The brutality of the murder focused international attention on homophobia, and eventually led to the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. This thought occurred to me last winter when my son, who was a freshman in high school, brought home the script for The Laramie Project, a documentary play developed in 1998 after the murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. Oral historians don’t always think of the theater as an outlet for their work. In this post, writer, historian, and activist Holly Werner-Thomas explores “verbatim theater” as a medium for disseminating oral histories, reflecting on her son’s recent high school’s performance of The Laramie Project. Tickets may be purchased at the door or online through the link above.The Laramie Project, Documentary Theater & Oral History Performance Ticket prices are $13 for adults and $11 for children, students, and seniors. Performances are Friday, October 19 at 7:00 p.m. The Community Chest of New Britain and Berlin is sponsor of the production.
The Laramie Project will be performed at Raymond Hill School at the Klingberg Center, located at 370 Linwood Street Street in New Britain. It’s a story that needs to be told now more than ever. If you’ve never seen this play before, or if you want to see it told by young actors, we invite you especially to come to our production.Īt its heart, The Laramie Project is about whether we let fear, hatred, and anger define us as a community. It’s twenty years this month that Matthew Shepard was murdered. It’s not only appropriate for a youth theater to tell this story it adds meaning and depth and hope to the story. They’ve shown understanding and empathy far beyond their years, and their talents on stage are wonderfully showcased in this piece as well. We’ve watched them in rehearsals and we know that they feel the responsibility of telling this story meaningfully and correctly. And the twelve actors in NBYT’s production are nearly that age themselves. The young men who murdered Matthew were the same age.
The Laramie Project is the most serious drama we’ve done to date and the furthest from standard children’s theater, so it’s understandable that there have been some questions.īut, at age 21 Matthew Shepard was still very young when he was taken from a bar, driven to a remote field where he was severely beaten, tied to a fence, and left to die. This out-of-the-box producing got NBYT recognized as the state’s best children’s theater by Connecticut Magazine in 2017. We’ve enthusiastically done some of the expected fairy tales and happy musicals, but we’ve also done original musicals and plays, Shakespeare, dramas, and some obscure titles with local historical and educational connections. But if you’ve been following NBYT for a while, you have may noticed that we like to challenge that stereotype. Because of the subject matter and language, some people have questioned whether a children’s theater should be producing the play.Ĭhildren’s theater often gets a bad rap-it’s sometimes looked at as lightweight and frothy entertainment for ungrown minds. It does contain some extreme profanity and graphic descriptions of violence. The play is a collage of scenes and monologues that explore the aftermath of the attack and the reactions of the Laramie community. The play tells the story of Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student who was murdered in October 1998. The script was developed and written by the Tectonic Theater Project, a New York theater company whose members conducted interviews with more than 200 people of Laramie. No Boundaries Youth Theater will open its 2018-19 season this month with The Laramie Project by Moisés Kaufman and the Members of Tectonic Theater Project.
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