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Neel Keller directs a production of Moisés Kaufman’s “The Laramie Project,” a story chronicling how a small Western town came to terms with its loss of innocence.
On Oct. 7, 1998, cyclist Aaron Kreifels came across what he thought was a scarecrow tethered to a wooden fence.
It turned out to be University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard.
When sheriff’s deputy Reggie Fluty arrived on the scene, she reported that only two tracks of skin were visible through the crusted blood on Shepard’s face. The deputy said she realized the tracks had come from tears the battered 21-year-old shed as he hung from the fence for 18 hours following a vicious attack.
Shepard, who was gay, died five days later.
In the aftermath of the death, writer-director Moisés Kaufman (“Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde”) and members of the Tectonic Theater Project traveled to Shepard’s home of Laramie, Wyo., to try to figure out how such a brutal attack could have happened in the small, tranquil town.
The resulting play, based on 400 hours of footage from interviews with more than 200 of the town’s residents includes the accounts of Kreifels and Fluty.
“The Laramie Project” will be directed by visiting artist Neel Keller. Keller is the associate producer of the Mark Taper Forum and Ahmanson Theatre.
The play, which premiered at New York’s Union Square Theatre in 2000, has been performed on college campuses across the country and was made into a movie that opened the 2002 Sundance Film Festival and aired on HBO.
“ ‘The Laramie Project’ actually explores the effect our presence had on the town and that the town had on us,” Kaufman told The New York Times. “It underlines the importance of the observer and constantly reminds the audience that what they are hearing and seeing is an aesthetic experience created by a group of people who are trying to tell a story and paint a portrait of what we saw and heard.
“This is about what happens to a town,” Kaufman said, “when it is forced to … look at all the things people really believed in all their lives.”
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