Solving the Laramie Problem, or, Projecting onto Laramie

Solving the Laramie Problem, or, Projecting onto Laramie Roger Freeman The Laramie Project is a dramatic/theatrical work based on the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, who was beaten and left to die by two young Laramie residents, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. The brutality of the attack, which was apparently motivated, at least in part, by virulent homophobia, led to national media coverage and sparked demonstrations and calls for the enactment of hate crime legislation around the country.1 Composed by Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theatre Project (TTP), The Laramie Project consists of a range of materials relating to the event, including interviews with Laramie residents conducted by TTP members, statements from TTP members, court transcripts, public announcements from the hospital where Shepard was treated, and other texts. Focusing on a speci¤c historical event, and composed in part of of¤cial public documents relating to that event, The Laramie Project follows in the tradition of documentary theatre. Yet the dominance of statements from individuals interviewed by TTP members has led to the work’s being classed with other forms, such as “theatre of testimony,” as developed by Emily Mann and others. Ryan Claycomb describes The Laramie Project, as well as Mann’s work and Anna Deavere Smith’s solo performances, as “staged oral history.”2 As Claycomb describes it, one of the distinguishing features of staged oral history is “the fragmentation of narrative and perspective,”3 a rejection of an overarching singular , third-person perspective on the events being treated in favor of multiple, ¤rst-person perspectives on those events. “Staged oral history radically fragments the unitary subject and creates montages of voice that indicate a polyphonic subjectivity.”4 Jay Baglia and Elissa Foster similarly write, “Although the telling of The Laramie Project is chronological . . . it violates expectations of conventional narrative through its use of multiple narrators.”5 The Laramie Project, in fact, deviates from traditional narrative—and dramatic—structure in several important ways. As Claycomb and Baglia and Foster note, the use of multiple narrators distinguishes The Laramie Project from works presented from the third-person objective perspective that Hayden White and others have described as a signal characteristic of narrative representation. White, citing Gérard Genette, observes that within narrative, “the events seem to tell themselves” rather than being presented from a particular subjective position, let alone several such positions.6 This refusal of a singular, authoritative position is reinforced by the particular content and arrangement of the various interviews, which, though all related to or motivated by the attack and its aftermath, range freely over a variety of topics. As a consequence the work deviates from traditional narrative structure in two other crucial, related ways: the absence of a speci¤c, de¤nitive central subject (in narrative terms) and the absence of de¤nitive closure. These deviations from narrative structure give rise to what has been seen by some as a problem: the failure to deliver an unambiguous meaning or moral lesson . This essay examines how this “problem” has been perceived and how particular moral perspectives have been projected onto the text to redress it. That The Laramie Project lacks a de¤nitive central subject is illustrated by attempts to describe just what the work is about. Amy Tigner, in her article “The Laramie Project: Western Pastoral,” identi¤es in the text features common to the pastoral poem and to the American western, which she presents as a modern version of the pastoral.7 In the pastoral, Tigner writes, “those from the epitome of civilization leave society and enter into a wilderness, a rural landscape, or a pasture, and then disguise themselves as local country folk” and tell stories about “societal problems ” (140). In the case of the pastoral elegy the story is often about a lost shepherd. In the western “the cultured outsider . . . comes to the West to ®ee the burden of industrialization and slowly begins to take on the costume and the customs of the ‘untamed’ Westerner” (140). Clearly, both of these descriptions apply to The Laramie Project, which deals not only with the murder of Matthew Shepard but...