Chris Griswold

Adjectives such as awe-inspiring, eye-opening, and absolutely amazing are being used to describe this winter's play, The Laramie Project.

The Laramie Project is actually a chronicle of interviews and reactions which the Tectonic Theater Project recorded throughout the two years that its members spent in Laramie, Wyoming, conducting over 200 interviews, recording the town's reactions to the merciless beating of Matthew Shepard on October 18, 1998. The two-act play is two hours long and is split evenly between its two acts. Everyone involved in the production from the director of the performance, Director of Theater John Reese, down through the actors and the technology crew, put in all they had from 3:30-5:30 p.m. for five days a week during the bulk of the term, and then put in 17 hours of rehearsal in the last three days before its opening on February 11, 2003.

The set appears rather basic and did not require too much work except for finding the buck-type fence that is kept in the back of the Black Box stage. Using just the fence for the subtle but poignant effect of signifying the structure onto which Matthew Shepard was tied after his beating, this is "comparably more tame and less obvious when compared to how some of the countless other schools currently working on the project have gone with the prop," said Mr. Reese. This is in contrast to such productions in which an actor had been tied to the fence throughout the play, or pieces of bloody clothing had been strewn about the area encompassed by the fence.

Along with the wooden fence with the break at the bottom, the play utilized a projection screen, located directly above the fence on the back wall of the Black Box Theater. For the majority of the play, a picture of Matthew Shepard perched upon a stone wall provided the audience with the kind of thoughtful and relatively tranquil image that most of the characters in the play comment on having of Shepard, thus serving to bring the audience even closer to the story.

Andrew Anderson '03 was in charge of the pictures displayed, and all were taken from web-sites, the HBO film version of the play, and personal pictures of Ellen Woglom '05, who over winter break visited Laramie, Wyoming.

What clinched the stunning performances, though, was obviously the incredibly talented and versatile cast of sixteen students. Each actor had four to six roles in the play, which "aided in the creation of a play with no one part standing significantly above another's," said Sam Bush '04. Not only did each actor have at least four different roles, but Mr. Reese intentionally made all the roles for each person significantly different. "This," said Mr. Reese, "caused the actors to search for what it was that made each role truly different, which worked out well for the actors in the end as their roles had become more real in the process." And because of this format, it is extremely difficult to single out any one for a great performance, because everyone clearly put a lot of effort into it and worked together so well.

One notable role was that of Ryan Bronson's '03 portrayal of Matt Galloway, a bartender at a tavern that Shepard frequented. It was hard not to get sucked in by his character because he was always cracking jokes and had created the seemingly perfect accent for his role. Another stand out was Kyle Yager '05 who played the role of Doc O'Conner, a limousine driver whom Shepard hired to drive him to an out of state bar. Just as with Bronson, the initial hook to Yager's character was his accent, which embodied his character's simple-mindedness and verbose qualities.

The Laramie Project effectively illuminated the issues of intolerance and hate crimes for the Deerfield community. It poignantly showed that what happened to Matthew Shepard as a result of deeply-rooted problems and twisted mindsets within our society. This play made the audience cry, laugh and most importantly, think.