The BTW "Laramie" is beautifully crafted, emotionally accessible, and generous. It proclaims its own communal decency and dignity, and discovers decency and dignity in most of the people whose lives it examines and in the social fabric of the western town that prosperity passed by. Kaufman says that he took the idea of witness and the aesthetic vocabulary of the Tectonic piece from a Brecht essay on his method for creating Epic Theatre. Who could have predicted that Brecht's ideas applied to an incident of deadly gay bashing would lead to a kind of patriotic love fest, a ritual of healing?
The town of Laramie is represented by a stage floor painted like a highway and by sizable screens with slide projections and a couple of TV monitors to add local color. As the memory of the media frenzy over the torture and murder of this frail gay college student fades, it is probably a good idea to have the visual images of Laramie summoned up while the play's words are sorting them out and making sense of them. It is certainly an impressive accomplishment on the part of the BTW design team. The dominating image is that of the log fence where Matthew Shepard was tied and beaten and left to die, bleak against a brown and wintry field. Very little of the script is dialogue between characters. The directors use stage position and lighting to vary the effect of monologue following monologue, narrowing down to intimate and confessional, widening to take in groups, and including an implied audience during speeches given for public consumption. A lively active surface is laid over a dark and solemn ground.
Eight actors share "Laramie"'s narration and play some sixty different people: James Barton, Kent French, Anna Gottlieb, Tom Lawton, Laura Napoli, Sheila Stasack, Holly Vanasse and Forrest Walter. Their characterizations are facilitated by the clever costuming of Molly Trainer, but all sixty people are vividly differentiated without resort to disguise or caricature. I always recognized returning characters, even when I wasn't quite sure which actors were embodying them. There's Marge Murray, the "best damn bartender in town" and Reggie, her 39 year old daughter on the police force who cut Matthew down from the buck fence where he'd been hanging for 18 hours; and Aaron, the kid out bicycling in the middle of nowhere to who found Matthew. There's the other bartender, the sympathetic one who saw Matthew leave with his killers, and "should have stopped them"; and the killers themselves, young men with no prospects and police records; their girl friends and neighbors; the local clergy; Zubaida Ula, a lone Muslim woman; faculty and fellow students like Jeddidiah, who goes from a homophobic background to playing Prior Walter in "Angels in America" at the University where Matthew was a student; journalists, TV people, doctors, detectives, lawyers, the judge -- and Matthew Shepard's parents. These were all well done, but several widely different characterizations performed by Forest Walter won a special place in my affections.
The action of "The Laramie Project" is divided into
three parts, and
is designed to run two and a half hours, with two
intermissions.
I think this may have been a better arrangement for the
original production,
presented before audiences with personal involvement.
It makes two
spaces for people to talk about their own relation to
the event, and to
assimilate what they have learned. But it makes too
much space--- the intermissions
run overtime, and the audience is tempted to shake off
the mood and gossip,
and then twice have to be lured back into Laramie at
the top of a new act.
I think Techtonic should consider allowing subsequent
productions to trim
about 15 minutes off the script and run it straight
through. At under
two hours, the piece would feel more like the event it
most closely resembles--
a well performed funeral for someone of symbolic
importance. If this
sounds strange, it is only because this ancient and
necessary function
of theatre doesn't fit very well into our Show Business
model.
Advertise a funeral, and sell tickets? Promise a good
cry,
and an affirmation of communial continuity? Did I
mention that the
language of "Laramie" is unusually inoffensive for a
cutting edge political/sexual
play? I noticed only one instance of the f-word, and
since that comes
very late and out of the mouth of an angel, it might
even slip past a high
school principal. "The Laramie Project" proceeds
tactfully, even
as it includes as much gritty detail as is compatible
with its Funeral
Function: mourn, re-prioritize, re-connect, resolve do
better together
in the light of our common mortality. BTW seems to have
recognized
the "beyond Show Business As Usual" nature of the
material and responded
by committing to benefit performances and community
outreach, especially
partnerships with local organizations supporting "gay,
lesbian, bisexual,
transgendered and questioning youth 22 and under." This
atmosphere
of sincerity and service is as important to BTW's
success with "The Laramie
Project" as all the talent and technical skill that
went into its staging.
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