THE LARAMIE PROJECT
Union Square Theatre, 100 E. 17th St., between Park Avenue South and Irving Place, (212) 239-6200.IT builds slowly, starting with a bunch of New York actors who descend upon the Wyoming town of Laramie to compile a testament to the murder of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man beaten and left tied to a fence, who later died in a hospital.
It creates, on a bare, brick-walled stage, the whole surprising town of Laramie and leaves us sadder, wiser and tentatively more hopeful because of the quality folk we’ve met.
It’s an amazing piece of theater, that uses delicacy, broadness and horror to shape a world.
It’s the work of author-director Moises Kaufman, founder of the Tectonic Theater Project, which is known for “Gross Indecency,” the teasing, angry Oscar Wilde piece.
He takes a huge step forward in “Laramie Project,” which summons forth with skill and care a world that could have been caricatured.
Several of the eight actors in the play accompanied Kaufman to Laramie and interviewed, in six visits, those whose lives had intersected the Shepard’s murder in October 1998.
With the aid of such devices as hats and uniforms, we meet a range of locals, including Reggie Fluty, a female sheriff (a superb Mercedes Herrero); her mother, Marge, (a spicy Amanda Gronich), and the University of Wyoming’s first openly lesbian faculty member (a terrific Barbara Pitts).
There’s a straight student who defies his parents by acting in “Angels in America” (a passionate Andy Paris). There are various religious leaders, of which the most sympathetic is a Catholic (an intense Greg Pierotti).
We also hear from the bicyclist who found Matthew, and the cop and doctor who tried to save him.
There is, more privately, the female cop who may have been exposed to HIV in getting Matthew down from the fence because of cheap gloves; her later all-clear is a joyous moment.
Peter Golub’s music works cinematographically to heighten (and sometimes to ironize) the action – it’s pop for the killers, sad for Matthew, bouncy for the reckless media who descend upon the town.
While there’s too much time spent on verdicts and pleas and agendas for hate-crime legislation (many will doubtless disagree) this play successfully evokes, out of the detailed life and death of Shepard, a town filled with people – some closed-hearted but most generous and funny and open to life.
Out of the Shepard tragedy is wrenched art, the shaped voices of the actors and writers from New York and of the residents of Laramie.
