The Laramie Project Play Analysis

An Intelligent Design Makes The Laramie Project Shine A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of seeing the William and Mary Theater Department’s production of The Laramie Project, a play that tells the story of the murder of Mathew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming, that took place in 1998 in Laramie, Wyoming. Over the course of the next year, members of the Tectonic Theatre project travelled to Laramie six times and conducted over 200 interviews with the people living there in order to write and produce a play about how this horrifying event had affected their lives and the town they lived in. I was impressed by the performances of William and Mary’s production, especially since many of the actors are my age. I also quite

The set consisted of around eight to ten wooden chairs, a wooden table, a stack of risers where members of the audience could sit, and two very realistic pieces of a wooden fence, each covered in flowers, on the wings of the stage. This arrangement was similar to the set of the original Tectonic Theatre production of the play, which too consisted of wooden chairs and tables. Although instead of an audience in the background, the original production had television screens (Kaufman). At first, adding the fences seemed like a poor decision to me, because their realistic design clashed with the minimalist chairs and table, and they seemed to big for the stage. I was also worried that the audience on stage would be a distraction. But once the play started the set started to make more sense to me. The fences were big and and more realistic then the rest of the set because what happened to Mathew was this big, appalling thing that was bearing down on the people of Laramie and staying stuck in their minds. The audience on stage seemed to function like the televisions in the original production; they represented how the media converged on Laramie and how whole world was watching the story unfold. I know some of my fellow classmates were not big fans of the fences in particular, but I thought the fences and the audience on stage gave the play an air of claustrophobia and foreboding that really hit home the severity of what had