The Laramie Project: Western Pastoral

The Laramie Project: Western PastoralI AMY L. TIG NER I. THE MURDER AND THE TOW N Tasha Dunn Tampa, FL 2/14/98 Jacqueline Julita Anderson Portland, OR 2/24/98 Brian Wilmes San Francisco, CA 3/13/98 Regina Haskins New York, NY 4/4/98 Barry L. Winchell Ft. Campbell, TN 7/5/98 Robert Howard Gibson EI Cajon, CA 7/31/98 Fitzroy "Jamaica" Green New York, NY 8/18/98 Monique (Rufus P.) Thomas Dorchester, MA 9/11/98 Chanel Chandler Clovis, CA 9/20/98 Matthew Shepard Laramie, WY 10/12/98 Rita Hester Boston, MA 11/28/98 Donald Fuller Austin, TX 119199 Steve Dwayne Garcia Houston, TX 2/6/99 Billy Joe Turner Cordele, GA 3/30/99 Kareem Washington Passaic, NJ 8/29/99 Tacy Raina Ranta Baltimore, MD 11/22/99 J.R Warren Gran! Town, WV 7/4/00' All of the people above were murdered - murdered because of Iheir sexual orientation. Yet probably only one name is widely familiar: Matthew Shepard, the young, gay. university student who was tied to a fence, beaten, pistolwhipped , and left to die in the cold. Why did Shepard, in particular, become Ihe focus of enonnous mainstream media and popular attention, including that of the White House? Doubtless, the violence and context of the crime are partly the cause; yet the other viciims suffered equally horrendous deaths. Matthew's race, class, and age may have had much to do with the public interest in his Modern Drama, 45'1 (Spring 2002) The Laramie Project 139 story: he was white, attractive, middle-class - he could have been the collegeaged son of any stereotypical middle-class American family.' However, the other primary factor involved has to do not so much with Matthew himself as with the location of the crime - the West. . Laramie, Wyoming: the name has a mythic quality. It is a town out of a Western, complete with outlaws and sheriffs; but Laramie is also a sleepy small town where ordinary people raise their children. For many Americans, Wyoming is a place more imagined than experienced. They cannot say exactly where it is on the map but neveetheless have a stereotypical idea of Wyoming, based on Western movies and paperbacks. Most people who have been to the state either have passed through it on Interstate 80 or have gone to Jackson Hole or Yellowstone on a family vacation. Even these experiences often substantiate the myth rather than dispel it. Jackson dresses itself up to look like something out of the OK. Corral; Cheyenne encourages its citizens to wear cowboy outfits while the tourists are in town for Cheyenne Frontier Days. Laramie beckons the weary 1-80 tourist to visit the nineteenth-century theme park, the Wyoming Territorial Prison, where the capers of famous outlaws are re-enacted. Those who actually go beyond the prison and enter the town encounter the other image of Laramie: a quiet university town where people know their neighbors and say hello to each other on the sidewalk. Theatre director Moises Kaufman and his New York-based company Tectonic Theatre Project (TIP) were drawn to Laramie soon after the crime against Shepard was committed. When the company arrived in the town, they had only a vague idea what they were going to write and eventually produce. After some 200 interviews with various townspeople and more than six separate trips to Laramie, TIP created a play taken from the actual words of the interviewees.' The work chronicles the story of Matthew Shepard's death but significantly does not stage it, does not represent Shepard as a character. TIP did not call it The Matthew Shepard Story, but rather The Laramie Project'; it is after all really the story of the small town of Laramie and what happened there. This homophobic crime in Laramie fascinated the media, the American public, and, I would argue, the TIP company precisely because ofthe landscape in which the crime occurred; the location both enthralled and horrified. The country as a whole, and Laramie in particular, was appalled and puzzled by how the crime could happen in such a safe, quiet, small town and how the perpetrators...