About the Show

Reminders for Audience

Please do not hang anything or touch items that are hung on the set. There are no food or drink allowed in the theater except water in a closed container. Please turn off cellular devices in the theater. There is also no recording during the production. Thank you. 

Director's Note

Matthew Shepard was killed in October 1998, before anyone in this ensemble was born. At the time, being gay, or exploring one’s gender identity, was far from broadly accepted. Twenty-eight years later, that moment is closer than we would like to believe. In one of our first rehearsals, an ensemble member put it simply: “I just realized this could have been me.”

This play is built from interviews conducted by members of New York’s Tectonic Theater Project. Its main character is not one person but the town of Laramie, Wyoming: people grappling, grieving, defending, and reckoning with colliding values as the world shines a spotlight on what was hidden in the corners of their comfortable community. It could be any town. It could be us.

The Laramie Project asks a lot of its actors. It requires deep work to understand how real people made sense of, and in some cases justified, a horrific crime. It also requires the willingness to portray them. The Macalester ensemble chooses to stand inside language and hatred that, for many of them, is not history but something they have heard, felt, or feared. That takes courage.

We do this work because theatre can do what nothing else can. It brings actors and audience together in a shared experience that holds a mirror up to our own lives. It draws our attention to the small moments of violence we might never notice unless they touch us directly. It deepens our understanding of what it means to be human, for all of us.

Hate crimes did not end in 1998, and violence does not live only in headlines. Awareness is essential, but it is not the goal. What we do with it is the measure of our integrity. We are all accountable.

Heidi Batz, Director

Dramaturg's Note

In Act I of The Laramie Project, Trish Steger asks, “How does any one person ever tell about another?” This question is at the center of the play, which follows the people of Laramie and the members of the Tectonic Theater Project as they all attempt to tell about each other. The play was created collaboratively by the members of the Tectonic Theater Project, and the words in it come from interviews, court records, news clips, and company members’ diary entries.

Even though its words are taken verbatim from real people, the play does not document the events that took place from an objective standpoint. It depicts the experience of its creators, what they saw and heard over the course of their work. It tells the story its makers were interested in telling.

Before they even conducted interviews, the company shaped the show through the questions that they chose to ask interviewees. In their book Moment Work, members of Tectonic write that “in retrospect, a sort of structure of a play was already visible in” the initial set of questions each member worked from. 

From the interviews, the company had to choose what to include in the show. After their first trip to Laramie, the company already had over seventy hours of recorded interviews. Writing the play meant deciding what to cut and what to incorporate. Members fought for their interviewees to be included as characters in the final piece. (Leigh Fondakowski has said she argued hard for Romaine Patterson’s importance in the show.)

The writers controlled the story not just through what they included, but also what order they placed it in. In order to keep the audience engaged, the writers organized the show by three “throughlines”: the town of Laramie, Matthew Shepard, and the company, and moved between throughlines to keep up tension and suspense. So although the play is taken directly from real life, it is also a narrative created by its writers. Not being a “true documentary” does not detract from The Laramie Project’s excellence—on the contrary, it’s what’s allowed the show to have such a lasting impact.

Moxie Strom, Dramaturg

Author's Note

The Laramie Project was written through a unique collaboration by Tectonic Theater Project. During the year-and-a-half development of the play, members of the company and I traveled to Laramie six times to conduct interviews with the people of the town. We transcribed and edited the interviews, then conducted several workshops in which the members of the company presented material and acted as dramaturgs in the creation of the play.

As the volume of material grew with each additional trip to Laramie, a small writers' group from within the company began to work closely with me to further organize and edit the material, conduct additional research in Laramie, and collaborate on the writing of the play. This group was led by Leigh Fondakowski as Head Writer, with Stephen Belber and Greg Pierotti as Associate Writers.

As we got closer to the play's first production in Denver, the actors, including Stephen Belber and Greg Pierotti, turned their focus to performance, while Leigh Fondakowski continued to work with me on drafts of the play, as did Stephen Wangh, who by then had joined us as an Associate Writer and "bench coach."

Moises Kaufman