“I felt a great deal of compassion for both of them.”
Those words, spoken at the close of Act 1 of The Laramie Project, get to the heart of what the play is about. Compassion — and the empathy that compassion requires — infuses every moment in Jared O’Roark’s masterfully directed, deeply affecting production, now on view at The Space at 2106.
Playwright Moisés Kauffman and fellow members of the Tectonic Theater Project traveled to Laramie, Wyoming in 1998 to interview residents five weeks after gay college student Matthew Shepard was savagely beaten, tied to a fence and left to die. The “docu-play” they created and first staged in 2000 is composed of material from those interviews and has since been seen all over the world and adapted into a film for HBO.
At The Space, 10 versatile actors play close to 80 roles, and as is characteristic of productions here, the action is literally up close and personal; above, behind, beside and in front of audience members. I have seen powerful productions of Laramie in traditional proscenium theaters, but O’Roark’s approach brings viewers viscerally into the lives of Laramie’s people in the year after Shepard’s death.
At times, the audience is Laramie. When cast members playing TV news reporters spread through the space shouting headlines, we feel the sense of invasion Laramie must have felt. When a judge asks whether prospective jurors would consider the death penalty for one of Shepard’s attackers, the jurors seated among the crowd shout “Yes!” A young Muslim woman, reacting to attempts by residents to distance themselves from the crime by saying Laramie “isn’t that kind of town,” protests, “We are like this. We are like this.” By implication, her “we” includes everyone in the room — because the play is asking the audience to question, not just how hatred led to murder in the Wyoming town, but how such crimes can happen in any town.
The Laramie Project, unhappily, is not dated. This production is one of 49 across the country that is being dedicated to the 49 victims of the Orlando Pulse massacre.
The cast is notably diverse — white, African-American and Latino actors play what one can assume were majority white Wyomians — amplifying the universality of the play’s message. Even more important, O’Roark seems to have emphasized swiftness and simplicity in both the costuming and the acting. With just a stoop in the shoulders or the change of a hat, actors quickly create new characters. The lighting by Thaddeus Engel artfully carves out playing space while keeping the audience and actors who are not the current focus effectively in the shadows.
Everyone in the cast gets a chance to shine. With the subtlest of shifts in posture and accent, Erin Foster moves from brittle university professor to warm-hearted waitress, to street kid, to sheriff’s deputy Reggie Fluty, the first responder at the scene of Shepard’s attack; her description of his destroyed face is quietly devastating. Emily Belvo is hilarious as Reggie’s outspoken, protective mother, and equally as believable as a severe, buttoned-up Mormon spiritual advisor.
David Sweat gets big laughs as a “live and let-live” cab driver and also plays two other characters that could not be more different from each other with indelible conviction: the loudmouth homophobe Rev. Fred Phelps (“God’s hatred is pure!”) and the heartbroken father of Matthew Shepard. I could not see Sweat’s face when he was delivering Dennis Shepard’s extraordinary remarks about the death penalty at the trial of his son’s killer, Aaron McKinney, but the impact was no less powerful — especially since what I could see was the sullen and ultimately scared face of McKinney, played with chilling matter-of-factness by Zach Coppola.
Coppola’s performance is all the more impressive because up to this point we've mostly seen him play, with appealing naturalness, several much nicer guys, including the gay Laramie resident who asks a crucial question about the town's ostensible “tolerance" of LGBT people; "What it boils down to: if I don't tell you I'm a fag, you won't beat the crap out of me; I mean, what's so great about that?"
DQ Monte finds the decency and the flaws in authority figures trying to do the right thing (a bar owner, a legislator, a hospital CEO) but does not always succeed. Jaime Cortes is spot on as the sexy-and-he-knows-it, friend-to-all bartender whose testimony is key in the case against McKinney and his partner in crime (also played by Cortes), the withdrawn Russell Henderson. India Davison is forceful and confident as a college theater department chair and as Zunbaida, the Muslim woman who knows Laramie better than Laramie knows itself. Kidany Camilo is touching as the high school acting student who gradually comes to an awakening about his own prejudices after he does a scene from Angels in America.
Chelsea Hooker brings a great presence to key roles of Tectonic company member Leigh Fondakowski and Romaine Patterson, leader of the famous Angel Wings protest against Fred Phelps; Patterson later became a well-known activist and Sirius XM radio personality, and Hooker gets her big-voice effect just right. Pablo Alameda is very moving as a Catholic priest who is adamant that the interviewers find the truth about Laramie and "say it right," and as the emergency room doctor who found himself treating both Shepard and McKinney (in the 18 hours after his attack on Shepard, McKinney got wounded in a fight). It is this doctor who, with wondrous candor, says he felt “compassion for both of them” — two boys, both of their lives over.
At the end of the play, O’Roark adds a coda which at first I thought to be a religious statement, because it begins with Alameda, as the priest, taking off his black choir stole and laying it on the stage center platform. But then, one by one, each of the actors comes to the platform and lays down one of the costume pieces they had used — a cap, a scarf, a jacket — and the moment becomes, if not religious, a kind of benediction — a blessing by the actors on the people they have embodied.
They honor them in this moment — just as this production honors The Laramie Project, the lives lost to hatred in Laramie and Orlando, and the artists and activists working toward a day when the losses will stop.
NOTE: The Laramie Project Project — the initiative to dedicate productions of Laramie to the Orlando victims — was initiated by high school students in New Jersey, who contacted The Space about participating. The Tampa production is dedicated to the memory of Eddie Jamaldroy Justice and Jean Carlos Mendez Perez, two of those lost.
This article appears in May 4-11, 2017.