‘Laramie Project’ Records Town’s Reaction to the Shepard Murder

DENVER —  Horrific events can and often do redefine otherwise indistinct communities on the global map--sometimes, overnight. When gay college student Matthew Shepard left the Fireside Lounge in October 1998 with two men who later left him beaten unconscious and tied to a fence, the crime made “Laramie, Wyo.” household words, and left a town of third-generation small-town folks forever transformed.

Moises Kaufman’s “The Laramie Project” is a play about the brutal slaying--the result of 18 months of research and interviews with Laramie residents. Staged by the Denver Center Theater Company and premiered here on Saturday, the play focuses on a community’s reaction to a barbaric crime and the trials of Shepard’s two murderers.

Written and performed by Kaufman’s New York-based Tectonic Theater Company, the play was partly developed at the Sundance Theater Lab in Park City, Utah. The acting ensemble, none of whom are professional journalists, gathered more than 200 interviews conducted in bars, homes and sheriffs’ offices, and then brought the Laramie residents’ reactions to the Shepard murder to the theater.

On a Robert Brill-designed stage that is as stark as any Wyoming plain, a few tables and chairs support Laramie townspeople who come in and out of focus as the chronology of events unfolds through their telling: Matt Galloway (Stephen Belber), the chatty bartender who enjoys the attention he gets as the last person to see Shepard alive; Father Roger (Greg Pierotti), bent on learning something from the unspeakable; and Officer Reggie Fluty (Mercedes Herraro), the sheriff who removed the ropes that held Shepard to the crucifixion-like fence. “His limbs,” says Fluty, “were tied so tight, I couldn’t cut them.” After learning Shepard was HIV-positive, Fluty spent several agonizing days wondering if she had been infected with the virus.

An in-transition work, “The Laramie Project” is ambitious in its struggle to cover a lot of ground: the details of the crime, the chronology of events over a year, and the wavering yet stalwart soul-searching inherent in coping. Characters move in and out of the spotlight, voicing reactions in sound-bite-like monologues. Shepard is never represented on stage, and the audience is asked to come to know the victim vis-a-vis the victim’s acquaintances and friends. “He’s a little guy,” says a local cabby. “Not but about 5 feet 2, 5 feet-1.”

It’s a lot to ask spectators when each of the eight-member ensemble wears at least three acting hats. Barbara Pitts plays herself as one of the investigating dramaturges, appears as the grandmother of one of the killers, and repeatedly shows up as a childhood classmate of the other. Likewise, in addition to his role as the questioning Father Roger, Pierotti performs the substantial role of hospital spokesman, which also calls him to be a father of four and confidant to the Shepards at their bedside vigil. It’s a pivotal role that illuminates Kaufman’s vision of story-told-through-story-gathering. Pierotti convincingly wears the hospital administrator’s face that ultimately became familiar to television audiences.

In one of the more compelling moments in the production, audience members collectively held their breath as Pierotti dramatized the administrator as one of the local, the stunned, the shell-shocked, as he lets his voice and heart crack open at a 4 a.m. press gathering telling the glaring cameras and sea of microphones that, after valiantly clinging to his life for several days, Matthew Shepard has died. It’s a steady, strong and true performance, embodying a town psyche that is broken and tormented.

But even as a University of Wyoming student wonders aloud at his parents’ homophobia, disclosing that his parents “came to everything I ever did,” yet refused to attend a theater tryout that won him a scholarship; and even as a lesbian tells the sweet and funny tale of wearing an angel costume to block a “God Hates Fags” sign; and though Matthew Shepard’s father tells a quiet courtroom that he wishes his son’s murderer a long life so that “when you wake up in your cell on the Fourth of July, you can remember Matthew, who will never see another Fourth of July,” “The Laramie Project” is still more often a telling, or retelling, of a familiar story. It toils to keep the tale, channeled as it is through actors, from being once-too-often removed from its audience.