by ANDREA ZANIN

In October 1998, 21-year-old Matthew Shepard was beaten by two young men, tied to a fence and left to die near Laramie, Wyoming. In the weeks that followed, the whole world heard about the outrage, taken up by gay activists as an incident of homophobic hatred. What the whole world might not have known at the time is that a mere four weeks after it happened, Moisés Kaufman and 10 members of the New York City-based Tectonic Theater Project made the first of six trips to Laramie to interview dozens of people who were involved in the case, the community and in Shepard’s life.

The result of their work is an exceptionally moving play, with a script composed of words spoken by townspeople and TTP members in over 200 interviews. In 2000, Time magazine named The Laramie Project one of the year’s 10 best plays, and it has since been performed by various groups all over the continent and been made into an HBO film. This week it’s being staged in Montreal by Players Theatre.

“The first time I came across the script online, I read it and just cried,” recalls Liz Singh, president of Players Theatre and director-cum-production manager of the play. “I had wanted to direct for a long time, but I wanted my first play to be the right one. I knew this had to be it.”

The culmination of Singh’s efforts is a true ensemble piece with a cast of eight, who together play over 60 characters—from homophobic preacher Fred Phelps to the police officer who held Shepard when he was taken down from the fence. With minimal costume signifiers, sometimes it can be a bit hard to follow who’s who, but the overall effect is powerful nonetheless. The cast, made up mostly of McGill University theatre students, deliver skilled performances, and the monologues are overlapped and inter-cut in ways that keep things moving briskly.

“We did this true to the tradition of Brechtian theatre,” Singh says of the political performance philosophy where actors represent opposing sides of an argument. “So we made it very evident that actors are exactly that, with costume changes on stage, among other things.” The simple set design features several televisions, which at times broadcast news coverage of the events surrounding Shepard’s death.

The group decided to donate a dollar from every ticket, plus all profits, to AIDS Community Care Montreal (ACCM). “Part of the message of The Laramie Project is that words and opinions are important, but so are concrete actions,” Singh explains.

Make sure you bring tissues to this one—while there are welcome moments of levity, it’s a wrenching story, and all the more so for its truth. “The Laramie Project is about queer issues, but more broadly, it’s about our tendency to believe we’re not part of the problem,” says Singh. “Every time someone is victimized in our society, it hurts all of us, and we all bear the responsibility for change."

The Laramie Project is at Players Theatre (3480 Mctavish, Third Floor) Dec. 1–3 and 9–10, at 8 p.m., with 2 p.m. matinées on dec. 3 and 10, 398-6813, $8

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