Conversations in the Holler

The Laramie Project was the first show I stage managed in high school. The show depicts the aftermath of the murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998. New York’s Tectonic Theater Project traveled to Laramie, Wyoming. Through the process of writing a play they wanted to tell a more complicated, human story about what happened in Laramie than the sensationalized media narrative. I was most drawn to The Laramie Project’s representation of people through their own words and its ability to consciously embrace the messiness of telling a story. Rather than end with a line related to Matthew or his murder, the play closes with:

And I will speak with you, I will trust that if you write a play of this, that you will say it right. You need to do your best to say it correct.

Since my Junior Trip last year I have been grappling with how to tell it's story “correct.” I traveled with my group to Harlan County, Kentucky to understand a place funneled into the single narrative of a “hillbilly Trump voter.” When we returned home we had only a few weeks to figure out how to capture and display the deeper story we learned while actually there. A documentary play, like The Laramie Project, felt like an embodied and nuanced equivalent of the Junior Trip Night. So, I decided to try and write one about Harlan.

How do you say it “correct?” I constantly asked myself this question during Senior Project. I was aware and terrified of the fact that the people whose words I was quoting were living their lives just a few hundred miles away. Questions spiraled: Am I co-opting this story? Can I do another person’s voice justice? How do I fit into this piece without making it all about me? Is this ethical? What are the things I didn’t ask? Writing this piece required learning to embrace these “messy” questions. I knew I would have spend hours transcribing videos, then chop them up and scatter them around my room only to piece them back together in a new order. And, I did this. But I didn't expect to spend hours free-writing about my fears and hesitations--stumbling through those messy questions. I didn’t come remotely close to answering them. Most of them aren’t even directly addressed in my first draft. But acknowledging them allowed me to build and edit together a piece of theater from a series of videos and memories.

Included in this gallery you will find the entire script of my first draft as well as videos of selected scenes created from a reading with some incredibly generous friends. This piece is my attempt to figure out how to bring home the stories I heard in Harlan, while leaving space for all the unanswered questions.