Milwaukee’s nationally acclaimed children’s theater company takes a big, dramatic leap forward with its production of The Laramie Project. The First Stage cast comprises members of the company’s training program for advanced high school actors, and the show is recommended for those age 13 and older.
Despite its generic-sounding title, The Laramie Project is a documentary play that details the true life-and-death story of 21-year-old Matthew Shepard, an openly gay college student who was brutally beaten and left to die on the outskirts of Laramie, Wyoming.
The play comprises transcripts of interviews from Laramie residents. During a half-dozen visits to Wyoming in the year after Shepard’s death in 1998, Tectonic Theater company members conducted more than 200 interviews.
The play first opened in Denver, which was partly selected for its proximity to Laramie. Since that 2000 debut, thousands of productions have been shared with audiences around the world. The Laramie Project has been staged in at least 20 countries, and millions more viewers have watched an HBO film adaptation. The play also has been studied in schools for its views on prejudice and tolerance.
The First Stage cast, under the able direction of Elyse Edelman, demonstrates just how powerful this play remains, more than 20 years after it debuted. The young people onstage – many of whom are just a few years younger than Matthew Shepard – give the play an urgency and power that it might not otherwise have.
In this production, the student actors play more than one character, and genders are sometimes swapped. A row of chairs behind a plain platform contains bits of clothing that the actors take on and off to differentiate the characters.
What really hits home in this production is how the students can become people who are older, and perhaps of a different race or gender, merely by their facial movements, their gestures and the tone of their voice.
Should people believe that hate crimes such as the one committed against Matthew Shepard are part of America’s past, they need only consult FBI statistics. In 2018, the FBI reported a 16-year high in the number of hate crimes. In the final scene, an actor mentions that Wyoming, the state where Shepard was murdered, still does not have hate-crime statute in 2021.
As the First Stage cast begins to weave stories about the Laramie community, one also picks up tidbits about Matthew. We find out his approximate height and weight, what beer he preferred to drink, and so forth. Some of the murder details are very graphic, such as a sheriff’s statement about what Matthew looked like when they found him tied to a fence along a cattle range. The First Stage actors do an excellent job of maintaining the flow and intensity of the performance, which lasts about two hours and 20 minutes.
In the pivotal trial scene, in which two suspects are sentenced and convicted, the play goes beyond the courtroom to detail how a major media invasion affected these residents in a small, rural town. More than one resident has fears that the media might portray everyone in town as being homophobic, which apparently wasn’t the case. Still, it’s easy to see how a small ranching community might certainly downplay that aspect as opposed to those living in major urban areas such as San Francisco, New York or London.
In summary, the mission of The Laramie Project is to inspire discussion and reflection about hate crimes and why they happen. First Stage has done terrific work in terms of presenting a play that truly exemplifies the best of ensemble acting. And it certainly gives audiences a lot to think about.
