Laramie: 10 Years Later 

In 1998 in rural
Wyoming, Matthew Shepard was tied to a fence by two
local men, brutally beaten, and left to die. After
languishing for several days in a coma, 21-year-old
Shepard did die, igniting outrage and a national
dialogue about homophobia, civil rights, and violence. That
watershed moment was brilliantly and movingly captured in
the play The Laramie Project, created by Moisés
Kaufman and members of his Tectonic Theater Project,
who traveled to Laramie to interview hundreds of
residents about the incident, letting their words form
the script. The Laramie Project has since
become one of the most performed productions in American
theater.

Ten years after
the Matthew Shepard murder, the company returned to
Laramie to find out, in the words of Kaufman “what
had or had not changed” about the town. They
re-interviewed many of the townspeople whose words had
been crafted into the original production. The latest
result is Laramie: 10 Years Later.

For its premiere
at the New York Theater Workshop in downtown Manhattan,
Laramie: 10 Years Later was read by the actors
who originally performed The Laramie Project in
2000 (including coauthors Greg Pierotti, Andy Paris,
and Stephen Belber) and have not been onstage together
since. Each of the eight performers onstage for this
one-night-only preview of the material read multiple
roles, once again inhabiting the personas of actual Laramie
residents as they discussed the impact of the Shepard
murder. Ten years on, some things have changed for the
better, and certain attitudes seem frozen in time.

The fence that
young Matthew was tortured on is gone, as is the Fireside
bar where he had the misfortune to encounter two
cold-blooded killers. There has been some progress:
The University of Wyoming now hosts an annual Shepard
Symposium on social justice, and the university also
dedicated a memorial bench in Matthew’s honor this
fall. And yet, Wyoming still has no hate-crimes
legislation.

The cast in performance

Additionally,
according to 10 Years Later, there is lingering
anger over a tawdry 20/20 segment that depicted
the crime as a drug deal gone awry. The residents of
this rural American town have been forced by tragedy to
examine their values and their beliefs. “Shame
is a funny thing," says Reggie Fluty, the policewoman
who first arrived to the brutal crime
scene. “It makes you look real hard at
yourself." Thankfully, the new material is not without
some needed levity. Explains Jedadiah Schultz,
“The entire shape of Laramie has changed; we have a
Chili’s now!”

In its current,
unfinished state, the epilogue runs approximately 35
minutes. It’s undecided whether the new material will
be added to Project’s current final act,
or be performed as a separate coda to the script. The
final product is slated to be completed and performed in
2009. It is sure to be a powerful examination of the lasting
repercussions of that horrible night in windy, rural
Wyoming. In the words of Officer Fluty, who cut
the wire that had bound Matthew to the fence,
“In life the man was so small, but his legacy was
huge.”