The Laramie Project: A play about hate crime and hope

Posted on: Staff Writer

From edition: March 24 2017 Strathmore Times

Laureen F. Guenther
Times Contributor

 

Rosebud School of the Arts will present The Laramie Project, April 1-22. Ten second-year students and three graduates are performing, with Paul F. Muir directing.
“In 1998, in Laramie, Wyoming, a young man was kidnapped, tied to a fence outside of town … brutally beaten and left to die,” Muir said. “It came out that the main reason why this young fellow was targeted was because he was gay.”
A month after Matthew Shepard was murdered, Moises Kaufman and other members of Tectonic Theater Project went to Laramie to interview residents about the incident. They used text from interviews, phone conversations, legal transcripts and their own journal entries to write The Laramie Project.
According to Muir, although that event was nearly 20 years ago, the play is equally pertinent now.
“Sometimes the object of the hatred changes, but hatred is just as prevalent now as it always was. So to do a story about a real life hate crime is utterly relevant today,” said Muir.
“Rosebud School of the Arts is not taking a stand about the rightness or wrongness of homosexuality,” added Muir, who is also the school’s education director. “But we are saying something about hatred. This is a story that speaks quite profoundly about the evils and detriment of hatred.”
Muir said it’s normal and it’s human to be suspicious and maybe even fearful of anything that is “‘other,’ anything that is different from us, anything that challenges our point of view.
“We are asked as [Christian] believers, but also we are just asked as global citizens, to resist that temptation to fall into the pit of being fearful and suspicious of the ‘other.’”
The Laramie Project will be performed on the BMO Studio Stage, April 1-22 at 4:30 p.m. The cast and crew will host a talk-back after each performance.
“If [people] come and see this show, they’re not coming to see a funeral. They’re not coming to see a dirge,” Muir said. “Yes, the subject matter is disturbing. But it is abundantly hopeful.”