Last weekend, George C. Marshall High School’s Statesmen Theatre opened their 2023-24 season with The Laramie Project, which follows the community of Laramie, Wyoming after the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay 21-year-old University of Wyoming student. The production marks the 25-year anniversary of the hate crime that claimed Shepard’s life.
As a gay man who grew up in the 1990s, I was a bit skeptical that a high school theater production would be able to do justice to the impact Matthew Shepard’s murder had on the world. Shepard’s death took place just six months before the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado ushered in an era of active shooter drills and ever-increasing gun violence in schools, and years before any current students were born. Would the significance of this hate crime — one that shocked a nation, and world, into speaking about homosexuals as people first — be fully conveyed?
Bernie DeLeo, Marshall’s drama director, says he selected The Laramie Project as this year’s production in response to a surge in anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and rhetoric in the politics of today. After 15 years of teaching middle and high school theater with Fairfax County Public Schools, this is his final season, and in his farewell statement he says “I have watched with frustration and anger the erasure of LGBTQ+ books, plays and rights happening across the country over the past years, and I decided to take a stand.”
Despite record approval for LGBTQ+ rights, even within the Republican party, GOP politicians have flooded legislative dockets in 47 states with anti-LGBTQ+ bills that, largely, target schools — and in particular trans students. In 2021 a record 250 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were introduced across state legislatures in the United States, followed by 315 in 2022 and over 500 so far in 2023. “The script is an examination of a tragedy that is 25 years old as of last month, and it is still sadly relevant in the current political climate,” DeLeo notes.
Beginning just as Matthew Shepard is discovered, tied to a split-rail fence and left to die after being brutally robbed, beaten, and tortured, The Laramie Project delves into the lives of the real people affected by the events in Laramie, Wyoming. Under the direction of DeLeo and co-director Olivia Tate, the cast and crew of Marshall High’s Statesmen Theatre delivered a moving and thought-provoking glimpse into a community that, reeling from the tragedy, is overwhelmed by media attention — and questioning how such a crime could happen there.
“Live and let live,” a dictum repeated several times by characters describing a Laramie that, to them, could not possibly be home to a vicious hate crime, is systematically deconstructed as the truth comes out about the tragedy, and as Shepard eventually loses his six-day battle to survive. A refrain of “Laramie isn’t like that” is heard as community members process the tragedy aloud on stage — but, as they continue, it ultimately becomes clear that silence actively contributes to stigma, which leaves room for, if not encourages, hate capable of manifesting such a violent act. Eventually, the toxic nature of the taboo surrounding homosexuality results in the admission: “we’re exactly like that” — a message that transcends time and place, leaving a palpable feeling of somber self-reflection in the auditorium. Laramie could have been anywhere.
Perhaps the most powerful moment of the production takes place during Shepard’s funeral, when members of the community created a wall of “angel wings” to block Westboro Baptist Church picketers and their signs.
Over the course of the production, the commitment and talent of the student actors — each of whom transitioned between multiple roles throughout the production — resulted in a thought-provoking experience that moved the audience through feelings of sorrow, self-reflection, compassion, forgiveness, and ultimately hope. By bringing this production to stage, the Statesmen Theatre not only showed their talent for storytelling, but delivered to the community a timely message about the need to actively embrace diversity and compassion in the face of hate.
