laboratory for
"We're theater people.
theater, asking how can
We're not used to being
theater remain alive and
in criminal trials sitting
important in this culture.
How is theater made? It
next to the mother of the
made sense [to proceed] .
murdered boy. I had to
for its subject matter after
ask, 'What am I doing
Gross Indecency and as part
to my company members,
of our larger theatrical
bringing them into a
situation of this nature.' " exploration."
Early in the process, four
of Kaufman's associates
formed- a writers group headed by actor-writer Leigh
Fondakowski. After four workshops, the company
premiered The Laramie Project at the Denver Center
Theatre in February 2000.
Because Denver is within a couple of hours of
Laramie, many people who had become characters in
the piece attended. The experience "was immediately
intimate and very emotional," says Laramie Project
designer and Sledgehammer founder Robert Brill.
"People interviewed started to show up for the
previews. A piece like this, because it has so much to
do with the voices of a community, became to all of
us even more special."

Truth In Process

"When an event like that occurs," Kaufman says,
"it is so large that a community must take it in. One
must listen."
Kaufman recently brought his Tectonic Theater
company and their collaborative The Laramie Project
to the La Jolla (Calif.) Playhouse. Earlier last year,
Berkeley Rep staged the praised piece about a town
indelibly marked, and changed, by its notoriety.
Before that, sold-out houses in Denver, Laramie
and New York listened to the montage of voices
affected by Shepard's death.
The Laramie Project, directed by Pat Ansuini,
comes to metro Detroit as Jewish Ensemble Theatre
stages the production Feb. 20-March 24 in the
Aaron DeRoy Theatre at the West Bloomfield
Jewish Community Center. The production is part
of JET's season-long "Stop Hate" campaign.

Genesis Of A Play

"Our idea was to go to Laramie at this bad moment.
We might be able to understand something about
where we are as a culture. I mean the country as a
whole," Kaufman says.
"The company had never done anything of this
[documentary] nature. But I talked to the members
and knew we would interview people, though we did-
n't know then that a play was going to come of it."

Most regional theaters operate on a corporate, facto-
ry model, with a staff of specialists together putting
out "product," much of it generic.
"Theater in America is very structured," Kaufman
notes. "Writers write, and directors direct and actors act.
"We operate differently. We transcribed the tapes.
Not one member of the company knew all that the
other members had gathered. During a three-week
workshop after our first visit, we each presented to
the group some of the interviews that we had done.
"Because we all couldn't listen to all of the tran-
scriptions, the company already became editors."
And so it went through 170 more interviews and
three more workshops until the group had created a
script. Many predecessors have created such docu-
mentary drama, including Emily Mann, whose "the-
ater of testimony" has tackled such issues as the
Vietnam War, and, more pointedly, Anna Deavere-
Smith, who transformed the Crown Heights distur-
bances in Brooklyn and the 1992 Los Angeles riots
into stunning, solo evenings of theater.
Kaufman's initial motivation was similar to theirs.
"We wanted to see what happened to the town of
Laramie during the year after the murder occurred,
so in the back of our heads, we knew we would be
there for the trials of the perpetrators. That would
be our time frame."
Over. the 10-year existence of Tectonic Theater Project,
Kaufman says, "we've developed ways of generating our
material. We call them tectonic techniques, designed to
create theater from a structuralist perspective."
Looking back on the Laramie experience,

