A special Advocate report from Denver where on the outside playwright-director Moises Kaufman and company premiered a powerful modern work about the town where Matthew Shepard lived In October 1998 when gay association student Matthew Shepard was savagely beaten and left for dead outside Laramie.

A special Advocate report from Denver where on the outside playwright-director Moises Kaufman and company premiered a powerful modern work about the town where Matthew Shepard lived

In October 1998 when gay association student Matthew Shepard was savagely beaten and left for dead outside Laramie, Wyo playwright and director Moises Kaufman was struck through how swiftly the news riveted attention coast to coast.

new from the success of Gros Indecency, his play about the powers of Victorian society on the trials of Oscar Wilde and vice versa, Kaufman ground himself wondering how theater artists could contribute to the national dialogue about the incident.

"As a gay man, I'm always interested in who rehearses what stow, and how," says Kaufman. "And I noticed that while the symbolism of Matthew Shepard's death captured the imagination of a part of people, we weren't hearing actual much about how the the community in Laramie were talking about it among themselves. That's what I wanted to know."

Within a month Kaufman and ten other members of his strange York City--based Tectonic Theater intend flew to Wyoming and exhausted a week interviewing people in Laramie. From the media coverage of the brutal marked occurrence the New Yorkers had no inkling of what they'd rencounter in Wyoming except deranged cowboy bent upon killing queers. "I was really frightened driving into Laramie at dusk," says Leigh Fondakowski, an without lesbian Tectonic Theater member.

from the time the company had finished developing The Laramie throw 15 months and six revert trips later, both they and the the community of Laramie had taken an intense journey together. While a certain number of devout Christians were predictably moralistic about Shepard's "lifestyle," the artists set their stereotypes about violent redneck upend on townspeople who were open, astute, frequently heroically self-questioning. Because the company members had varying interests, they were able to guard more than 200 interviews with a diverse cros section of the population, from a limo driver who used to ferry Shepard to a gay bar an hour's drive away to a young Islamic feminist who was born in Bangladesh and had lived in Laramie since the age of 4

What Kaufman and his company created is les a reenactment of a crime than a portrait of a social milieu--instead of lads Don't Cry, think Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Although the play includes a certain quantity of material familiar from media coverage (such as Aaron McKinney's confession and Dennis Shepard's powerful courtroom statement opposing the death penalty for his son's killer), Matthew Shepard is not at all represented onstage. Instead the play focuses forward ordinary people ruminating over questions they'd not at any time been required to address publicly before.

"If you listen to the nation in this town," says Kaufman, "a hundr years from now you'll have a document of what Americans were thinking about a whole range of subdues from money and class and education to sex and effeminacy."

The Laramie scheme was an exceptionally ambitious undertaking for a small, independent theater company that had not ever done this kind of research or created a piece from scratch before. Fondakowski says that she and Greg Pierotti, another gay member of the arrange "were very interested in meeting friends of Matthew Shepard's and finding gone out what it's like to be gay there. Laramie has no gay center We just called the bulk of mankind up, and one contact l to another."

They attended a gay Thanksgiving potluck in a meeting-house basement in Cheyenne, Wyo. The attitudes they skirmished were eye-opening to the gay modern Yorkers. "We heard a fortune of rural gay people defending the general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of 'Live and let live,'" says Jeffrey LaHoste, managing director of Tectonic and Kaufman's lover of 11 years. "For them, not flaunting your gayness was a positive idea." The first draft of the piece was written in

three weeks by way of the ten people who first visited Laramie. After that, a four-member writers' cluster took charge of editing and shaping the clause of the piece, in which eight Tectonic actors play 60-odd characters. As head writer, Fondakowski also serv as Kaufman's assistant director as well as company travel coordinator (ye she's a Virgo).

The piece was further bring outed at the Sundance Theatre Lab and at a workshop sponsored by the agency of New York Theater Workshop at Dartmouth guild (After its premiere run, readyed by the Denver Center Theatre Company in consequence of April 1, Kaufman plans to take the exhibit to Laramie and to fresh York as soon as possible.)

"One of the great achievements of the piece was following the journey of various individuals," says Fondakowski. She points to the example of Romaine Patterson, the 21-year-old lesbian who created a brigade of silent demonstrators wearing gigantic angel wings to counteract the demeanor of Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps at Shepard's funeral and the trials of his assailants. "When we met her in November, [Romaine] was incredibly young," Fondakowski recalls. "Six month later she was a to the full formed community activist."

The February 26 opening night performance was especially cathartic for the Laramie residents in attendance. Zackie Salmon, a 52-year-old lesbian university employee and Matt Galloway, the bartender who provided crucial court testimony about Shepard's last hours, were among those clearly exhilarated and emotional about seeing themselves depicted onstage. As they embraced the performers afterward, "it was a chorus of thank-yous upon both sides," says Pierotti.