QCA Theater: The Laramie Project (Revisited)

It’s been 10 years since the October 12th, 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. Four years after the murder, the Tectonic Theater Project, a New York City company, entered Laramie to conduct hundreds of interviews with inhabitants of the town. They ended up creating a play based on those interviews as well as company members’ own journal entries and published news reports. The play, The Laramie Project, premiered in February 2000 and has been performed over 2,000 times worldwide since. The three-act play details the community reaction to the murder as well as the trial of Shepard’s murderers. In it, eight actors portray more than sixty characters in a series of short scenes. Time magazine created a website in support of the project and HBO made a film by the same name in which actors portrayed the play’s interviewees.
The Tectonic Theater Project is returning to Laramie this week to re-interview the play’s real-life characters. In doing so, they hope to explore whether Matthew left any sort of legacy on the high plains town, 10 years after his passing. Returning to Laramie, a town of 25,000 near the Colorado border, is far from a theatrical exercise. They plan to use the new interviews to write an epilogue to the play before the 10th anniversary of Mr. Shepard’s death; it will be added to the published version of the script and will be included in future performances of “The Laramie Project.”

The trailer for HBO’s The Laramie Project
Read more about the attack on Matthew Shepard, the fate of his attackers, and civil reaction since then, after the jump.

Shortly after midnight on October 7, 1998, 21-year-old Shepard met McKinney and Henderson in a bar. McKinney and Henderson offered Shepard a ride in their car. Subsequently, Shepard was robbed, pistol whipped, tortured, tied to a fence in a remote, rural area, and left to die. McKinney and Henderson also found out his address and intended to burglarize his home. Still tied to the fence, Shepard was discovered eighteen hours later by a cyclist, who at first thought that Shepard was a scarecrow. At the time of discovery, Shepard was still alive, but in a coma.
During court cases both of the defendants used varying stories to defend their actions. They attempted to use the “gay panic defense”, arguing that they were driven to temporary insanity by Shepard’s alleged sexual advances toward them. At another point they stated that they had only wanted to rob Shepard and never intended to kill him.
The prosecutor in the case charged that McKinney and Henderson pretended to be gay in order to gain Shepard’s trust to rob him. During the trial, Chastity Pasley and Kristen Price (the pair’s then-girlfriends) testified under oath that Henderson and McKinney both plotted beforehand to rob a gay man. McKinney and Henderson then went to the Fireside Lounge and selected Shepard as their target. McKinney alleged that Shepard asked them for a ride home. After befriending him, they took him to a remote area of Laramie where they robbed him, beat him severely (media reports often contained the graphic account of the pistol whipping and his smashed skull), and tied him to a fence with a rope from McKinney’s truck. Both girlfriends also testified that neither McKinney nor Henderson were on drugs at the time. Both men received two consecutive life sentences without parole in state penitentiaries.
Since then, both the Wyoming and United States Federal government have failed in repeated attempts to pass hate crimes legislation that would inflict harsher penalties on those who seek out LGBT victims. The fence to which Shepard was tied and left to die became an impromptu shrine for visitors, who left notes, flowers, and other mementos. It has since been removed by the land owner. In the years following Shepard’s death, his mother Judy has become a well-known advocate for LGBT rights, particularly issues relating to gay youth. She is a prime force behind the Matthew Shepard Foundation, which supports diversity and tolerance in youth organizations.
Matthew Shepard was described by his parents and a good close friend from Orlando, Florida, Frankie J. McGraw, as “…an optimistic and accepting young man …[who]… had a special gift of relating to almost everyone. He was the type of person that was very approachable and always looked to new challenges. Matthew had a great passion for equality and always stood up for the acceptance of people’s differences.”