Ten years after: Tectonic returns to Laramie

Excellent article by Patrick Healy in today's New York Times focusing on the upcoming 10th anniversary of Matthew Shepard's murder in Laramie -- and the creation of the Tectonic Theater Project's play, "The Laramie Project." Here's a sample:

Near the end of “The Laramie Project,” the widely praised and frequently staged play about how this small city grappled with the notorious murder of the gay college student Matthew Shepard, one of the characters wonders if the convictions in the killing will help Laramie heal.

“Maybe now we can go on and we can quit being stuck, you know?” says Reggie Fluty, a local policewoman. She is one of the real-life characters whose words, collected on tape, make up the actors’ entire script.

Ms. Fluty was among 200 people interviewed in 1998 by the Tectonic Theater Project, a New York City company that created “The Laramie Project” shortly after Mr. Shepard was tied to a fence by two Laramie men, pistol-whipped and left to die in the frigid Wyoming night. And Ms. Fluty is among those whom the theater company is re-interviewing this week to explore whether Mr. Shepard has a legacy here on the high plains, 10 years later.

“Hurt’s hurt and pain’s pain, and I think people in Laramie see that now,” Ms. Fluty, now retired, told Moisés Kaufman, the artistic director of Tectonic, during a conversation in her sun-splashed living room just north of town.

“Sometimes you got to just, as a community, get slugged before you wake up and grow up,” she said. “I don’t think we’re all grown up, but I think people are trying.”

For Mr. Kaufman and his colleagues, returning to Laramie, a town of 25,000 near the Colorado border, is far from a theatrical exercise. They plan to use the new interviews to write an epilogue to the play before the 10th anniversary of Mr. Shepard’s death, on Oct. 12; it will be added to the published version of the script and will be included in future performances of “The Laramie Project,” which has had about 2,000 productions since it opened off Broadway in 2000.

Read the entire article at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/17/theater/17laramie.html?_r=1&ei=5070&emc=eta1&oref=slogin