Tectonics

The Laramie Project interests me because it's a lot like a play I read earlier in my college career, Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror. Like Fires, The Laramie Project takes excerpts from actual interviews to help tell about a true event from a large collective of witnesses and people affected by the event. But while Smith decided to divide up her play into long spans of uninterrupted monologue, Kaufman and his fellow Tectonic Theatre Project members decided to weave all their characters together into what they refer to as "moments." As it is explained in the notes about the text, a moment is "simply a unit of theatrical time that is then juxtaposed with other units to convey meaning." Reading the play, I felt a little bit like I was watching a documentary about Laramie and Matthew Shepard, with many different individuals chiming in on a particular subject, i.e. Shepard's personality, whether McKinney should receive the death penalty, etc. But from a theatrical standpoint, I also saw these moments mostly as dialogues that are composed of monologues...at times, the way the lines were weaved together, it seemed like completely unrelated characters were having indirect conversations with each other. I found this to be a very compelling way of telling the story.

Another thing I really liked about this play is that it is essentially telling two stories: one, the most obvious, being the life and death of Matthew Shepard; the other being the nature and fate of his tormentors. While Shepard is described in detail, almost just as much time goes into describing Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney. The third act is basically framed by the question of whether or not Henderson and McKinney will receive the death penalty for their crime. I think this is important for not only telling the audience what kind of tragedy happened, but also for shedding light on why it happened.

I worried that by including themselves in the narrative, the TTP would make the play too much about their personal experiences with Laramie's citizens. Thankfully, they managed to keep their appearances at about the same level as all the other people interviewed.

Unfortunately, their inclusion adds to an already overflowing cast of characters. By allowing everyone to get their say about the string of events in Laramie, many of the characters do not get a lot of time to establish their identities. I kept forgetting who some of the people were and turned back to the cast list a number of times. I have no way of knowing, having not seen this play before, but I imagine that the confusion might be even worse if actors did not characterize well. Thank goodness they had the initiative to include a narrator, or Laramie Project would be a mess.