Laramie Project Research Articles

Staging the Theatrical Public Sphere in The Laramie Project

Abstract Contemporary documentary theater has become a favored genre in scholarship to investigate the relationship between theater and the public sphere (Reinelt, “Promise”; Balme; Claycomb, Lurch). Drawing on Christopher B. Balme’s concept of the theatrical public sphere and other scholarship, I examine how The Laramie Project (2000) by Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project stages the idea of the public sphere and, in the process, rethinks the form of documentary performance. On one level, the play reflects a discursive turn in documentary practice as multiple narrative layers dramatize the collision of opposing value systems and civic voices in order to challenge established boundaries between the private and the public, the liberal and the conservative, the rural and the urban, poverty and wealth, life and art. The theatrical sphere is constructed as an imaginary space not just of rational debate but of negotiating questions of accountability by appealing to the affective engagement of the audience. On another level, I argue, the play operates as a metatheatrical piece, using strategies such as a narrator and anti-illusionism to establish the theatrical public sphere as a conceptual framework that fuses sociopolitical engagement with a self-reflexive theater practice.

Creative Interpretation and the Politics of Failure

Abstract In this article, I ask what happens to theatrical performance when it fails. By describing a performance as “failed,” I do not necessarily imply its normative dismissal – as a “flawed” enactment or an artistic vision not properly executed. Instead, I use failure as a conceptual starting point for the articulation of alternative meaning-making practices. In this sense, failure is a form of creative interpretation that capitalizes on performance’s constitutive contingency, its structural unreliability that for many is part of its appeal, the very “magic” only a gathering of live bodies can create. Specifically, the article looks at two recent US American plays and one musical in order to discuss the theatrical politics of failure: Moisés Kaufman and Tectonic Theater Project’s The Laramie Project (2000), Ayad Akhtar’s The Who and the What (2014), and Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 (2012). By discussing the ways in which these pieces and their performances creatively address failure, I point to three formal and cultural dimensions in which failure can be mobilized theatrically: first, failure problematizes the easy formal subsumption of performance under production, pointing to the ways in which a specific performance may not adequately actualize the conceptual work of the production, be it because audiences intervene in ways not intended by the production or because performers deviate from the production’s script in one way or another. Second, failure can be mobilized to reveal tacit cultural conventions or standards of success that entrench particular (classist, racist, sexist, ableist, etc.) normative behaviors. And third, failure can enable more creative approaches to the relationship between the labor of theater practitioners and its exchange value for spectators, who paid – at least – the price of a theater ticket and typically expect some form of artistic professionalism as remuneration.

The Need for Embodied Dramaturgy: The Laramie Project and Generation Z

20 years after the murder of Matthew Shepard, I introduced The Laramie Project to a group of undergraduate students. Observing cast members' first experience of the characters, a troubling lack of empathy to the complexity of this tragic story became apparent. Of primary concern was that decades of progress made towards LGBTQIA equality stripped this story of its relevance. Geographic and generational bias is natural and expected but ultimately requires a new dramaturgical approach. We offer reflections on the methodology developed to address this gap: an embodied dramaturgical approach to our pre-production work culminating in a full cast and crew research trip to Laramie, Wyoming. Through photos, video, soundscapes and observations, we illuminate the impacts of using a place-based, psycho-somatic sensory approach to dramaturgical research. This experience created physical and emotional transformation in the participants that can inform future dramaturgical work particularly for stories that are deeply unknown and unfamiliar to the cast and crew. Together, we found that stories like “The Laramie Project” continue to be relevant. Although progress has been great, the threat of anti-LGBTQIA violence is still very real for many people. Employing an embodied approach can enhance storytelling and empower further progress with the benefit of today’s experience.

“There are Parts I Won’t Tell You”: Biography, Trauma and Violence in Moisés Kaufman’s The Laramie Project

The murder of Matthew Shepard, in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998, was the traumatic event that inspired Moisés Kaufman to write The Laramie Project. The author travelled to Laramie and built the play based on interviews with the townspeople. This essay examines the connection between verbatim theatre and biographical writing and the ways in which these connections and touching boundaries can be a valuable strategy in the depictions of personal and collective trauma, as well as forms of institutionalized and structural violence. The essay will explore the community’s relation to the hate crime committed and make clear the relation of the community with questions regarding homosexuality and homophobia. Through the analysis it will aim at rendering visible the community’s dealing with the shadow of intolerance cast over them and not just those directly involved in Matthew Shepard’s murder, while trying to distance themselves from a collective identity of brutality. The theoretical considerations carried throughout result from the attention to challenges that non-normativity poses on both individual and collective levels.

Queer(er) Approaches to The Laramie Project: An Autoethnographic Account

Queer(er) Approaches to The Laramie Project: An Autoethnographic Account Nicolas Shannon Savard (bio) As one of the most-produced plays in the country, the Tectonic Theater Project’s 2000 docu-drama, The Laramie Project, has become a staple of theatre curricula and educational production at the high school and collegiate level in the United States. The play’s inclusion in our seasons and classrooms becomes even more significant when we consider that it is the first, and often only, representation of LGBTQ people and issues that the vast majority of our students encounter in an academic setting. The Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network’s The 2017 National School Climate Survey found that just under 65 percent of students graduate high school without ever having discussed or read about LGBTQ people or issues in any class (Kosciw et al. 58). The Laramie Project’s sustained popularity indicates that schools are leaning on the theatre to bridge that representational gap. The way it has been taken up as the gay play presents a problem, in that it can perpetuate uncontested narratives of victimization and what youth theatre scholars Manon van de Water and Annie Giannini call the discourse of the “troubled gay youth” (103). However, given this play’s place in the curriculum as the singular point of contact for many students, it is vital that we create opportunities for students to engage with the content to the fullest capacity, with a critical eye, and with explicit connections to the world we inhabit together. My critique here is not intended to discredit the valuable work that the Tectonic Theater Project has done with Laramie, but rather to hold my own community of theatre educators and practitioners to a more rigorous standard in our conversations with our students about the piece. I advocate a shift in questioning away from “could this happen here?” My own lived experience as a queer transgender person; scholarship coming out of queer, feminist, and transgender studies; and the alarming rates of violence against the LGBTQ community, particularly transwomen of color, has taught me that it can and is currently happening all over the world.1 Instead, I propose broader alternatives such as “what can we do to create a culture and systems equipped to stop homophobic violence? How are heteronormativity and homophobia operating culturally and systemically within the world presented in Laramie, and how can we recognize this in our own communities? Informed by theories and pedagogies developed by Jasbir Puar, bell hooks, Cathy Cohen, and Sarah Ahmed, this essay will provide an autoethnographic account of the pedagogical strategies I have developed over the course of four semesters to engage my own students in a queer-feminist examination of The Laramie Project and our own Midwestern community. I will begin with a critical analysis of the most popular pedagogical tools accessible to those teaching the play. The autoethnographic portion of the essay will explore the challenges I faced as an instructor in attempting to move the discussion surrounding Laramie beyond a surface-level reading, some particularly productive moments, and methods my students and I found of extending the lessons of the piece beyond the class time specifically dedicated to it. Surface-level readings of Laramie lead to post-show talk-backs and the classroom discussions surrounding the play that run the risk of becoming reductive rather than deeply critical. I have had dozens of my own students take away the message that “nobody deserves to be murdered,” ignoring the specific cultural circumstances that led to Matthew Shepard’s death and focusing on the victim [End Page 221] rather than the perpetrators. On the other hand, I have noticed a tendency among students and audience members alike to create distance both temporally and geographically: “Wow, we’ve come a long way since the 1990s” or “But that couldn’t happen here.” The latter reaction reflects the same differentiation that Jill Dolan noted in her explanation of how the original New York production, in her view, failed to create a utopian performative for its audience. The 2000 production, she writes, “miscalculates some strategies, most flagrantly maintaining the binary of rural/urban that keeps the tragedy distanced and ‘othered...

A Body without a Story: The Immortal Spectacle in The Ballad of Little Jo

A Body without a StoryThe Immortal Spectacle in The Ballad of Little Jo Shelby E. E. Grauberger (bio) As a genre intimately tied to the landscape of the American West, the romanticization of the frontier, and the American social imaginary, the Western holds a special place in Americans’ hearts. While Western films present a nostalgia for supposedly simpler times— when communities stood by each other and people lived by a moral code, at least in theory— they also develop to deal with the anxieties present in contemporary American culture. As American culture shapes the genre, pushing it to evolve over time, the genre Western likewise informs culture by teaching Americans about their own social identity. This reciprocal relationship makes Westerns troubling to critics; Western films are steeped in genre conventions that whisper disconcerting truths about American ideology and hint at Americans’ callous treatment of both themselves and the Other. One particularly troubling element of the genre Western is “the centrality of the male protagonist and the subservient nature of the female characters” (Piturro 113). Even as Western films progress to address changing American values and beliefs, they struggle to shake the patriarchal gender dynamics marginalizing women, as time and again Westerns demonstrate that “the root language of the genre is gender” (Dowell 10). Leo Braudy asserts that “genre films essentially ask the audience, ‘Do you still want to believe this?’ Popularity is the audience answering ‘Yes.’ Change in genres occur when the audience says, ‘That’s too infantile a form of what we believe. Show us something more complicated’” (179). This argument suggests that if a progressive or revisionist genre film is unpopular, the audience still believes in the classic model a filmmaker sought to challenge, ultimately [End Page 33] demonstrating that the audience is not ready to evolve as the genre progresses. Such is the case with Maggie Greenwald’s The Ballad of Little Jo (1993), a thought-provoking film that has been labeled both a revisionist and a feminist Western for its portrayal of a female embodying the classic Western hero. Earning just under $550,000 at the box office, the film’s unpopularity suggests that even in the midst of the women’s empowerment movements dominating the 1990s, audiences still believed, and supported, genre conventions that reinscribe patriarchal social structures. Although this weak box office performance leads some to believe the film does not merit reintroduction to critical conversations, I instead posit that The Ballad of Little Jo dropped off critics’ radar because scholarship about gender performativity and transgender representation was not yet prominent in the field when the film was released. Maggie Greenwald presents a female Western hero who identifies as a man, and in doing so challenges an earlier feminist criticism that was dominated by cis-gender normativity. In the early 1990s the film anticipated our present discussions of transgender experiences, asking viewers to reevaluate their understanding of gender and its relationship to identity within the context of the genre Western. Jo’s story takes place just outside a small frontier community called Ruby City during the nineteenth century, and as such, the film depicts early instances of intolerance and gender violence in the American West. Despite developing into less isolated, law-governed towns in the century following westward expansion, in some respects, western communities are still plagued by the legacy of the “Wild West,” both in modern culture and in popular imagination— a distressing reality addressed in other popular Western productions. Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), for example, addresses gender violence, hate crimes, and homophobia by alluding to the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. Productions like The Ballad of Little Jo, Brokeback Mountain, and Moisés Kaufman’s documentary play The Laramie Project (2001) speak to the necessity for scholarship addressing the troubling legacy of hate violence in the “Wild West.” By reintroducing The Ballad of Little Jo to contemporary gender discourse, I hope to address the need for more criticism about [End Page 34] hate and gender violence in Western literature and film studies. Additionally, I propose that publishing an individual’s image can be an example of necroviolence, especially when their final image is misrepresentative of their...

Our Town, by David Hyatt Crowe

Our Town, by David Hyatt Crowe

Empathy and moral education, Theatre of the Oppressed, and The Laramie Project

ABSTRACT Notable theorists have argued that theatre and drama play positive roles in the moral education of children and adults, including cultivating their capacity for empathy. Yet other theorists have expressed concerns that plays and educational practices involving improvisation might not lead to positive changes in real life, and might even have negative influences on actors and audiences. This paper focuses in particular on the dramatic methods employed by Theatre of the Oppressed, devised by Augusto Boal, and on the methods involved in the development of the play The Laramie Project, developed by Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theatre Project. It argues that Theatre of the Oppressed and The Laramie Project cultivate actors’ and audiences’ empathetic capacities, while overcoming many theorists’ worries about the impact of drama.

Performing Critical Pedagogy in a Politicized Public Sphere

Here, I outline a performative approach to the politicized public sphere specifically drawing on Moises Kaufman’s Laramie Project,1 Saldaña’s call for a critical ethnotheatre that engages key moments in a culture’s history, and Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed.

Belgesel Tiyatroda Karşı Duruş olarak Bellek The Laramie Project ve The Exonerated

Focusing on major differences between nostalgic and documentary memory in contemporary plays, this paper argues how The Laramie Project (2001) by Moises Kaufmann and The Exonerated (2002) by Jessica Blank and Eric Jensen reinvigorate the concept of memory as an alternative political stand on stage. Memory plays use historical documentation as a forerunner of their dramatic material. In this respect, The Exonerated tells the story of six wrongfully convicted death row inmates through testimonies of the freed convicts, court recordings, and other documents. The Laramie Project belongs to another category of verbatim plays, which is still centered on edited interviews and testimonies but it is characterized by the elimination of the protagonist. It reconstructs and rewrites the story of brutally murdered Matthew Shepard to question this tragedy and disclose the reasons for his murder, but Shepard himself is not represented as a character on stage. The Laramie Project is similar to The Exonerated, but their methodology and construction have fundamentally different incentives and elements. Their emphasis on identity politics and insistence upon a more extended public discussion of politics and social issues separates them from other genres and trends. The way memory is stripped of its nostalgic layers in these documentary plays aims to foster a new understanding of dramatic constructions while challenging mainstream accounts and shifting to side of the silenced figures. Although there is little overlap between the contents and messages of the plays, a key point in both of these works is their emphasis on current issues through a variety of memory forms. Their accent on harsh realities of history is especially pronounced when audience members are invited to witness the flaws of our society. It might be a wrongfully convicted person, a screened and scrutinized life of a transvestite, or a brutally murdered homosexual, but in the end, documentary drama shows us the urgent need to look back to understand the present. Our mistakes are all buried in the magical box of the past. They can be our guides for tomorrow as long as we do not glorify them.

사회적 드라마의 변증법적 파트너: The Laramie Project와 The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later

사회적 드라마의 변증법적 파트너: The Laramie Project와 The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later

Hate crime trauma and pain: Affiliation, becoming and in-Betweenness in The Laramie Project

Abstract Tectonic Theater Project’s documentary/verbatim theatre work entitled The Laramie Project charts the intricacies of the process of a hate crime victim’s search for and acquisition of identity (becoming) and the concurrent success and failure of the community to engage in this process (affiliation). The productions, as well as the film version, of The Laramie Project tackle the crucial importance of understanding the grey area between the state of becoming (part of) something and being excluded from it (in-betweenness). This liminality, reflecting Victor Turner’s illustrious ideas of “betwixt and between”, shall serve to explore The Laramie Project as an attempt to show the facets of social and cultural affiliation and becoming, as well as an instrument to put them to use in socially and politically relevant theatre. The paper will seek to show how Tectonic Theater Project’s work scrutinizes the significance of “in-betweenness” and employs it to communicate a message that is both humanistic and aesthetic.

『레라미 프로젝트(The Laramie Project)』의 성소수자 지칭어 번역

The discourse of homosexuality in Korea is particularly pronounced in the cultural field, and literature, film, play and musical are the areas where homosexuality is the most visible. For a society that has long deemed heterosexuality as normal to accept and translate works on homosexuality in itself constitutes an ideological and political action since those works inherently contain a political claim that discrimination against homosexuals is not legitimate. Meanwhile, in less than a generation, terms referring to sexual minorities have gone through changes so radical that even contemporary people comprehend them very differently from each other. Homosexual, gay, homo, queer, fag or faggot and other vocabularies for sexual minorities are polysemic words which could be regarded as normal or depreciatory depending on how the public see homosexuality, and they also orient some of the most representative political correctness of these days. In other words, the terms could serve as a scale that could reflect the user’s perception of homosexuality, hence requiring a cautious approach from the translator. As such, this study attempts to analyze how words referring to sexual minorities in The Laramie Project are translated into the Korean language through text analysis and interview.

“The Every 28 Hours Plays” and “After Orlando”: Networked, Rapid-Response, Collective Theatre Action—New Forms for a New Age

“The Every 28 Hours Plays” and “After Orlando”: Networked, Rapid-Response, Collective Theatre Action—New Forms for a New Age Ann Elizabeth Armstrong (bio) and Joan Lipkin (bio) “The nature of an emergency dictates a response.” —Arlene Goldbard1 Naming both “natural” disasters such as hurricanes and “civil” disasters such as gun violence and police brutality, the US Department of Culture’s guide Art Became the Oxygen specifically details the role of arts in responding to emergencies. Drawing from the insights of crisis-management fields, they describe how artists form a “third line” of support to those in crisis, using storytelling and culture to cultivate allies and resources for communities in need on the “first line.”2 As we find ourselves increasingly lurching from crisis to crisis, theatre-makers are innovating new artistic forms and producing practices that leverage networks and foster dialogue through performance. Some refer to such work as “rapid-response” theatre. In the tradition of the Federal Theatre Project’s (FTP) Living Newspapers, plays are created quickly with minimal production values in order to disseminate a story, often literally ripped from the headlines. However, more than simply capturing a contemporary moment, now artists are also enacting mobilizing strategies, community-building, and collaborative methods that constitute an innovative form of networked, collective theatre action. Projects like “The Every 28 Hours Plays” and “After Orlando” represent a significant new trend using short-form drama to respond to the breakneck speed of the news cycle and construct a space for both a deep and wide community conversation. This note 1) introduces both of these projects and their original impulses and history; 2) explores this emerging genre of theatrical protest: the networked, rapid-response, collective-theatre action; and 3) brings together commentary about six different productions at various university campuses that staged either The Every 28 Hours Plays or After Orlando. Building on the lively roundtable discussions of two sessions in Las Vegas at ATHE 2017, we note that such productions provide significant educational opportunities for student actors, directors, and producers; encourage interdisciplinary collaboration and community partnerships; and construct spaces for deep dialogue, consciousness-raising, and community-building. As evidenced by each contribution, the performance of these plays within different university contexts extends and develops conversations beyond the immediate crisis to bear witness to injustices and construct multiple points of entry for social action. As a necessary step in commemorating, healing, and promoting action, the plays magnify the voices of those who have been silenced and allow for empathy in cultivating a community of allies. As mentioned above, the FTP’s Living Newspapers provide an important precedent for the rapid-response, networked, collective theatre actions. Living Newspaper units in the 1930s organized themselves like a news bureau to create a structure for US artists to quickly represent pressing stories.3 As Jordana Cox notes, their work spoke not only to a concrete public, but called for an “imagined community” as well (301–2). The FTP also consciously used its networks to foster simultaneous discussions at the same time across different geographic spaces.4 Cox notes how Living Newspapers took hold during a moment of a “fraught relationship between mass media and democracy” (302), [End Page 159] calling on audiences as concerned citizens to deliberate the issues of the day. Augusto Boal’s Newspaper Theatre, formulated in the Arena Theatre of 1970s Brazil, is another precedent, a kind of “ideological warm up” (225) for the actor; it uses Brechtian techniques to dramatize current events in short sketches to uncover biases and explore multiple perspectives left out by journalists in an authoritarian society.5 Other precedents of rapid-response, networked, collective theatre action include productions like Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues and Tectonic Theatre’s The Laramie Project. Although not short-form drama, their dramaturgical structure portrays a controversial event or issue from multiple perspectives, based on interviews and research. These productions started in professional theatre.6 Interestingly, they soon discovered how the dramaturgy facilitated the opportunity to move performances beyond that setting to enact mobilization and community-building around the process of performance in educational and community settings. In both, a website provides a kind of unifying frame, bringing local efforts...

Inspiration from the "Really Real": David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face and Documentary Theatre

Inspiration from the "Really Real":David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face and Documentary Theatre William C. Boles (bio) According to David Henry Hwang, two literary influences for his Obie-winning play Yellow Face were Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie and Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, both of which rely on a stand-in character for the author as he revisits painful autobiographical memories.1 In writing Yellow Face, Hwang did not want the same thing to happen to his literary doppelgänger DHH that happened to Tom Wingfield and Edmund Tyrone, namely, paling in comparison to the rest of the play's richly defined characters. However, the more he wrote, the less concerned Hwang became: "I found that…creating a character that I actually gave my name to…liberated me to make him a character…. It's kind of counterintuitive, but by naming him after myself he became more of a character."2 Aiding Hwang in separating himself from the fictional DHH was his recent performative turn in Greg Pak's short film Asian Pride Porn, where he played himself hawking "politically correct Asian porn."3 By embracing, in part, his highly self-conscious and at times self-parodying creation, Hwang imbued his literary double with much less seriousness than Williams and O'Neill did. While the inspirational roots of the main character DHH can be traced back to two canonical American plays and playwrights, the play's format stems from the realm of documentary theatre (also known as verbatim theatre), and its influence over Yellow Face and Hwang is far more significant than that of Williams and O'Neill. Over the two decades prior to the play's premiere in 2007, the documentary play had reappeared to much fanfare. In England, London's Tricycle Theatre produced numerous [End Page 216] tribunal plays, with its most successful being Richard Norton-Taylor's The Colour of Justice, while the National Theatre produced David Hare's The Permanent Way and The Power of Yes. In the United States, docudrama was equally successful with productions such as Moisés Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater's The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Laramie Project; Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992; Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues; and Anne Nelson's The Guys. This form of drama relies on myriad informational sources, including government documents, public hearings, trial testimony, media outlet transcripts, newspaper pieces, letters, and personal interviews, all of which are used as informative as well as authoritative statements about the topic being theatrically explored. The source-based format intrigued Hwang and, in turn, jump-started his creative process. He admitted: "I'd been wanting to fix my play Face Value [which closed on Broadway in previews] for the past 17 years, but I couldn't figure out how to do it."4 Face Value had been Hwang's farcical and biting response to the yellow casting of Jonathan Pryce as The Engineer in the Broadway premiere of Miss Saigon and he intended for his play to challenge multiple misguided conceptions about ethnic identity and stereotypes. In his later return to this subject matter, he "started thinking about the stage documentary form—making it a mock stage documentary that would poke fun at some of the absurdities of the multicultural movement."5 In regard to the "mock" part of his documentary play, he created a fictional narrative surrounding Marcus Gee, a white actor, who is mistaken as Asian by DHH and is cast as the lead in Face Value, whereby Gee then goes on to garner great success as an Asian-American actor. Surrounding this fictional story line, Hwang uses newspapers, magazines, and government sources to document specific incidents in the 1990s, including Hwang's protest against Pryce's casting, the critical and financial failure of Face Value, the rising sense of "yellow peril" associated with Chinese Americans in the 1990s, and his father's role in a campaign finance scandal surrounding Bill Clinton's run for President. Leigh Silverman, the play's director, noted that what "we ask people to believe in in the play is that everything...

Violence Onstage and Off: Drama and Society in Recent American Plays

Direct and bloody violence has a long history on stage. In recent years, a different mode of violence can be distinguished in the work of prominent American playwrights – less direct than indirect, more covert than overt, and likely to affect a group rather than individuals. In this article Russell Vandenbroucke applies concepts from Norwegian sociologist and Peace Studies scholar Johan Galtung to examine structural and cultural violence in Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2, & 3) and traces similar representations of violence in Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror, Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Lynn Nottage's Ruined, Ayad Aktar's Disgraced, The Laramie Project by Moisés Kauffman and the Tectonic Theater Project, and Tim Robbins's adaptation of Dead Man Walking by Sr Helen Prejean. These writers have in common the status of traditional outsiders – black, female, gay, Muslim – and this informs their engagement in the social and political vitality of the stage. The shift in focus of these plays from direct violence echoes observations in Steven Pinker's recent The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Russell Vandenbroucke is Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Louisville and Director of its Peace, Justice, and Conflict Transformation programme. He previously served as Artistic Director of Chicago's Northlight Theatre. His publications include Truths the Hand Can Touch: the Theatre of Athol Fugard and numerous articles on South African theatre.

“Say It Right, Say It Correct”: Documenting the American West in The Laramie Project

“Say It Right, Say It Correct”Documenting the American West in The Laramie Project Tony R. Magagna (bio) Throughout Moisés Kaufman’s documentary play The Laramie Project, the citizens of Laramie express their concern about being “documented” and represented by others.1 Already the focus of intense media coverage in the immediate aftermath of the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, many of the townspeople depicted in Kaufman’s play are conscious and wary of being portrayed and defined elsewhere. One character—the over-the-top limousine driver Doc O’Connor—admits that “when Hard Copy came and taped me, I taped them at the exact same time … so if they ever do anything funny they better watch their fuckin’ ass” (Kaufman, Laramie 48). Here, Doc reveals an anxiety about being depicted by the outside news media specifically, but he mirrors sentiments that are expressed by other characters about the idea of the play itself. One University of Wyoming student, for instance, finds it “unreal … that a group from New York would be writing a play about Laramie. … You’re gonna be onstage in New York and you’re gonna be acting like you’re us. That’s so weird” (26). Further, when another character is asked how she and others in Laramie will feel about being depicted on stage, she responds, “To show it’s not the hellhole of the earth would be nice, but that is up to how you portray us” (100). Most poignantly, Father Roger Schmit, the Catholic priest who heads the University of Wyoming’s Newman Center and is a central figure in the vigils for Shepard following the attack, implores the Tectonic group, “if you write a play of this … say it right, say it correct. … Just deal with what is true” (66). Such questions of authenticity and accuracy regarding the depiction of Laramie are ultimately central to the play. To craft The [End Page 199] Laramie Project Kaufman and nine other members of his Tectonic Theater Project traveled from New York City to Laramie six times to conduct interviews with Laramie locals following Shepard’s death, recording more than two hundred interviews with locals and amassing more than four hundred hours of tape (Baglia 129). The finished play is presented as a verbatim account of these inside conversations, offering a kind of living snapshot of the town and its people through the remarks of more than sixty individuals, as well as the processes and reactions of the Tectonic members themselves. Rather than producing a play “based on” or “inspired by” the events of Matthew Shepard’s death, Kaufman consistently approaches the subject through a documentary technique, where both interviewer and interviewee appear onstage, presenting only the material that was recorded. The actors in the original production play themselves, as well as the individuals with whom they had spoken. Using their journals and recorded exchanges, the actors intermix their own responses to Laramie and its citizens with the words of the townspeople affected by the crime, as well as with those of the media members and activists suddenly in their midst.2 Presented in this documentary fashion, The Laramie Project depicts Kaufman and his company members as deeply concerned with the factual representation of the elements surrounding Matthew Shepard’s murder, and this self-consciousness within the play lends the project credibility as an accurate, au courant portrait of how real people responded to Shepard’s murder and to the heated discussions of homosexuality and homophobic violence that ensued. In the closing moments of the piece, Kaufman even echoes Father Schmit’s injunction to “say it right” again as a kind of coda; it both reminds the departing playwrights within the play of their responsibility to tell a true story, and implies to the audience watching that they have now done just that (100).3 From the work’s premiere at the Denver Center Theater in February 2000, and again in May 2000 at the Union Square Theater in New York City, The Laramie Project’s apparent commitment to accuracy has contributed to the power and popularity of the play and has made it the primary cultural artifact of an event that has become...

Twentieth Centurions: Screening Gender and Sexuality before the Digital

Twentieth Centurions:Screening Gender and Sexuality before the Digital Heather N. Lukes (bio) Sarah Hagelin’s Reel Vulnerability: Power, Pain, and Gender in Contemporary American Film and Television, New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2013 B. Ruby Rich’s New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013 Amy Villarejo’s Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014 Through strikingly different modes of intellectual engagement, these three books offer a rich account of gender and sexuality in the latter half of the twentieth century. Sarah Hagelin’s work reminds us of all that remains delicious about historically informed, close formal analysis of both the large and small screen through her upending of gendered assumptions about “vulnerability.” Reel Vulnerability addresses the concept expansively within a relatively narrow topical frame: through war and the rapeable female body. Hagelin’s theoretical starting point is Laura Mulvey’s 1975 equation of the camera’s gaze with male assault, which has been revised by many critics, including Mulvey herself. As Hagelin points out, however, social discourses about female vulnerability have nonetheless often served to reify Mulvey’s initial point, especially through the lingering concern for “women and children.” The result is a persistent feminization of vulnerability that seems utterly at odds with the celebration of “strong” female characters in film and television since the 1990s, ranging from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and G.I. Jane (1997) to Deadwood (2004–06) and Battlestar Galactica (2004–09). Here, Reel Vulnerability centers an important difference between the lie of “postfeminism” that spectacularizes what political scientist Caroline Heldman terms the “fighting fuck toy” and Hagelin’s distinction between “sentimental and resistant” vulnerability that both genders may occupy (9, 11). Hagelin’s readings expand the terrain of vulnerability well beyond the “logic of female frailty” and its [End Page 116] fierce foil to explicate how, even within the same movie or show, subtle deployments of threat and woundedness may manifest variously reactionary or progressive meanings in an increasingly precarious world. Reel Vulnerability’s chiasmic crossing of male and female figuration with resistant vs. sentimental tactics begins with a reading of The Furies (1950) and The Men (1950) in which the gendered distinction between their respective leads, Barbara Stanwyck and Marlon Brando, is informed by the rise of Method acting and its reassignment of emotionalism to men, forged through the wholesale dismissal of the resistant female vulnerability embodied in the stylized acting of 1930s women’s film and film noir. War films including The Deer Hunter (1978), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Casualties of War (1989), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and G.I. Jane (1997) command the center of Reel Vulnerability, with complex interplays between sentiment around and among bands of brothers, rape as spoils of battle vs. dishonor to the cause, the fitness of female soldiers, and the trauma of men unfit to be soldiers. As the book turns to the millennium with texts like Boys Don’t Cry (1999) and The Laramie Project (2002), vulnerability becomes more queer, dispersive, and interdependent. Yet it also becomes more sentimental, in keeping with LGBT social inclusion by way of straight pity, in which too many queers have been melancholic collaborators. Hagelin concludes with post-9/11 television, where post-feminist tough women, posthumanism, and torture variously figure a crisis of global precarity in shows including 24 (2001–10), Battlestar Galactica, and Deadwood. The narrative long form and through line afforded by the hour-long serialized televisual drama at once expands and circumscribes the limits of resistant vulnerability by engaging complicated questions about endurance, ensemble social networks of suffering, and shaded ethical terrains over which the 90–120 minutes of narrative cinema seem no longer to hold moral authority. Negotiating between the affective regimes of the postmortem and optimistic hope for new media, B. Ruby Rich’s “director’s cut” historicizes the 1990s New Queer Cinema (NQC) through her own unique perspective, serving as she has in the capacity of its coiner and its most crucial “funder, critic, curator, pundit, publicist, scholar, [and] champion” (xx). At stake here is more than a subgenre, as the festival circuits that have supported her...

Hit the Wall by Ike Holter (review)

Reviewed by: Hit the Wall by Ike Holter Chloe Johnston Hit The Wall. By Ike Holter. Directed by Eric Huff. Chicago Commercial Collective, Greenhouse Theater Center, Chicago. 24 May 2014. When you entered the theatre the music hit you. Someone offered you a beer and a woman rushed past you, loudly greeting everyone she saw. You followed her into the space and found your seat as you watched her entreat others onto the dance floor. The music washed over you as you watched other audience members stumble in—including a few who seemed friendly with the band. From the first moments of Hit the Wall, the actors and the audience were tossed together. It was 1969 and we were at the Stonewall Inn. Together. Soon, the stakes of this immersive prologue became clear. The audience was thrust into this world because the characters needed us. The band ended their set and the show began: the actors turned to the audience, the line between us and them suddenly distinct, and each one told us, emphatically, “I was there.” With these words they implicated us in the act of bearing witness. Every element of design supported this project. The shadowy lights by Jeff Glass and Cassie Mings blurred the line between stage and house. Coral Gable’s period costumes would not look out of place on the streets today. On John Holt’s set, the band was elevated, playing directly to us, and the actors, at least at first, stayed on the ground level, mirroring the audience. Yet, playwright Ike Holter almost immediately challenges the concept of bearing witness. Carson (Manny Buckley) is the first character to speak: “’I was there.’ Everybody says that. . . . If every sissy who said she was at Stonewall / was actually at Stonewall / shit, you coulda seen that rainbow from outer space, please.” Witnesses are unreliable because they speak from their subjective experiences; once we begin to talk about truth we construct it. Hit the Wall functions as a docudrama that rejects many of the trappings of the form. Unlike The Laramie Project or The Exonerated, it is not constructed from interviews or found text. Some of the characters are imagined versions of historical figures, most notably Peg (Sara Kerastas), who appears to be inspired by a woman at the bar who, according to several eyewitnesses, fought back against police and turned a raid into a rebellion. Holter gives her a name, a backstory, and a love interest, the revolutionary Roberta (Shannon Matewsky), who has become the leader of a one-woman movement in reaction to the hypocrisies she has found in her fellow radicals—the racism of the women’s movement and the sexism of the Black Panthers. She is uncompromising and undaunted, giving voice to Holter’s critiques of fellow leftists. Elements of the character referred to as “Cop” seem to be loosely based on the officers who led the raid on Stonewall, most notably their defense that they were only following orders. It is Peg’s showdown with Cop in the bathroom of the Stonewall Inn that provides the climax to the play. After beating Carson, Cop (Walter Briggs) turns his attention to Peg, berating and sexually assaulting her. This is not the first encounter between these characters: earlier in the day, Cop, then dressed in civilian clothes, grabbed and threatened Peg in a public park. Cop’s public humiliation of Peg is on a continuum with the violence he will ultimately inflict. Tano and Mika, the “Snap Queen Team” that serves as Greek chorus/comic relief in the play, are witnesses to the daytime incident, but as Cop points out: “They don’t do anything, they watch.” Later that night, Peg fights back against her attacker, taking his gun and forcing him to beg for his life. In the heat of their confrontation, Peg screams at anyone who can hear her: “NO MORE WATCHING! You see me scream, you SEE IT!” That call to arms catalyzed a seismic shift in the action: the stage erupted, what was once a raid became a riot. Holter explodes the idea that bearing witness is enough. Rather than read Hit the Wall as a document of a historical...

Teaching Tolerance Without Pushing the Envelope: The Laramie Project in High School Theatres

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) representations in theatre for young audiences are rare, so it is important to examine the components that make LGBT representation considered acceptable on the high school stage. This article examines the prevalence of The Laramie Project in high school theatres through the lens of multicultural education and explores which aspects of the play make it considered acceptable for high school audiences. This article looks at different aspects of multicultural education theory and argues that the victim narrative and lessons of tolerance rather than radical change make the play considered acceptable for school audiences.