TECTONIC THEATER PROJECT

Tectonic Theater Project is an award-winning company whose plays have been performed around the world. The company is dedicated to developing innovative works that explore theatrical language and form, fostering an artistic dialogue with audiences on the social, political, and human issues that affect us all. In service to this goal, Tectonic supports readings, workshops, and full theatrical productions, as well as training for students around the country in our play-making techniques.

Tectonic Theater Project was founded in 1991 by Moisés Kaufman and Jeffrey LaHoste. Tectonic refers to the art and science of structure and was chosen to emphasize the company’s interest in construction — how things are made, and how they might be made differently.

Its groundbreaking plays, The Laramie Project, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, and I Am My Own Wife, have sparked national discourse about their subjects and have inspired artists and audiences worldwide.

In the early years of Tectonic, the company staged works by writers who were testing the boundaries of the theatrical form: Samuel Beckett, Franz Xaver Kroetz, Sophie Treadwell, and Naomi Iizuka. In time, however, Kaufman realized that in order to be rigorous about exploring theatrical form, the company had to deal with the issue of text. Thus, he set about writing his first play, Gross Indecency, based on transcripts, biographies, letters, and other found materials about the life and work of Oscar Wilde.

Tectonic followed Gross Indecency with another bold experiment in form: The Laramie Project. One month after the murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard, Kaufman and 10 company members traveled to Laramie, Wyoming, to interview people in the town torn apart by the crime. The play forged from these interviews was created collaboratively by the members of the company over a long workshop process in which participants were encouraged to operate outside their area of specialization. Thus, actors and designers became writers and dramaturges, directors became designers and actors, and the company uncovered a new way of creating a theatrical event.

Tectonic continues to employ these techniques in creating some of the most unique and innovative works on the American stage.

Moisés Kaufman

Moisés Kaufman is a Tony- and Emmy-nominated director and award-winning playwright.

Most recently, Mr. Kaufman directed the Pulitzer and Tony Award winning I Am My Own Wife on Broadway (Obie award for direction, Tony, Outer Critics, Lucille Lortell, Drama Desk Awards nomination)

Mr. Kaufman’s plays Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Laramie Project have been among the most performed plays in America over the last decade.

The Laramie Project opened at The Denver Theater Center in March 2000 and moved to New York on May 18th, 2000. TIME Magazine called The Laramie Project “one of the 10 best plays of 2000″ and it was nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience. In November 2000, Mr. Kaufman took his company to Laramie, Wyoming to perform the play there. In 2006, The Laramie Project remains one of the most performed plays in America today.

Mr. Kaufman also directed the film adaptation of the The Laramie Project which aired on HBO. The film’s cast included Peter Fonda, Laura Linney, Christina Ricci and Steve Buscemi among others. It was the opening night selection at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival and won a Special Mention for Best First Film at the Berlin Film Festival. Mr. Kaufman received two Emmy Award nominations, for Best Director and Best Writer.

Gross Indecency

ran for over 600 performances in New York. He also directed it in Los Angeles (Mark Taper Forum), San Francisco (Theater on the Square), Toronto (Canadian Stage) and London’s West End (Gielgud Theatre). The play has been produced in over 40 cities in the U.S. and in dozens of cities abroad. For Gross Indecency, Mr. Kaufman won the Lucille Lortell Award for Best Play, the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Play, the Garland Award (Los Angeles) for Best Play, the Carbonell Award (Florida) for Best Play, the Bay Area Theater Critics Circle Award for Direction, the GLAAD Media Award for New York Theater, and the prestigious Joe A. Callaway Award for direction given by his peers in the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers.

Other directing credits include Macbeth (Shakespeare in the Park), Master Class with Rita Moreno (Berkeley Rep), This is How it Goes (Donmar Warehouse), Lady Windermere’s Fan (Williamstown), Women in Becket, Machinal, In the Winter of Cities and The Nest.

Mr. Kaufman is currently working on his adaptation of One Arm by Tennessee Williams, as well as further plans for 33 Variations – about Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. Mr. Kaufman is a Guggenheim Fellow.

Leigh Fondakowski

Leigh Fondakowski was the Head Writer of The Laramie Project and has been a member of Tectonic Theater Project since 1995. She is an Emmy nominated co-screenwriter for the adaptation of The Laramie Project for HBO. Her latest work, The People’s Temple, has been performed under her direction at Berkeley Repertory Theater, Perseverance Theater, and The Guthrie Theater. Another original play, I Think I Like Girls, played to sold-out audiences in San Francisco and at La Jolla Playhouse and was voted one of the top 10 plays of 2002 by The Advocate. Other directing credits include: I Think I Like Girls (La Jolla Playhouse and Encore Theater), The Laramie Project (Berkeley Repertory Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Perseverance Theater), La Voix Humaine by Jean Cocteau (Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh), Agatha by Marguerite Duras (French Alliance, New York City), Gwen John adapted from the novel by Jane Warrick (HERE, New York City), and readings and workshops of new plays by Jeff Baron, Stephen Belber, Colman Domingo, and Lisa Ramirez.

Andy Paris

As a founding member of Tectonic Theatre Project, Andy has appeared in three productions directed by Moises Kaufman (Machinal, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, and The Laramie Project) as well as several workshops and readings. He is proud to have been a part of the development of the company and marvels at its continued success. Other credits include: Innocents (dir. Rachel Dickstein), Mankynde: The Musical (dir. Louis Scheeder), Proof (Playmaker’s Rep), Wit (dir. Josephine Abady), Twelfth Night (dir. John Rando), The Quiet Room (dir. Lucie Tiberghien), Red Noses (dir. Melissa Kievman), Phaedre (dir. Matthew Maguire), Indelible Flesh (dir. Randy Rollison), Quick, Bright Things (by Jesse McKinley), Cymbeline (dir. Mr. Scheeder), The Merchant of Venice, Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, ‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore, and Love’s Labour’s Lost. Andy has lent his voice to several books for Recorded Books Productions and starred in Smile, a Radio Play. He is a graduate of NYU.

Greg Pierotti

Greg Pierotti has spent the last three years collaborating with Leigh Fondakowski on The People’s Temple both as head writer and as an actor. He appeared in the world premier of The People’s Temple at Berkeley Rep in the roles of Dick Tropp, Verne Gosney, and others. He also appeared at Berkeley Rep. in The Laramie Project, in the roles of Rulon Stacey, Father Roger and others. An associate writer on that project, he and his collaborators, who were lead by Moisés Kaufman, were nominated for a NY Drama Desk Award and for an Emmy for the Teleplay. He also performed the play under Kaufman’s direction at The Union Square Theatre in NY, The Denver Center, LaJolla Playhouse. Other performances include Present Laughter at Hartford Stage and George Bernard Shaw in The World Premier of Gross Indecency. Film and TV: The Laramie Project and Law and Order. Greg is currently the Goldberg scholar at Empire State College at SUNY University. ______________________

– All biographical / informational material from www.tectonictheaterproject.org

LONG DISTANCE:

Why Tectonic Theater Project, The Laramie Project, and The Laramie Project Epilogue are Important
by Lauren Neal

My personal best long jump, recorded during my freshman year of high school, was seventeen feet, six inches; enough to win a bid to the state championship. I loved running and jumping: moving because I was moving me.

I eventually eschewed track for theatre; I was tired of skittering my then-skinny twig legs around the world just to land in the same spot. I wanted to go somewhere, but I was precocious and self-important and ignorant enough to figure I’d seen everything I would ever need to see. I wanted to get deep. I decided that, in the theatre, I could dig.

I shoveled my way through Shakespeare and Beckett; even Sondheim became a muddy little underground friend. I became an expert at speaking in other people’s voices, at running in other people’s costume-shop shoes. I studied character intention, historicization, contextualization. I wouldn’t know what Lauren would say if she opened her mouth, what excuse (other than lactic acid) she’d give for jogging the last one hundred meters of a sprint, what distraction she’d cite for slipping out of first place. I moved because someone else was moving me.

Then, someone killed Matthew Shepard because he was gay, but it was okay because I could still run away in some other people’s shoes; for years, he was not enough to move me in the right direction. If I had been Matthew, I would have escaped in someone else’s heterosexual shoes. I didn’t speak honestly, my mouth wouldn’t dare mouth true words; but at least I had shoes, at least I was alive, I thought; at least I could still move.

I became complacent. I began to walk without fear of the consequences of bridging minute cement canyons; I stopped looking down. I walked straight, I talked straight, I was straight: there was no reason to walk with my head down. The ground I took for granted; the ground was, granted, immobile.

My footing inevitably fell from under me. I fell in love with the wrong person, the wrong sex. I fell to the ground, through the ground, to the other side, the wrong end up. I slipped into a world void of gravity’s righting, normative function. The earth quaked and destroyed all faith I had in my ability to run from anything, away.

Simultaneously, Moisés Kaufman halted his theatre company’s performances of other playwrights’ work in favor of writing the company’s own, to deal with the issue of text, to deal with the matter of words. His theatre company is Tectonic; tectonic, notes the group’s website, refers “to the art and science of structure… how things are made, and how they might be made differently.” Tectonic Theater Company wrote The Laramie Project to document the life of a small Wyoming town in the light of an unforgivable death, and upon witnessing it in performance, I — for all my self-hating, stubborn denial — was remade.

Tectonic’s epochal work epitomizes the potentially exponential reach of one solitary, potent story; it will reach you, if you let it, if you understand that one event, like the event of Matthew’s murder, is much more than a methodical sequence of happenings. The event of his cold-blooded killing frosted the surface of the earth with Matthew’s face. His face is the face of The Laramie Project and its interviewees, from 1998 through 2009; the face of each student who lived with the play’s words for weeks of rehearsals; the face of every audience member — fifty million and counting — who has experienced the invitation to enter into dialogue with the play; the face of every violent act that remains faceless because the face wasn’t pretty enough to grace the nightly news.

When I see Matthew’s face, I see the face of every single one of my friends: they are queer, they are people of color, they are broke(n)… The list of differences for which others can and have justified raising violence, hatred, and eyebrows in opposition to their humanity scrolls down toward infinity; the list scorched with what I imagine to be hellishly reductive headlines. When Matthew Shepard crosses my mind I consider writer Greg Pierotti’s words during my recent interview with members of Tectonic Theater Project. I contemplate the “peak emotional experience” that was Matthew’s murder. I wonder why Matthew’s sympathizers “can’t have the peak experience continuously,” because I do. I wonder where they get the “discipline [and] structure to help support and leverage the more emotional experience,” because it is something I lack.

When I think of Matthew, the butterflies in my stomach make a date with the cat captor of my tongue, because — from my perch in the middle of the debate regarding equality — I swear I feel our terrestrial landscape grumble defiantly at the God Of How Things Ought To Be. I am moved. I move.

I find the strength to break an evil spell — the warmth and resolve to force blood into my fingertips and nausea from my esophagus — when I consider the reach of Matthew’s face: its splintered shards etching bloody question marks into the numb flesh of hypothermic hands. I start running when I think of how many times I will be willing to break my back, to step over and suture every crack on this planet until I am certain that this — Matthew’s shattered face; tilted, unhinged Earth scaling the hoops of Saturn’s wedded rings; historically indifferent shadows obscuring the visibility of victims not ‘worthy’ of this Son’s light — this will never happen again.

Moisés Kaufman wanted to know if theatre can participate in (inter)national dialogue. Yes, it can. And thanks to Matthew Shepard, and to the theatre, and to an earthquake, so can I: I am an athletic, actor’s nightmarish little asshole of a biracial gay girl. I’ve finally got my words; the race is on.

Matthew’s Place Interviews members of the TECTONIC THEATER PROJECT and authors of The Laramie Project and The Laramie Project Epilogue
August 11, 2009

MK: Moisés Kaufman
LF: Leigh Fondakowski
GP: Greg Pierotti
AP: Andy Paris

MP: Matthew Shepard Foundation has a youth-oriented website, www.matthewsplace.com, and this interview will go live on the site the week of October 12. It will be right in the middle of a larger interview series that I’ve been doing for the Foundation. What I’ll ask first is: what really prompted you all to write the Epilogue to The Laramie Project?
LF: Moisés, you want to take that?
MK: Yes. I think that when we were in Laramie the first time, we felt that, obviously, being so close to the epicenter of this event, they had a much more intense experience of it. They had experienced not only the crime — the shock of the crime — but the media descending on them, the national attention, the international attention; and for them, the issues and questions that were raised by Matthew’s murder had to do with issues of identity, with issues of legacy, issues of how a community deals with an event like this on a short-term and long-term basis. And so, the result of that was The Laramie Project, which basically chronicled the life of the town for the year after Matthew’s murder. As the 10th anniversary was coming up, we started looking at the national situation and seeing how little had changed, at least in terms of legislative process and all of the measurements that one can quantify. We wanted to know what had happened in the town of Laramie 10 years later. Because they had been impacted so profoundly by Matthew’s murder, because they had been impacted so profoundly by everything that surrounded the event of the murder. I wanted to know, if we went back to Laramie — to the core of where everything happened — what would Laramie look like 10 years later? What does Laramie look like now? What things that happened then have created change that is concrete and lasting? Or has there been change that is concrete and lasting? And so that’s what made us want to go back there and see what had happened.

MP: How do you suggest that we keep from getting complacent; not only about the theatre that we see or that we produce, but also about — as you mentioned — the issues that may upset us and for which we feel compelled to fight, but eventually grow exhausted? Even The Laramie Project itself: how do you keep from letting it become a theatrical cliché? For example, just another show that every high school produces every 10 years?
MK: I think that’s a question that every person that is involved in any kind of civil rights movement has to ask themselves. But I think that for us, as a theatre company, the important question is: can theatre play a role in a national dialogue? A national dialogue not only about civil rights, but about all of the more humanistic questions: about growth, about development, about changing as a race, not only changing as a community or as a society. I think that those questions are the kind of questions that keep dialogue open.
AP: I think the fact that it might even become cliché is kind of a monumental achievement, in a way. The way that I think it stops from being the bad part of a cliché is the original approach that each high school, or university, or college, or semi-pro[fessional theatre company], or professional theatre company uses with the material. That their approach is fresh, and that they approach it from a point of it being an intrinsic part of the conversation in their community. And that keeps it from ever getting stale.
LF: Also, depending on where you are in the country, it’s a more or less radical act to do The Laramie Project. There are still places in the country and still schools in little pockets of America where it absolutely is still extraordinarily radical for this conversation to be happening there. I went and spoke at a Catholic college in Pennsylvania not long ago where it was a huge deal that they were even doing The Laramie Project. High schools still have their productions banned and censored. It’s still a part of the conversation and a bigger struggle when it comes to even talking about homosexuality in America.
GP: It’s always been an issue in social justice, social change, in the arts, in anything, this notion of discipline and ongoing discipline. We have these peak experiences, like the event that took place in Laramie: the murder of Matthew Shepard. And schools have a peak experience of creating this production, but really we have to ask the question: then how do you leverage that experience in your day-to-day experience? So when educators put on The Laramie Project, its useful for them to also think about an ongoing plan for how they can keep the conversation alive. Because you can’t have the peak experience continuously. There has to be some kind of discipline that’s sewn into the fabric of our daily lives, that’s much more about showing up daily, daily, daily and keeping the conversation alive. It’s not always going to be this big dramatic event. If you don’t have that discipline or that kind of structure that helps support and leverage the more emotional experience, then it will fade away.
MK: I think the other thing that I would say is that obviously we are very biased, because we are a theatre company. So what we want to do is, we want to continue the dialogue theatrically. As Andy said, I think another important part of this, is that the theatre is a medium very well suited to encourage this kind of conversation. When a high school does it or a university does it or a professional theatre company does it, it is not only the experience of going to see The Laramie Project. For the students of that university, it is about the experience of putting on The Laramie Project, and living with the material for weeks on end, and having the people who come to see the play being addressed by their peers. I think that there are levels and levels in which theatre is a profoundly well-suited medium to nest these kind[s] of conversations.

MP: I think that the theatre itself, particularly the writing style of The Laramie Project, is concerned with the ripples [of an event] — the effect on the community, the educational experience, the activist experience — as opposed to just the event or the single act itself. Are you interested in seeing the different productions that get performed this fall? I know that you’re up to performances in at least 46 of 50 states right now. Is that part of the beauty of the Epilogue for you? To see the aftermath and to see how different theatre companies choose to put this on?
GP: In terms of the event on October 12 — on the anniversary of Matthew’s death — we’ll be in New York and they’ll be everywhere else, so the life that it has going forward will of course be very interesting to see. But what’s so exciting about this conception that Moisés had, of doing it altogether, is again that it gets back to this question of: where do you go from the peak emotional experience of that event on October 12? So what’s exciting about having all of these productions and all of these people involved, is that it is a real opportunity to start conversation. Because it’s conversation; you know, we’ve heard it in our interviews, conversation around the water cooler; the way that Matthew’s experience changed the conversation in America. It really is about conversations, and in conversations that dynamic social change is going to have to happen. It’s a grassroots sort of change. We definitely need to be responsible for keeping that conversation alive and ongoing as we move out from October 12. I do think that, for all of us, it is going to be really important to know how this is rippling out in these other communities.
LF: I also think, just jumping off of Greg’s point, that hopefully the Epilogue will stir the pot a little bit and get people thinking about how change happens. And where we can as country — you know, with the play happening all over — take a step back and say: what has changed since this watershed moment in our history, and what hasn’t changed? How do we get there? What are the steps that we need to take to get where we need to go? So hopefully the new Epilogue can reignite the spark of dialogue in this country about change. That’s what I’m hoping.

MP: Given the investigative, almost journalistic, nature of your playwriting, what skills and nuances would you say it takes to listen to someone tell their story and perceive it as something performance-worthy, engaging, or even life-altering?
AP: I don’t know exactly what the skills are. But sometimes when you’re sitting there and someone says something, you think, “Wow, that’s a really powerful thing you just said.” And sometimes it really takes going back and listening over it and putting it into context with something else. Sometimes the things that you think might not be as noteworthy actually take on a much bigger life when they are studied and put in conjunction with someone else. It’s really, there’s no real fine or good rule about it. I don’t even know how to articulate it. There are no rules. You never know.
GP: The one skill that I think we’ve all developed over time, and that we definitely had a crash course in, is just listening. Listening and stepping back with our own point of views and actually letting somebody speak their truth. It’s only through listening, and feeling listened to, that somebody that you’re speaking to is going to really be willing to open up and share themselves. You can’t expect theatrically compelling material if you’re trying to hammer a person in a particular direction rather than get their true experience. And I think that has been a learning [experience] for all of us over time … to step back and really let a person have the space to really say what they need to say.
LF: We also talk a lot, within the company, about the poetry of the vernacular. How ordinary people have certain turns of phrases or they articulate things in ways where literally it’s like poetry. Like Andy said, you can feel it in the moment, you experience it in the moment; you almost can’t wait to put it on stage. The other part of our process is that we work very collaboratively. We share text, we analyze what people say, it’s a very active conversation. It’s not just alone in a room with the text. We speak the text in the room with each other, we dissect it, we think about it as a group. One of the ways that we figure out how to put it on stage is through our collaborative process of investigating the text that we have gathered as a group.

MP: Theatre is, in that sense, such a good educational tool, in terms of just learning how to listen to people. I know that any experience I have had with theatre makes me a lot more perceptive and open to different people and the ways that they express themselves.
AP: I think the other benefit of theatre in a communicative way is that, in the live performance, you also get the benefit of the reactions of everyone around you as well as everything else; a sort of give and take of communication between what’s happening on stage and the audience starts to take place. That’s when you really have the possibility of catharsis in the theatre and really have a powerful moment of communication within a community.

MP: How has the writing and proliferation of The Laramie Project informed your personal lives and creative and professional work since its inception?
LF: When Moisés posed that original question to the company 10 years ago — can the theatre participate in a national dialogue about a current event? — that was a life-changing question for me because it was one that I hadn’t fully considered. I really thought about theatre in smaller terms. One of the things I really admire most about Moisés is that he thinks about theatre on a much bigger scale and how it can have a much bigger impact. So the answer to that question turned out to be yes. A very big yes. That has changed the course of my work and my life and my thinking about the impact that theatre can make, for sure.
GP: I met Moisés working on Gross Indecency. Tectonic Theater Project had already developed that piece. Starting to use the Tectonic Theater Project techniques that Moisés basically developed with the company, working on The Laramie Project, has everything to do with the way that I think about theatre now. I don’t know how to make theatre any other way, and I don’t want to make any other way, other than the way that Moisés taught me to make theatre. I have contributed to that process and informed the moment work as well, but the process of making The Laramie Project has pretty much branded me as a person who makes work in this way. I can’t think about going into a room by myself and writing a play and bringing it to production.

MP: Why do you think the public held so fast to the story and legacy of Matthew Shepard?
MK: That’s a really interesting question that Judy [Shepard] talks about a lot. I think that there are many reasons why this crime resonated in a more direct way than many others. As you know, there are thousands of hate crimes that occur every year in America, but for some reason this one captured the nation’s imagination, the world’s imagination. I think that there are several elements. One, the fact that Matthew was attacked and then he didn’t die for several days. So people around the country could hope that he would survive. The other thing was, as one of our interviewees said, the symbolic nature of the crime. Even if it wasn’t a crucifixion, the media sparkled it as a crucifixion. We can’t deal with that kind of imagery in this country without it getting an incredible amount of attention. There are other factors: Matthew was white. I think that somebody white being murdered in this vein — and he was a college student, so I think a white college student being murdered like this means something very different in this culture from a Latino drag queen who goes home with somebody and gets murdered in a bed. As one of our interviewees said, Matthew was a “worthy” victim, where other victims are not as “worthy.”
LF: One of our interviewees from ten years ago — Moisés is referencing her now — works for OUT magazine. She was talking about how they were doing a hate crimes spread after Matthew was killed. She went to the photo editor, and she had all these photos of victims of hate crimes, and the photo editors said, “We can’t print these photos. These people are not beautiful.” She was so shocked that even within the gay community that there was this idea that you had to be a “perfect” victim — you had to look a certain way — in order for people to stand up and say, “This is wrong.” That’s a very interesting thought, an interesting question, that I think as a culture we need to stand back and look at. Who makes a “worthy” victim? Why do they have to be of a certain class or of a certain race or look a certain way for people to understand that what happened to them is wrong?

MP: Do you think that there has been progress in that sense since 1998?
AP: I think that there has definitely been progress. I think it has been hard fought and hard won, and I think there hasn’t been enough progress. It’s a very complicated question. There’s your complicated answer.
LF: If we think about some of the hate crimes that have happened since, and which ones have gotten attention — there have probably been thousands in these last 10 years, and we haven’t heard very much about it — I think that’s an active question. I don’t know that I have an answer. But I think it’s an important question.
GP: I do too. There were a number of other hate crimes that got some media attention, not to the degree that Matthew did. The one thing that I can think of right off of the bat is that they were all white. There were no African-American people who got big, widespread media attention. And they were mostly younger people. In New York City there are hate crime murders every year. When I was living in Queens there was a Latino kid who was last seen at and picked up at a bar who was killed. It’s a very interesting question. And I don’t think we’ve made that much progress in this particular area.

MP: Unfortunately, no.
GP: I think there has been progress made in other areas, but yes. It’s an interesting question, and I don’t understand exactly why that is.

MP: Do you think that — given the tendency of the media to attach itself only to particular stories, to dictate what is important in the public consciousness of our country — it’s important for youth to find ways to tell their own stories? How would you encourage them to do so? How would you encourage youth — or anybody, who wants to get their voice heard or a story some attention — to go about doing that?
GP: I think this kind of work is a great way to do it. One of the things that I love about Tectonic Theater Project and about the moment that we teach is that it puts the creative process directly in the hands of people who want to tell stories. They don’t have to wait for anything. I think it is about art; it’s about making works, it’s about making art; it’s about taking responsibility for your own story and telling it the way that you want to tell it. I don’t think that you can necessarily wait for the media to change its mind about how it represents reality. But you can start owning your story and making work about it, or owning stories that are interesting to you from other communities, and grabbing a hold of that and saying, “I want to tell this story.” Trying to give it the attention that it deserves.
MK: I think that Greg is making a really, really important point. One of the reasons that we have chosen to teach our techniques is because we think that the theatre is a really adept method at getting people in a room together to have a conversation. I think that by teaching moment work we are given students and theatre practitioners all over the country tools with which to theatrically explore the ideas and discourses that are prevalent in their communities and in their lives. Again, for The Laramie Project: we went to Laramie, we talked to people, we came back, we wrote a play. The play has been seen by more than fifty million people around the world. Fifty million people, between the play and the movie. I think that the idea of artists as playing an important part in a national dialogue, or in this case an international dialogue, is a really valuable one. As artists, we bring a perspective that journalists don’t have, or that any other kind of media doesn’t have. We are talking about it in very specific theatrical terms. I think that there is something incredibly powerful about that, and as Greg said, incredibly empowering. Because you don’t wait for the media to dictate what the nature of the discourse is. You get in a room and you create the discourse. Historically, we all know that the history of representation is a very troubled one, and that it always includes the views of the person telling the story. By creating techniques that allow people to create, construct, and narrate their own stories, we hope to empower people to be the owners of that story.
GP: It gets back to why this is so powerful also. This is the function that theatre used to have. It used to be about a community getting together to share their stories: their shared experience, and to process that and to grieve that and to experience catharsis around it. Now the media has sort of replaced that function but it can’t really do it. The media cannot really have the same kind of conversation because you can watch the media alone on your TV screen or on your computer. You have to be in a room with your community when you are experiencing. And that’s the power of the event.

MP: Do you think that the fact that the media is so reductive has a lot to do with that as well? You know, for instance, watching a news story of thirty seconds as opposed to seeing a production of three hours?
GP: I think that has a lot to do with it. But I also think that there’s a kind of starkness about the media, rather than a lot of nuance. There’s a lot of grab-ratings mentality, and I think that the theatre allows us to tell a more nuanced, more multifaceted story that really reflects what’s going on in the community, rather than the shock-and-awe approach of contemporary media.

MP: Of course.
GP: It’s a time issue too. The media doesn’t have the time that the theatre has to really penetrate into the depth of an experience. It has to move along; that’s what it does. So we can spend a couple of years getting to know a community and listening to all of the different voices and trying to represent a fuller picture and the media just doesn’t have time to do that.
MK: Also, we can write a play that is seven hours long.
GP: Exactly.
MK: In the case of The Laramie Project, a play that is three hours long. That alone gives us the possibility to speak in much more depth. So that’s something about the form. But the other thing that we can’t forget is the act of theatre: having live actors articulating ideas in front of you, on the stage, while there is a community of people listening together. That even is irreproducible. As Greg said, we spend so much time alone in front of our television sets. And I think that still, after all of these thousands of years, one of the most radical events of the theatre is that we bring people together to watch other human beings articulate their thoughts and ideas in the hope that something will transpire between the two groups. I think that is a profound event. I’ve been doing theatre for over 20 years and I am still in awe of that event.

MP: I’m close to wrapping up, but if there is anything else that anyone would like to say or feel they didn’t get a chance to explain, I’d love to hear it now.
LF: Well, I just want to add that one of the conversations that’s happening in the new Epilogue is about the next generation. So I’m excited that we’re having this chance to talking directly on Matthew’s Place about it. One of our characters, Romaine Patterson, talks about going out and speaking to young people and the inspiration that she feels from the young people in that they feel empowered to make change. They don’t feel the kind of hopelessness that sometimes the people working for change in Laramie come across; by moments, how hard things are to change or becoming pessimistic. The young people are invigorated and they feel charged. Matthew’s story means something to them and they really feel empowered to make social change. I’m glad that we are participating in that conversation, and I’m glad that the epilogue points that out.
MK: I would like to add to that whoever is listening to this, the fact that they have logged on and they have pressed the button and are listening to this, it is the beginning of a commitment to change, the beginning of a commitment to think about how change occurs. Even the logging in process can be such a subversive, revolutionary, radical process. It’s great to have the possibility, for us, to talk to your audiences. But also, how magnificent that the Matthew Shepard Foundation has created this platform where we can do this. So thank you.

MP: Thank you.