Project portrays town’s thoughts on 1998 murder of Matt Shepard

  OSCAR ALVAREZ At the "Laramie Project" screening, a panel
with several important community figures, professors and students
followed, discussing the film and the current state of hate crime
policy in the U.S.

By Ryan Joe
Daily Bruin Contributor

In the vast starlight of a Wyoming night, Matthew Shepard was
led, beaten and tied to a ramshackle fence where, comatose, he was
left for dead. The murder of Shepard, a 22-year-old gay man from
Laramie, Wyoming, catalyzed an explosion of media-fueled attention
that throttled the nation with horrified shock and a consequent cry
for hate-crime legislation.

In the wake of the 1998 murder, eight people from New York,
members of the Tectonic Theater Project, entered Laramie and
interviewed the town’s citizens on more than 400 hours of
tape. After a two-year interval of blood, sweat, tears and
transcription, the fruits of the octet’s labors bloomed into
the “The Laramie Project.” It premiered as a play and
had an off-Broadway run in five cities, warranting a spot on Time
Magazine’s Top 10 Best Plays of 2000.

Translated to a telefilm to air this March on HBO, “The
Laramie Project” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. At
Tuesday’s pre-screening of the film in Ackerman Grand
Ballroom, followed by a panel discussion replete with Tectonic
members, UCLA professors, spokespeople for civil rights groups and
a District Attorney, “The Laramie Project” and its
effects were assessed by the ensemble.

“The Laramie Project” was directed by Moises
Kaufman, who also worked with the project during its off-Broadway
tenure. The film retells the troupe’s occupation in Laramie
and their interaction with the locals, played by an ensemble cast
of character actors including Steve Buscemi, Peter Fonda, Janeane
Garofalo, Laura Linney and Christina Ricci.

But while the film follows the details surrounding
Shepard’s death, “The Laramie Project” is not so
much the story of Matthew Shepard as it is a poignant meditation on
how a senseless death affected a community. In fact, pictures of
Shepard himself are never once shown on film, yet throughout he
remains a presence felt but never once witnessed.

“When we worked from the understanding that Matthew was
never represented,” said Tectonic Theater member Greg
Pierotti, “we realized that the film had a certain haunting
quality.”

This parsing through, editing down, and reinterpreting of events
resembles in technique Truman Capote’s “In Cold
Blood,” in which Capote recounts his trek into the Kansas
wheat fields to reconstruct the shotgun murders of a four-member
family. But while Capote excluded himself from the narrative of his
novel, the members of Tectonic include themselves.

“I don’t think you can ever extract yourself
completely from the story,” said Tectonic member Kelli
Simpkins. “Part of the beauty of “˜The Laramie
Project’ is that it is about our journey with these people,
inside the community and outside of the community. We had the
experience as they were having it and we all changed in line with
how the community changed.”

It is a change brought in part by the media floodlights that, in
the direct aftermath of Shepard’s death, blared penetratingly
into the Laramie landscape. The blanket of cameras and news crews
were prominent, from Simpkins’s point of view, because of
Shepard’s curious boy-next-door virginal quality ““ a
quality not normally attributed by the straight public to gay men
““ and the exaggerated Christ-like allusions of Shepard
hanging on the fence.

But peeling through the emotive layers of Laramie natives whose
ideals are revealed and tried in the aftermath of Shepard’s
death, “The Laramie Project” does not depict a
black-and-white clear-cut case of good and evil; the film dwells in
the fog of moral gray areas in which opposing sides are represented
and the murderers themselves are sometimes tragic. Many of the
residents are appalled that locals committed the crime. It would
have been infinitely more comforting had they been able to distance
themselves from the callowness of the killers.

These revelations emerge, often in melancholy sighs, during the
progression of the film. And while not all of the Laramie residents
eagerly sought to talk to the members of Tectonic, those who did
were anxious to be heard.

“I’m not a professional journalist,” Pierotti
said. “I would cry in the interviews. The people who
didn’t want to talk just didn’t talk, but those who did
were pretty desperate to be listened to.”

A recurrent plea in “The Laramie Project” is the
necessity for new hate crime legislation. According to Ramona
Ripston, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties
Union of Southern California, California has possibly the best hate
crime laws in the country. However, legislation at the federal
level has been locked for the past two years, and laws in Wyoming
have remained stagnant.

Despite the inherent cry for government-brought legislation and
occasional didacticism, “The Laramie Project” is
emphatically not an after-school special.

“Part of it is finding the humor. There’s a lot of
comedy in the play,” said Simpkins. “Create distance
with the audience. In the play, we’re all playing multiple
characters and changing costumes, whereas in film, that’s a
more dangerous situation because the film is a literal translation
of reality.”

“The movie is not a dramatization of the things that
happened; it’s a retelling of stories that a group of people
gathered,” added Pierotti. “I think that prevents the
film from getting too melodramatic.”

TELEVISION: “The Laramie Project” will show on
HBO March 19 at 1:00 pm and 9:00 pm, March 24 at 2:15 pm and 11:00
pm, and March 27 at 11:30 am and 6:00 pm.