The Laramie Project
By Moises Kaufman
Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney
Until April 15
REVIEW BY MARK STOYICH
In 1998, near the town of Laramie in the US state of Wyoming, two young men tortured a young gay man, Matt Shepard, and left him for dead. The men were tried and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Each culture deals differently with a shameful crime. In Japan, a relative or two of the murderers would quietly commit suicide and nothing much more would be said. In Britain, the media would be full of commentary, attributing the viciousness of modern British society either to having had the Empire or to having lost it. In Australia, the governor-general would cry at the funeral and that would be that.
In the United States, a theatre company in New York (in this case the Tectonic Theatre Project) would descend on the small town, interview everyone associated with the victim and the murderers, go back to New York and recreate those characters on stage before an admiring, teary audience, note angrily that "hate-crime" legislation had not been passed, call for greater tolerance and find some redeeming feature amid the tragedy.
In this case, the silver lining is the way the townspeople were brought together in their sorrow, in a wave of solidarity that rippled out throughout the land, with marches of solidarity in memory of young Matt Shepard in every major city ...
Sadly, most gay men would not be surprised by this crime, and it's hard to see it as meaningful of anything much beyond itself. Matt Shepard was by all accounts a nice guy, if naive. His killers were local white trash, drunk and at a loose end. The town of Laramie, according to this "project", is populated, with the exception of some fundamentalist preachers, by fairly decent, sensible types who were not anti-gay and wanted to see the murderers executed.
Matt's father reads a statement calling for forgiveness, so the murderers' lives are saved; this is a poignant moment. But there is never any doubt who did the crime. They were captured at once, so there is no suspense.
In the Australian staging, we are seeing actors recreate the US actors recreating various south-western types, with varying success at the accent. There is therefore an added measure of distance.
What can be said of this worthy, unengaging exercise, with its waste of an excellent cast (as this is a democratic "project", there's no point naming any particular actor) beyond noting that Wyoming is the home state of vice-president Dick Cheney?