Matthew Shepard died on October 12, 1998. I was in the third grade at Spring Creek Elementary in Laramie, Wyoming. I remember going to a candle-light vigil with my parents in the days between the discovery of the savagely beaten Shepard—tied to a fence on the outskirts of Laramie—and his death.
A few weeks ago, I went to a production of The Laramie Project. The University of Wyoming’s theater department hosted a performance which involved several original members of Tectonic Theater Project, the group which came to Laramie to collect the material that would become the iconic play. I’m embarrassed to admit—or perhaps it’s fitting?—that I’d never before seen The Laramie Project on stage. I’ve seen the HBO movie, and I lived alongside the story in more than one sense. Several people I know, some quite well, were interviewed at the time by the members of Tectonic. One of my best friends was an extra in the movie. But even as every American theater kid in my generation was part of a production of The Laramie Project, I never sat in a room and watched it performed.
When the night of the performance came, I had to go. My mom was in the cast (full disclosure, I suppose), along with a few other people I know. Among the cohort of Laramie-ites who would be likely to go to a play in the first place, the one-night-only show was the place to be. It would be weird not to attend. But I can’t say I was really in the mood. This was going to be heavy; I could be at home watching a movie that would ask me to bear far less weight. It was a miserably wet night, another reason to be wary of revisiting the story that had been cited to me over and over for my entire adult life as soon as I told someone where I was from. A conductor taking my ticket on a train outside of Birmingham, England once said to me, upon seeing my ID, “Terrible what they did to that young man there.” Terrible indeed, but I’d processed the terribleness long ago.
The lobby of the university’s theater was itself pregnant with memories. There were so many people I know well enough to chat up, or more than that, but also so many nameless faces I’d seen around town for nearly thirty years. Imagine the spectral feeling evoked by a face you have a long history with even though you don’t know the name that goes with it; imagine that feeling times a hundred faces, arrayed across a quarter of a century and compressed into one room.
I have a lot of memories of Shepard’s death and the aftermath, but what struck me a few weeks ago was how much I had forgotten about both the events and The Laramie Project. There’s a subplot about the sheriff’s deputy who first unties the still-living Shepard from the fence, and her saga as she anxiously awaits learning whether she’s contracted HIV (Shepard was positive; the deputy ultimately tested negative). This arc very much dates the play. HIV/AIDs is sadly still a live issue in the United States, but it isn’t nearly as central or anxiety-inducing as it was in the Eighties and Nineties. The people depicted in the play had a relationship to that topic that I simply don’t.
And then there are the timeless parts of The Laramie Project. I’ll probably be emotionally anchored to some of these scenes forever. The play reaches its crescendo with the courtroom monologue of Matthew Shepard’s father, Dennis, in which he urges the jury not to sentence to death the men convicted of killing his son:
Matt officially died in a hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado. He actually died on the outskirts of Laramie, tied to a fence. You, Mr. McKinney, with your friend Mr. Henderson left him out there by himself, but he wasn’t alone. There were his lifelong friends with him, friends that he had grown up with. You’re probably wondering who these friends were. First he had the beautiful night sky and the same stars and moon that we used to see through a telescope. Then he had the daylight and the sun to shine on him. And through it all he was breathing in the scent of pine trees from the snowy range. He heard the wind, the ever-present Wyoming wind, for the last time.
I’d never been part of an audience that reacted the way we did during this speech. The sobbing echoed off the walls. “The ever-present Wyoming wind” was what got me. I transcribed the above from a script of the play, and I suppose it’s a little too late to inform Moisés Kaufman that it should be capitalized: “Snowy Range,” the mountains where I hiked a few days ago.
Aside from my own proximity to the story, what struck me most about The Laramie Project, viewed from the vantage of Anglophone culture in 2023, was that it is, in the fullest sense of the term, an act of bearing witness. In building a drama out of the actual words of real people, Kaufman and Tectonic give pride of place to presentation over didacticism. The play and its creators have their point of view, of course. But the audience is not invited to sit in judgement of most of the characters, even as seemingly at least half of them give their variation on that hoary late-Twentieth Century formulation: “I don’t agree with the gay lifestyle, but….”
In another of the most widely quoted and evocative moments in The Laramie Project, Catholic priest Father Roger Schmit talks about the fact that he didn’t ask the bishop’s permission to mourn the loss of a young man who happened to be gay: “His permission doesn’t make it correct, you realize that? And I’m not knocking bishops, but what is correct is correct.” He goes on to say, by way of imploring the Tectonic members who had come to interview him, “Just deal with what is true. You know what is true. You need to do your best to say it correct.”
I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not always easy to know what is true and what is correct. That’s one reason why it’s so tricky to create narrative art right now. Presenting characters as they come to us, real or imagined, with all their ambiguity, complexity, and contradiction, feels harder than ever. A latter-day version of The Laramie Project would have been all too easy to load down with jargon, talking points, and underscoring of The Message.
While the play I saw a few weeks ago may have become a high school drama staple, it’s also a demanding piece of art that asks something of its audience not only emotionally or morally, but also aesthetically. It’s about the murder of Matthew Shepard and its aftermath, but it’s also about the labor of grappling with a heavy story. What I like most about The Laramie Project is that it makes the audience confront the hard work that’s required if you even want to try to say it correct.
Calvin and Hobbes Corner
The falling leaves always bring contemplation:
I’ll admit that I’m glad to have a break from the leaf-collecting arc, which—when you factor in my 2.5-year hiatus from this newsletter—I’ve now been analyzing for the better part of three years. Though I’m on-record saying the leaf collection saga isn’t his finest work, Watterson could sling a plot with the best of them (if “them” are newspaper cartoonists, in particular), but he’s at his best with vignettes like the above.
As usual, Calvin resists ego-suppressing reflection in favor of hedonic self-assertion. Things are bad when they’re not exactly what he wants them to be. I’ve said it before, but this guy would be a menace on Twitter (I refuse to call it “X”).
I’m pleased to say that fall in Laramie has not disappointed. There have been some colorful leaves, yes, but it’s also snowed twice prior to Halloween. The autumn chill always cheers me up. I love easing towards the reduced expectations of winter. It’s nice to be alerted that your job is now to hunker down.
A Poem
Mahmoud Darwish loves the ancient love poems that guard the sick moon
It's somewhat incidental, but I wonder how universal that experience of having somebody recognize your hometown from its famous tragedy will become, or is already becoming. There's certainly a cartography of atrocities, of place-names plucked from obscurity and weighted by public grief that only seems to grow. My cousins grew up in Ft. Collins, and when one relocated to Denver to marry and settle down and briefly lived in Columbine it was impossible to think of it as a town, a suburb, and not just the site of a massacre.
But of course it's a place that existed and continues to exist, and isn't experienced in its daily existence as the one infamous thing that happened there, and neither is Laramie. It sounds like recognizing that, in a way restoring to Laramie its actuality, is part of what 'saying it correct' is, and how The Laramie Project managed to evoke such a response in you, and the rest of the crowd. Thanks for sharing it with us.
Sounds like a very interesting experience, seeing this often-performed show about your hometown for the first time. I've read a lot of essays about reflecting, seeing a piece of art after years of not seeing it, and about "being from a place." This essay's at the top tier of them.
Also, good to see this newsletter again!