The characters in the play - again, thanks to the stellar emotional range voiced by the cast members - can be “seen” audibly prying open the fabric of their small-town lives in search of a better way to understand. If anything, it became a subtle reinforcement of my impression that the aftermath of unfathomable cruelty often sharpens into attempts to understand one another that, while earnest, reflect cultural distortions.Īt the same time, the vocal performances of the cast members are filled with the poignant, sometimes panicked outcry of people unfamiliar with the glare of the public eye. With that said, it didn’t take away from the experience of the radio play. By and large, this reflects a misunderstanding that people east of the Rockies and Tetons tend to have about people in the Mountain West. I was left with the feeling of a town I knew artfully stitched together, in the aftermath of cruelty no one seemed to feel they could make any sense of.Ī needed caveat: I noticed right away that the heavily accented twang of most of the characters was inaccurate. They blended into the air seamlessly like tight knitting.

The voices of the characters could have been anyone. The killing was later classified as motivated by homophobia.īut I soon realized something else, and that’s what was surprisingly effective about approaching “The Laramie Project” as a radio play the way Cuff does here. His tears traced a trail through his blood. He was caked in blood to the extent that the person who found him thought he was a scarecrow. The Matthew Shepard story has been heard many times: Two roofing workers, Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, bludgeoned Shepard, tortured him, tied him to a fence post and left him to die. When hearing about the homicide of Matthew Shepard and its aftermath as portrayed in the script - which reproduces the interviews of citizens of Laramie, Wyo., as performed by cast members of the Tectonic Theatre Project - I’d heard one adjective repeatedly used to describe the murder: graphic.

I’d never seen “The Laramie Project” before. Due to COVID-19, Music, Theatre & Dance sophomore and director Chloe Cuff adapted the production from a minimalist stage play to a radio play with a limited window for listening. Even after I settled into a cozy chair this past weekend, Basement Arts’s production of Moisés Kaufman’s impeccable stage play “The Laramie Project” had me riding an unsettling wave of emotion from start to finish.

The laramie project play script