The Laramie Project
Encyclopedia
The Laramie Project is a play by Moisés Kaufman
Moisés Kaufman
Moisés Kaufman is a playwright, director and founder of Tectonic Theater Project. He is the author of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, 33 Variations and is perhaps best known for writing The Laramie Project with other members of Tectonic Theater Project...

 and members of the Tectonic Theater Project
Tectonic Theater Project
With Moisés Kaufman at the helm, the Tectonic Theater Project explores the ways in which experimentation with form and structure can inform theme in contemporary drama....

 (specifically, Leigh Fondakowski, Stephen Belber
Stephen Belber
Stephen Belber is an American playwright , screenwriter and film director.-Early life:Belber was born in Washington, D.C.. He studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, and moved to New York at the age of 25. There he unwittingly moved in with a roommate with AIDS,...

, Greg Pierotti, Barbara Pitts, Stephen Wangh, Amanda Gronich, Sara Lambert, John McAdams, Maude Mitchell, Andy Paris
Andy Paris
-Early life:Paris is from Cincinnati, Ohio, where he graduated from The Seven Hills School in 1989.-Career:Paris and other members of the Tectonic Theater Project wrote The Laramie Project . Along with the other writers of the screenplay, he was nominated for an Emmy in 2002 for Outstanding Writing...

, and Kelli Simpkins) about the reaction to the 1998 murder of University of Wyoming
University of Wyoming
The University of Wyoming is a land-grant university located in Laramie, Wyoming, situated on Wyoming's high Laramie Plains, at an elevation of 7,200 feet , between the Laramie and Snowy Range mountains. It is known as UW to people close to the university...

 gay
Homosexuality
Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, or romantic attractions" primarily or exclusively to people of the same...

 student Matthew Shepard
Matthew Shepard
Matthew Wayne Shepard was a student at the University of Wyoming who was tortured and murdered near Laramie, Wyoming, in October 1998...

 in Laramie, Wyoming
Laramie, Wyoming
Laramie is a city in and the county seat of Albany County, Wyoming, United States. The population was 30,816 at the . Located on the Laramie River in southeastern Wyoming, the city is west of Cheyenne, at the junction of Interstate 80 and U.S. Route 287....

. The murder was denounced as a hate crime
Hate crime
In crime and law, hate crimes occur when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her perceived membership in a certain social group, usually defined by racial group, religion, sexual orientation, disability, class, ethnicity, nationality, age, gender, gender identity, social status or...

 motivated by homophobia
Homophobia
Homophobia is a term used to refer to a range of negative attitudes and feelings towards lesbian, gay and in some cases bisexual, transgender people and behavior, although these are usually covered under other terms such as biphobia and transphobia. Definitions refer to irrational fear, with the...

 and brought attention to the lack of hate crimes laws in various states, including Wyoming
Wyoming
Wyoming is a state in the mountain region of the Western United States. The western two thirds of the state is covered mostly with the mountain ranges and rangelands in the foothills of the Eastern Rocky Mountains, while the eastern third of the state is high elevation prairie known as the High...

.

The play draws on hundreds of interviews conducted by the theatre company with inhabitants of the town, company members' own journal entries and published news reports. It is divided into three acts, and eight actors portray more than sixty characters in a series of short scenes.

Performances

The Laramie Project premiered at The Ricketson Theatre by the Denver Center Theatre Company (Denver) (part of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts
Denver Center for the Performing Arts
The Denver Center for the Performing Arts ' is an organization in Denver, Colorado which provides a showcase for live theatre, a nurturing ground for new plays, a preferred stop on the Broadway touring circuit, a graduate-level training school for actors, acting classes for the community and rental...

) in February 2000 and was then performed in the Union Square
Union Square (New York City)
Union Square is a public square in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York.It is an important and historic intersection, located where Broadway and the former Bowery Road – now Fourth Avenue – came together in the early 19th century; its name celebrates neither the...

 Theater in New York City before a November 2002 performance in Laramie, Wyoming. The play has also been performed by high schools, colleges, and community theaters across the country, as well as professional playhouses in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.

Many of the performances in the United States have been picketed by representatives of Fred Phelps
Fred Phelps
Fred Waldron Phelps, Sr. is an American pastor heading the Westboro Baptist Church , an independent Baptist church based in Topeka, Kansas...

, who are portrayed in the play picketing Matthew Shepard's funeral as they did in real life. Though the play has been produced worldwide, it still generates controversy.

The holder of the royalties/rights to The Laramie Project is Dramatists Play Service, Inc.

Actors

Notable actors/actresses who have performed in The Laramie Project include:
Actor/Actress Dramatic Appearance
Van Hansis
Van Hansis
Van Hansis is an American actor. Hansis, who uses the name Van professionally, starred on the long-running CBS soap opera As the World Turns as Luke Snyder, the son of one of the show's signature supercouples, Holden and Lily Snyder ,...

As the World Turns
As the World Turns
As the World Turns is an American television soap opera that aired on CBS from April 2, 1956 to September 17, 2010. Irna Phillips created As the World Turns as a sister show to her other soap opera Guiding Light...

Mary Beth Peil
Mary Beth Peil
Mary Beth Peil is an American actress and singer.-Early life:Born in Davenport, Iowa in 1940, Peil trained as an opera singer at Northwestern University under Lotte Lehmann. There she became a member of the Gamma Phi Beta sorority...

The Good Wife
Jenna Ushkowitz Glee
Glee (TV series)
Glee is an American musical comedy-drama television series that airs on Fox in the United States, and on GlobalTV in Canada. It focuses on the high school glee club New Directions competing on the show choir competition circuit, while its members deal with relationships, sexuality and social issues...

Laura Linney
Laura Linney
Laura Leggett Linney is an American actress of film, television, and theatre. Linney has won three Emmy Awards, two Golden Globes, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. She has been nominated for three times for an Academy Award and once for a BAFTA Award...

Love Actually
Love Actually
Love Actually is a 2003 British romantic comedy film written and directed by Richard Curtis. The screenplay delves into different aspects of love as shown through ten separate stories involving a wide variety of individuals, many of whom are shown to be interlinked as their tales progress...

James Murtaugh
James Murtaugh
James Murtaugh is an American film and television actor. He is known for his rich and distinctive voice and was for years the television spokesperson for A1 Steak Sauce. Murtaugh is also a member of the Off-Broadway theater company TACT .-External links:...

Two Weeks
Two Weeks
Two Weeks is a 2007 comedy-drama film written and directed by Steve Stockman and starring Sally Field.-Plot:Four siblings return home to their mother's house, in North Carolina, for what they think are the last few days of her life...

Joshua Jackson
Joshua Jackson
Joshua Carter Jackson is a Canadian American actor. He has appeared in primetime television and in over 32 film roles. He is best known for playing Charlie Conway in The Mighty Ducks film series, Pacey Witter in the television series Dawson's Creek and Peter Bishop in the television series...

Fringe
Fringe (TV series)
Fringe is an American science fiction television series created by J. J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. The series follows a Federal Bureau of Investigation "Fringe Division" team based in Boston, Massachusetts under the supervision of Homeland Security...

Stephanie March
Stephanie March
Stephanie Caroline March is an American actress, best known for her current portrayal of Alexandra Cabot on the television series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.-Early life:...

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is an American police procedural television drama series set in New York City, where it is also primarily produced...

Peter Hermann
Peter Hermann
Peter Hermann is a German-American actor and writer. He is married to actress Mariska Hargitay, with whom he has three children.-Career:Hermann had brief stints on a variety of television shows that include the soap opera, Guiding Light , the ABC Family show, Beautiful People and the Lifetime...

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
Peter Fonda
Peter Fonda
Peter Henry Fonda is an American actor. He is the son of Henry Fonda, brother of Jane Fonda, and father of Bridget and Justin Fonda...

The Wild Angels
The Wild Angels
The Wild Angels is a 1966 Roger Corman film, made on location in Southern California. The Wild Angels was made three years before Easy Rider and was the first film to associate actor Peter Fonda with Harley-Davidson motorcycles and 1960s counterculture...

Camryn Manheim
Camryn Manheim
Camryn Manheim is an American actress known primarily for her roles as attorney Ellenor Frutt on ABC's The Practice and Delia Banks on CBS's Ghost Whisperer and as Elvis's mother, Gladys Presley in the 2005 mini-series Elvis....

The Practice
The Practice
The Practice is an American legal drama created by David E. Kelley centering on the partners and associates at a Boston law firm. Running for eight seasons from 1997 to 2004, the show won the Emmy in 1998 and 1999 for Best Drama Series, and spawned the successful and lighter spin-off series Boston...

Cyndi Lauper
Cyndi Lauper
Cynthia Ann Stephanie "Cyndi" Lauper is an American singer, songwriter, actress and LGBT rights activist. She achieved success in the mid-1980s with the release of the album She's So Unusual and became the first female singer to have four top-five singles released from one album...

Mad About You
Mad About You
Mad About You is an American sitcom that aired on NBC from September 23, 1992 to May 24, 1999. The show starred Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt as a newly married couple in New York City. Reiser played Paul Buchman, a documentary film maker. Hunt played Jamie Stemple Buchman, a public relations specialist...

Clea DuVall
Clea DuVall
Clea Helen D'Etienne DuVall is an American actress. She is best known for her role as Sofie on the television series Carnivàle as well as for films such as The Faculty , Girl, Interrupted and The Grudge .-Early life:DuVall was born in Los Angeles, California, the only child of Rosemary and...

21 Grams
21 Grams
21 Grams is a 2003 American drama film directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and written by Guillermo Arriaga. It stars Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Danny Huston, and Benicio del Toro....

Christina Ricci
Christina Ricci
Christina Ricci is an American actress. Ricci received initial recognition and praise as a child star for her performance as Wednesday Addams in The Addams Family and Addams Family Values , and her role as Kat Harvey in Casper...

The Addams Family
The Addams Family (film)
The Addams Family is a 1991 American black comedy film based on the characters from the cartoon of the same name created by cartoonist Charles Addams....

Judith Light
Judith Light
Judith Ellen Light is an American actress. Her television roles include Karen Wolek on the soap opera One Life to Live, Angela Bower on the sitcom Who's the Boss?, Claire Meade on ABC's TV series Ugly Betty and Judge Elizabeth "Liz" Donnelly on Law & Order Special Victims Unit.-Early life:Light...

Ugly Betty
Ugly Betty
Ugly Betty is an American comedy-drama television series developed by Silvio Horta, which premiered on ABC on September 28, 2006, and ended on April 14, 2010. The series revolves around the character Betty Suarez and is based on Fernando Gaitán's Colombian telenovela soap opera Yo soy Betty, la fea...

Terry Kinney
Terry Kinney
Terry Kinney is an American actor and theatre director, and is a founding member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, with Gary Sinise and Jeff Perry.-Early life:...

The Mentalist
The Mentalist
The Mentalist is an American police procedural television series which debuted on September 23, 2008, on CBS. The show was created by Bruno Heller, who is also the show's executive producer...

Frances Sternhagen
Frances Sternhagen
Frances Hussey Sternhagen is an American actress. Sternhagen has appeared on and off Broadway, in movies, and on TV since the 1950s.-Personal life:...

The Closer
The Closer
The Closer is an American crime drama, starring Kyra Sedgwick as Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson, a Georgia police detective who often closes her cases using sometimes-questionable methods...

Brian Kerwin
Brian Kerwin
Brian Kerwin is an American actor.Born in Chicago, Illinois, Kerwin won the Theatre World Award in 1988 for the off-Broadway play Emily. His Broadway theatre credits include the 1997 revival of The Little Foxes and the Elaine May comedy After the Night and the Music in 2005...

One Life to Live
One Life to Live
One Life to Live is an American soap opera which debuted on July 15, 1968 and has been broadcast on the ABC television network. Created by Agnes Nixon, the series was the first daytime drama to primarily feature racially and socioeconomically diverse characters and consistently emphasize social...

Robert Desiderio
Robert Desiderio
Robert Desiderio is an American actor best known for his television roles.Desiderio was born in New York City, New York, the son of Mary and Anthony J. Desiderio. He first came to prominence in soap opera, with parts in daytime dramas such as Search for Tomorrow, Ryan's Hope and One Life to Live...

One Life to Live
Chad Allen
Chad Allen
Chad Allen may refer to:*Chad Allen , actor known for his role on Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman*Chad Allen , baseball outfielder formerly with the Minnesota Twins...

Save Me
Save Me (2007 film)
Save Me is a 2007 film directed by Robert Cary about Mark , a drug-addicted homosexual man who is admitted into an ex-gay program run by Gayle and her husband Ted...

Stockard Channing
Stockard Channing
Stockard Channing is an American stage, film and television actress. She is known for her portrayal of First Lady Abbey Bartlet in the NBC television series The West Wing; for playing Betty Rizzo in the film Grease; and for her role as Ouisa Kittredge in the play Six Degrees of Separation and its...

The West Wing
Andrew Garfield
Andrew Garfield
Andrew Russell Garfield is an American-English actor who has appeared in radio, theatre, film, and television. His early roles include the films Lions for Lambs, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, and Boy A, which garnered him the 2007 BAFTA Television Award for "Best Actor".Garfield achieved...

The Social Network
The Social Network
The Social Network is a 2010 American drama film directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin. Adapted from Ben Mezrich's 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires, the film portrays the founding of social networking website Facebook and the resulting lawsuits...


Combating homophobia

The Laramie Project is often used as a method to teach about prejudice and tolerance in personal, social, and health education
Personal, Social and Health Education
Personal, social, health and economic education has in various forms been part of the national curriculum for schools in England since 2000. Some aspects, but not all, have been compulsory...

 and citizenship in schools, and it has also been used in the UK as a General Certificate of Secondary Education
General Certificate of Secondary Education
The General Certificate of Secondary Education is an academic qualification awarded in a specified subject, generally taken in a number of subjects by students aged 14–16 in secondary education in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and is equivalent to a Level 2 and Level 1 in Key Skills...

 text for English literature.

The play has also inspired grassroots efforts to combat homophobia. After seeing the play, New Jersey resident Dean Walton was inspired to donate more than 500 books and other media to the University of Wyoming
University of Wyoming
The University of Wyoming is a land-grant university located in Laramie, Wyoming, situated on Wyoming's high Laramie Plains, at an elevation of 7,200 feet , between the Laramie and Snowy Range mountains. It is known as UW to people close to the university...

's Rainbow Resource Center. Today, that campus office houses one of the largest LGBT
LGBT
LGBT is an initialism that collectively refers to "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender" people. In use since the 1990s, the term "LGBT" is an adaptation of the initialism "LGB", which itself started replacing the phrase "gay community" beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s, which many within the...

 libraries in the state of Wyoming
Wyoming
Wyoming is a state in the mountain region of the Western United States. The western two thirds of the state is covered mostly with the mountain ranges and rangelands in the foothills of the Eastern Rocky Mountains, while the eastern third of the state is high elevation prairie known as the High...

.

Film

As a result of the play's success, HBO commissioned a 2002 film of The Laramie Project
The Laramie Project (film)
The Laramie Project is a 2002 drama film written and directed by Moisés Kaufman. Based on the play of the same name, the film tells the story of the aftermath of the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming...

, also written and directed by Kaufman.

Return to Laramie

Ten years after Shepard's murder, members of the Tectonic Theater Project returned to Laramie to conduct follow-up interviews with residents featured in the play. Those interviews were turned into a companion piece, entitled The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later. The play debuted as a reading at nearly 150 theatres across the US and internationally on October 12, 2009 - the 11th anniversary of Matthew Shepard
Matthew Shepard
Matthew Wayne Shepard was a student at the University of Wyoming who was tortured and murdered near Laramie, Wyoming, in October 1998...

's death, most whose opening was linked by webcam
Webcam
A webcam is a video camera that feeds its images in real time to a computer or computer network, often via USB, ethernet, or Wi-Fi.Their most popular use is the establishment of video links, permitting computers to act as videophones or videoconference stations. This common use as a video camera...

 to New York City where Judy Shepard and the play's producers and writers gave an opening speech, followed by an address by Glenn Close
Glenn Close
Glenn Close is an American actress and singer of theatre and film, known for her roles as a femme fatale Glenn Close (born March 19, 1947) is an American actress and singer of theatre and film, known for her roles as a femme fatale Glenn Close (born March 19, 1947) is an American actress and...

.

See also

  • Violence against LGBT people
  • Matthew Shepard Foundation
    Matthew Shepard Foundation
    The Matthew Shepard Foundation is an LGBT rights group founded in December 1998 by Dennis and Judy Shepard in memory of their 21-year-old son, Matthew, who was murdered in Wyoming in October 1998.-The Matthew Shepard Point Scholarship:...

  • Cultural depictions of Matthew Shepard
    Cultural depictions of Matthew Shepard
    Cultural depictions of Matthew Shepard lists notable plays, films, novels, songs and other works created from the 1998 Matthew Shepard murder, investigation and resulting interest the case brought to hate crime issues. The best known is the stage play The Laramie Project, which was adapted into an...


External links

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