Links: Kaufman's take on "10 Years Later" in "American Theater"

When studying The Laramie Project, usually the first starting point for studying the play are two articles written by Don Shewey and Moisés Kaufman published in American Theatre.  With the premiere of 10 Years Later came yet another article from Kaufman about the project, again published in AT.  Like his previous work, this article is also an expository work explaining the process of producing the play, from its first inception, changes to the process, and its final form as a worldwide Internet linkup premiere.  I'm not entirely sure how helpful Kaufman's explanation is for explaining the whole process behind the creation of 10 Years Later in reality, but it is surely a great exploration of what Kaufman thought they were doing as they interviewed Laramie residents and former residents again, ten years after Matthew's murder.  It makes his investments, beliefs and goals for the new epilogue very clear for the researcher. 

One thing I found interesting is that Kaufman claims that this new play "deals with history" and how it's created, which is quite different from the first play's goal.  That's fair enough, but he talks (again) about the emergence of the robbery narrative as if it started after the fact, an attempt to re-write history-- and as I have pointed out repeatedly from my little soapbox in this little corner of the Interwebs, the robbery narrative arose at the exact same time as the hate crime narrative.  Oh well.  He also calls his re-interviews with DeBree and Dave O'Malley as an attempt to "clarify the facts."  That may be the most interesting comment I've heard Kaufman make in print so far.

Nevertheless, how and why someone chooses one narrative over another as "truth" is particularly interesting regardless-- not just for Laramie, but for Mr. Kaufman, Tectonic Theater, and myself as well.  You can read the article online here through the Theatre Communications Group website. 

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Source:  

Kaufman, Moisés.  "Anatomy of an Experiment: When the Tectonic Team Returned to The Laramie Project, the Docudrama's Sequel Became a Collective Creation Seen and Heard 'Round the World."  American Theatre Jul/Aug 2010.  Web. 

Links: Study Guides for TLP on Sub/Text

For those of you who teach The Laramie Project, one of the most useful things available online are theater website productions who produce study guides.  For instance, verybody knows about the Guthrie Theater and their semi-famous student guides for their own productions (if you don't, you need to look.  I used their guide for Amadeus during my first year teaching), but they don't have material for everything.   Unfortunately, the Guthrie never performed TLP until 10 Years Later came out, and their only available material is a link to Tectonic's study guides.   

A lot of other productions, however, have picked up the slack, and one particularly useful source of information is Sub/Text, which was created by Jeanine Sobeck in connection with the Mead Center for American Theater's Arena Stage.  Sobeck creates pages of background information for different productions every theater season, and there's a great guide for The Laramie Project and the Epilogue, which has some great background material for the study and discussion of the two plays. 

The study guide is full of useful stuff, but the page which first got my attention was this super-useful timeline of events leading up to The Laramie Project and its sequel, which would be great for those teaching students who can't remember the Shepard murder.  

Let me give one more quick shout-out to Jeanine Sobeck for doing such a great job with the Arena Theater's "Online dramaturge," and be sure to check out all the available guides if you teach drama! 

Advocate article by Greg Pierotti on TLP and "10 Years Later"

In the middle of all this personal angst about how the members of Tectonic related to the larger Laramie community, I nevertheless feel a certain amount of personal connection to two of its members: Stephen Belber and Greg Pierotti.  Perhaps it is because these two writers and actors of Tectonic Theater have both been willing to lay bare their own experiences with Laramie, their struggles and mistakes, and how the play still haunts them.  Maybe that's also the reason I've found it so hard to find a similar personal connection with Kaufman.  In contrast to Belber and Pierotti, Kaufman usually positions himself as the artistic theorist or architect, and perhaps that distant, forensic persona makes it harder for me to relate to him.

In any case, if you want to see why I tend to sympathize with Pierotti, he has a great article in the Advocate you should really check out.  In a real sense, the first article is telling his own story, and how Matthew Shepard and researching TLP changed his life.  The series ballooned into, so far, a seven-part exploration of the two plays as the company prepared to put both on tour last fall, and the whole thing is a fantastic read.  You can get Pierotti's perspective on everything from how the Tyler Clementi story relates to TLP to safety on college campuses to the problem of making snap judgments-- about gays and lesbians, but also about Christians, and he's very up front with where his own snap judgments lead to.  Please forgive me if I label the whole series a "must read." For those who want to see how Tectonic-- in this case, Pierotti's view, at least-- sees the world, it's quite valuable.  And it will challenge your assumptions about Tectonic Theater and the way they operate. The links to all seven parts are below! 

On the Road with Laramie, Part 1-- August 10, 2010
On the Road with Laramie, Part 2-- August 25, 2010
On the Road with Laramie, Part 3-- September 14, 2010
On the Road with Laramie, Part 4-- October 6, 2010
On the Road with Laramie, Part 5-- October 18, 2010
On the Road with Laramie, Part 6-- Jan 11, 2011
On the Road with Laramie, Part 7-- February 8, 2011

The Eds, Take 2

So, in 10 Years Later we had an interesting insight into the tense weeks surrounding the tenth anniversary of the Shepard murder.  On the one hand, the Boomerang staff did a wonderful five-part series on where Laramie as a community stands a decade after they found their values severely challenged in the national spotlight.  They dedicated that bench on the A&S plaza in Matt's memory.  We see the LGBT community in Laramie developing a new presence on the campus and keeping dialogue alive.  Those were all great things (and you can read about most of them if you search the Boomerang's online archive.  Links are on the "Bibiliography" page to the right.)  

On the other hand, we also got an unsettling glimpse of a community in deep denial.  We saw both intentional and unintentional forgetting of Matt's name and a fear for some kind of permanent change.  We saw people who still deeply resented the stigma that the national spotlight cast on the town.  And then there was this. 

The second editorial in the Boomerang ran on the tenth anniversary of Shepard's death, and it is the editorial that is specifically mentioned in The Laramie Project.  It's also the editorial to which Jonas Slonaker tries to respond, but they wouldn't run his letter.  For some reason, you can't find the copy for either of the 10th anniversary editorials on the Boomerang website archive even though other editorials are available there, but an hour or so on the microfilm machine right before the library closed yielded my very own copy.   Man, I love public research institutions. 

There are a few interesting things to note on this second editorial piece, which is entitled "Laramie is a Community, Not a Project."  First of all, there's no byline on this, so it seems that the Boomerang was putting this out as its official position rather than just the editor's personal view.  The email listed for responses is for the actual publisher, too, rather than just the editor. 

Secondly, the amount of snark right at the end where they're pushing the robbery motive is just... well, baffling.  But I guess even journalists have a right to have an opinion, and at least it's on the Opinion page.  My experience is that small town newspapers are a lot more strident when pushing personal opinion than most, so perhaps I shouldn't be as surprised as I am to see how blunt it is.  

But, with that said, this opinion piece is not entirely bad.  The first several paragraphs are actually a fairly good summary of the community reactions, and it's useful for that.  And the editorial is very right about one thing: Laramie is more tolerant than most other communities in the area.  That should be kept in mind.   However, I definitely would challenge the publisher about his dismissal of this as the problem of "a few questionable characters."  It's not.  Those people don't define Laramie exclusively, but they are still a part of who Laramie is, and you can't just reject McKinney and Henderson because they make us feel guilty.  Whether we like it or not, Laramie does share some societal guilt for what happened to Matthew Shepard because we are part of the society which shaped them;  ignoring that solves absolutely nothing-- and unless we learn to embrace the McKinneys and Hendersons in our communities as a part of who we are and try to transform their hate with love, it's only a matter of time before this happens again. 

In any case, the Boomerang's had their say on the matter.  And I'll be happy to let the rest of y'all know about it.

The Eds, Take 1

While I was in Laramie, I didn't get a lot of academic-y stuff done.  Most of the people I had hoped to chat with were gone for the July 4th weekend, and after some bad planning and some car troubles, I only had a few short hours to make use of the university library before they closed up for the 4th of July weekend.  

But my time in Laramie wasn't a loss by any stretch.  I spent a lot of time with my brother Coyote, who let me see this community for a weekend through his eyes, and for which I thank him.  I spent a lot of time lost in the wilderness trying to learn how to be alone with myself again.  And I got three whole hours in Coe Library, where I spent my time digging in the basement and looking at the microfilm.

And what I found was really interesting.  I only had a short time to look at the Boomerang's coverage of the original beating and the ten-year anniversary, but it was extremely revealing, and I'll be talking about that in more detail later.  But the best gems I came back with were some editorials from the current Boomerang staff.  After 10 Years Later, we all learned about one snarky editorial on their Opinion page; as it turns out, there were two.

The first editorial (which I highly encourage you read) doesn't get a mention in the play from what I remember, and it's pretty interesting.  It was entitled "Ten Years Later, It's Time To Move On,"  and it's a bit of an over-the-top emotional argument about why the community needs to let the specter of Matthew Shepard go.  For one, I noticed that this one is actually attributed to the editor personally.    She's also asking a legitimate question: why do some stories of murder remain and get memorialized and others don't?  That's a great question, actually.  What I don't like is using that question to dismiss any attention paid to Shepard.

In the editorial, the editor gives a litany of other murders and tragic deaths which happened in Laramie (of which Cindy Dixon, Russell Henderson's mother, is one) and complains that none of them are given the same recognition.  She's not quite right about her examples of forgotten tragedies, however.  There was a memorial marker erected at Tie Siding where the members of the cross-country team died (and note the evasive wording in that statement).  This white cross stands near the location where the accident occurred.   Nothing, however, stands on the ground where Shepard was brutally murdered, not even the fence on which he was tied.  One location has a white cross marker to help establish the memory of a tragedy while the other has been wiped clean of all bad memories.  I'm not saying that this is a problem per se-- that landowner has the right to have peace on his or her own property-- but it does complicate her point, which the editor tries to paint a little too much in black and white when this is an issue that by definition requires shades of gray.

I also find it interesting that, in her litany of tragedies in her editorial, she chose to skip over Kristen Lamb.  That was the tragedy that had so many people in Laramie steaming (her murderer's trial roughly coincided with the Shepard beating) and is often cited as justification for those who resent the media attention over Shepard's death.  Perhaps some things run too deep, and too painful, even to be used as ammo by an angry journalist in a newspaper editorial.   Maybe there are other tragedies she would like to see remain at rest, and unmentioned. 

Anyhow, I guess that would be my main complaint here.  Sure, Deb, you're asking a legitimate question, and it's one that I (and many others) are interested in, too.  But you're not asking it in order to get an answer.  You're simply using it as an excuse to complain about an event that has left Laramie feeling bruised.  If you'd stop and explore that question-- why some stories are remembered and others are not-- you might learn something really fascinating about the nature of collective memory and human nature.  That's a lot more productive than trying to wish away a memory of an event that stings to remember and isn't going to go away.

Whether we like it or not, Matt will be a part of this community's memory.  The only real question, in my mind, is whether or not we incorporate that memory in a positive way or not, and an attitude like yours makes that difficult.   And it makes it impossible for everyone to "move on" from this tragedy like you want.  No one can "move on" from a story like this until it is confronted and you reconcile yourself to its existence.  That's the only kind of positive healing this community can ever have, and if you don't do that, you will continue to be haunted by this memory which will never leave.  The more you try to "move on," the longer he's going to be with you. 
 

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PHOTO CREDIT:

1)  The roadside memorial at Tie Siding, Wyoming, taken from gregor_y's Flickr photostream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gregor_y/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Watch "TLP: 10 Years Later" online!

You can actually watch clips from the New York performance of The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later, an Epilogue online!

Tectonic Theater has launched a new website for The Laramie Project with a variety of great things included-- there's going to be community access, it looks like, as well as blogs and photos.  But the thing that's particularly exciting for me is that you can see eight minutes of the Lincoln Center performance online.  That means I have something I can actually cite from!  I can talk about 10 Years Later in a meaningful fashion-- sort of. 

If you wanted to see the sequel but couldn't, now you can have a taste of it online.  The performance recorded here includes some post-performance discussion as well.  I don't know if the plan is to keep this up, so visit while you can...

Laramie and Tectonic's Codes and Power

Read more at Amazon.com

So, as a Christian who studies medieval literature, it's no surprise that I just love the writings of CS Lewis.    Sure, he was a bit of a stodge and didn't "get" how women worked until he was in his late fifties-- but for a conservative, stuffy old Oxford dean, he doesn't get enough credit for taking on and dismantling the linguistic codes of oppression of his own day.

For instance, in the sci-fi book Out of the Silent Planet, he basically takes on the entire linguistic power structure of white imperialism and rips it to shreds.  In the book, an interplanetary explorer named Weston tries to justify his attempted takeover of the planet Mars (which is a silly, pathetic attempt) in the name of white human imperialism.  This is how Weston justifies his murder of a sentient being (called a hnau in Martian) to the ruler of Mars:

Your tribal life with its stone age weapons and bee-hive huts, its primitive coracles and elementary social structure, has nothing to compare with our civilization—with our science, medicine and law, our armies…  Our right to supersede you is the right of the higher over the lower. (85)

Weston's adversary Ransom has to translate all this colonial-ese into Martian so that everybody can understand.  Here's how he does it: 

He says that, among you, all the hnau of one kind live together and the hrossa have spears like those we used a long time ago and your huts are small and round and your boats small and light and you only have one ruler. He says it is different with us. He says we know much. There is a thing happens in our world when the body of a living creature feels pains and becomes weak, and he says we sometimes know how to stop it. He says we have very many bent people and we kill them and shut them in huts. He says that we have many ways for the hnau of one land to kill those of another and some are trained to do it… Because of all this, he says it would not be the act of a bent hnau if our people killed all your people. (135-6).

 Oppression sounds completely different when you strip it of all the linguistic codes and speak it plainly, doesn't it?  The little linguistic codes of Weston's set about survival of the fittest and right to supersede (and elsewhere, the white man's burden) really are just a power play.  They separate the 'us' (that is, the elites) from the 'them' and make that outsider vulnerable to violence.  And Lewis' alter-ego Ransom, from his position of the Martian convert, cannot translate their nonsense into sense.  As the person with a foot in both societies, all he can do is expose Weston's brutality for what it really is. 

I hope you can see why this interests me.  Sometimes the little cliques and social boundaries we set up (which Lewis called "Inner Rings") only exist to render others powerless.  Others have are much more well-intentioned but eventually lead to the same thing, and language is nearly always one of the principal tools people use to do it. 

So, do Laramie residents have language codes to build barriers between themselves and who they have deemed outsiders?  Of course they do.  Everybody does to some extent.   But so does Tectonic Theater, as it turns out, and that's what I'd like to look at today-- how such languages of belonging and exclusion can be exposed for what they are, and who gets the benefit and who suffers the consequences.  

The Religious Codes of Tectonic Theater: Using Your "Inside" Voice

When people speak about certain issues, they always do it from within a limited point of view: are they looking from without or within?  Each perspective is useful in its own way, but they're not the same thing.  Whether or not you consider yourself (or your conversation partner) inside or outside of your community can really affect the way you explain your view of things. 

Religious dialogue, for instance, is one of the places where the play has the hardest time breaking into, so to speak.  This is something observed by a "bench coach" for the original TLP, Stephen Wangh.  As I pointed out in a previous post, Wangh wonders a little bit whether or not Tectonic Theater found themselves unable or unwilling to address that society's "holy protagonists," and more often than not I find that I agree with him. 

But that's not entirely up to Tectonic Theater to decide; after all, those "holy protagonists" have a say in the matter, too.  For a variety of reasons, from doctrinal to social to political, each of these people can make a choice about where to align themselves in regard to Tectonic Theater.  If we look at how different people speak about the religious community-- Unitarians, Mormons, Baptists, and Catholics-- can we see where they see themselves fitting in?  

As for me?  At one time, I was an insider in The Baptist Church.  And now, where am I?  Do I speak now as an insider or an outsider of that community?  Well, just look above for your answer...

Codes and Community in TLP: Looking at Jed (and Jackrabbit)

So, we've been talking a little about how language is often a marker of certain social groups, that what we say, and how we say it, changes with one group to the next.  We code-switch into the codes of one social group into another.  When there's tension between those groups, like, say, the "town and gown" conflict in Laramie, choosing one's language is important because navigating between groups gets perilous.  And, if there's one character who is literally stuck in this divide in The Laramie Project, it's Jed Schultz.  

Jed interests me because I totally understand his plight.  Before I say anything else, let me assure you that Jed was a good kid when I knew him; he was always extremely outgoing and energetic, fun, easily overemotional, and he had a craving to fit in socially with the people he was around.  He also loves his parents.  Never doubt that.  I knew him a little bit from high school, but after I was baptized and attending The Baptist Church, I'd see him come to church with his dad occasionally.   I found him... interesting.  Jed still knew all the codes, from the shiny polyester button-down shirt and pleated slacks to the monogrammed Bible he carried in its nylon zip-up cover and handle, but he never seemed quite at ease.  Before that point, I had never known Jed to seem ill at ease anywhere. 

That sense of ill ease is where I can sympathize; I'm not in the SBC anymore, probably for the same reasons that he was uncomfortable in that church back then.  At the time of the first play, Jed was caught between two different societies, transitioning out of one and into another.  On the one hand, he was born into a Southern Baptist Convention culture with some pretty legalistic ties and proud of its religious independence and political conservatism.  I should know-- I was there.  On the other hand, he was heavily involved in theater in high school, which tends to be a fairly counter-cultural group anyhow, and then he was a theater major at the college.  Those two worlds can't be more opposite.  Again, I should know.  I spent most of my spare time in Fine Arts, just like Jed, and most of my friends were in dance, music or theater.  And in the course of the play, I think that Jed is trying to keep a foot in each world and having trouble figuring out where to stand.  His language, I think, betrays a little bit of that attempt to fit in.  Jed has to switch codes between different groups as he tries to navigate from one to the next. 

Links: The "10 Years Later" Q&A Session, covered by The Daily Planet

To be straight with you, I spent most of the 45 or so minutes following the reading of The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later chatting with our cast here locally, so I missed something like eighty percent of the live linkup to New York.  I haven't found a full transcript or recording of that time yet, but the Twin Cities Daily Planet did a nice job giving a summary of the main questions and how Kaufman and Tectonic responded.  For those of you who would like to look over these again, I've linked it below. 

The full reporting of the Q&A session is here, and it goes through most of the Twitter session fairly carefully.  Enjoy! 

Source:  Everett, Matthew A.  "The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later—An Epilogue (Q&A session)."  Twin Cities Daily Planet 17 Oct 2009: n.p.  Web. Also linked here for reference.

Hunter of Justice talks about TLP: 10 years later

Hunter of Justice is a blog run by Nan Hunter, a professor at Georgetown Law which focuses on issues of human rights and equality, and it's a great read.  She focuses especially on issues of gender and sexuality.  You can visit "Hunter of Justice" here and check up on some current posts if you like.  

Nan Hunter had a guest writer give a writeup on the Ten Years Later performance. and you can access the article on 10 Years Later here.  It has some great observations about the play!

Aaron McKinney's Tattoos, or the Ethics of Reading Humans as Literature

One thing that I've been wondering about is how little literary criticism has been written on The Laramie Project so far.  When I started thinking about the play, my initial impulse was to write an academic article.   (I've changed my mind since then.)   But when I started to pull together scholarly sources to start my research, I found that there wasn't too much to build from.  I started to wonder: why I can I find so few literary scholars writing about this play?  

For instance, when I did a search in the MLA Bibliography for The Laramie Project, I only got eight hits; six were articles of literary criticism, and one of those is Tigner's.  I tried the International Index to Performance Arts and netted another 4-5 scholarly articles, but they're mostly about documentary/nonfiction performance rather than the play as text.  That seems really strange for a play that has been as popular and culturally important for the last eight years as TLP has.  Just for comparison, Shaffer's play Amadeus had nineteen articles written and indexed in MLAB by 1988.  Why haven't all those gape-mouthed literary professors who teach this text (of whom I suppose I am one) been writing about it? Why are pens so silent in my own professional field? 

Maybe others aren't writing on this text as a literary object for the same reason that I'm a little reticent about writing on this text in an academic forum myself.  I don't like treating actual, living human beings as abstractions (which was probably clear with one of my previous posts).  It's one thing to talk about "Mozart" and "Salieri" as characters because, even though these people are real, the play itself is a total fiction.  I can even do it with Spiegelman's Maus because the conscious meta-narrative and the fictive animal story insulates the reader enough from the unspeakable horror of Vladek Spiegelman's lived reality to give him a more critical eye.  I have a much harder time doing the same thing with a person in The Laramie Project, especially when it's somebody I took classes from or saw in church.

Maybe other critics have the same hangups.  For instance, there are only 36 articles in MLAB for In Cold Blood, and they mostly seem to be focusing on genre or journalistic concerns  rather than treating it as a literary work.  Maybe we're all running into the same question: what are the ethics of reading a documentary work or "faction" (fact-based fiction) as a literary event?  Is it ethical to treat a real, live human as a symbolic construction, whether it be the Clutters, Gary Gilmore, or Russell Henderson?  Do you lessen the gravity of the situation if you talk about Aaron McKinney's failures from a literary, rather than a historical or cultural standpoint?

Or, to put it from a more practical standpoint: am I doing a disservice to Aaron McKinney (and, by extension, Matt Shepard) as a human being if I treat him like a literary construction?   

"Has Anything Changed?" cont.: The Tectonic Uncertainty Principle

In my attempt to think through the relationship of Tectonic Theater to the Laramie community, I've tended to focus on their relationship to the Laramie community as a whole:  are they reporting it like they are from the "inside" of the community in reflection or from the "outside" in judgment?  There's another way to think of the organization, however: as either passive observer, or active participant in, the events they're observing.  When Tectonic came into Laramie this second time, how much had they already changed the situation in Laramie with their first play?  For me, the answer is simple because I don't think that passive observation of a community is possible; you're always changing the environment you're observing.  Therefore, for me the question is not whether Tectonic Theater has had an influence in Laramie; the  question is how much, and whether or not Tectonic recognizes that fact in the second play. 

So, to start, all of you Trekkies out there understand the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, right?  Here it is in a nutshell:  you can't observe an aspect of a particle in space without changing something else about it.  For instance, if you can pin down a particle's momentum, you know nothing about its position because your observation of its momentum precludes knowing its position.  And, since you have to "poke" a particle to know where it's at, you have to sacrifice knowing its momentum just to know its position.  It's the damnable, frustrating fact of life for quantum physicists:  you simply can never be a passive observer; to some extent, just by observing you are always a participant, you always interfere and you can therefore never know everything.    

"Has Anything Changed?" cont.: The Other Side of the Fence

I don't hate this play, I really don't! I swear!  *ahem.*

Okay, so I figured that after the last post I put up on this subject, it wouldn't hurt to make that point a little more clear.  My relationship with Tectonic is admittedly conflicted, but I'm not a "hater."  Actually, you wouldn't find a bigger supporter of reading, teaching or performing this play than me.  M'kay?  Alllright, so let's move on to the good stuff now. 

So, last time I spent an inordinate amount of time picking apart The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later from the perspective of outsiders judging the Laramie community and how that changes the feel of the new play.  That's not the only way to look at this situation, however.  The play gives us a lot of reasons to think that the question "Has anything changed?" isn't so much their question as Laramie's.  In the Epilogue to The Laramie Project, Kaufman and his acting team instead reveal the internal criticism of the community and their drive for change. In these instances, Tectonic acts more as a sort of midwife, bringing Laramie's own questions and ambivalence into the spotlight. Knowing Laramie's reticence to address this topic, this actually makes Tectonic Theater's presence in the community at this moment all the more important because they can bring those voices of frustration, resistance and hope out into the open.

"Has Anything Changed?" Thoughts on TT's interaction with Laramie

Has anything changed?   

That's the question that Moises Kaufman and Tectonic Theater ask repeatedly in the run-up to the Epilogue-- has Laramie, WY changed since Matt Shepard's murder?  Have we as a nation changed?  It's the question they pose in their Newsweek article preceding the play, and it's the impetus that drives the new play forward.  Is that kind of change even measurable, they ask?   If it is measurable, then what does it look like?  It's only natural that a theater company that prides itself on holding its fingers on the pulse of the nation's important social issues would ask a question like that.  But the thing is, what happens when you pose that question?  Does it change the relationship between yourself and your interviewees?  This really comes down to a more basic, more obvious question: does judgment against Laramie in the new play come from within the community, or without?

Tectonic Theater seems, on one level, to recognize that change in their relationship to the Laramie community between the two plays.  I'm wondering right now if that change in relationship also changes the overall structure of the second play.

TT writes for Newsweek: "Has Anything Changed?"

Tectonic wrote a short but illuminating online piece for Newsweek talking about the Laramie community-- it's called, naturally, "Has Anything Changed?"  It's also basically the sentiment of the prologue they read before the performance of The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later and includes a certain amount of the information they used in the final version of the play.

I found it an interesting view into Tectonic's attitude as they prepared to enter into Laramie one more time, and it was good to see how much they tried to keep an open mind of what "change" might look like in a community.  But it also outlined some things that I'd like to write about over the next few weeks.  Check it out!

URL:  http://www.newsweek.com/id/163027

Scatter Plots

One of my students particularly enamored with The Laramie Project and endowed with a more mathematical imagination once described TLP as a "scatter plot" of Laramie, a broad and random cross-section of the entire community that gives a good idea of the total population.    That's one of the real beauties of TLP, honestly: we hear from ranchers, professors, police officers, Mormon home teachers, and college students, just to name a few. The way these voices all come together to show their different experiences of the exact same event creates an incredible picture of a "collected memory," to use James E. Young's term. All these voices are focused on the m emory of the same, life-changing moment; but very few of them share the same experience. 

And yet, when I think back to this student's comment, I'm a little conflicted.  I completely agree with the metaphor he picked-- the play is incredibly rich in its portrayals of the Laramie community.  The thing that bothers me a little is that I know that the scatter isn't entirely random.   It's a scatter plot, sure, but where did they take the points from?  If you understand a little bit about the background and connections between some of the key players in their drama, the plot looks a lot less random than perhaps Tectonic tries to make us believe.  That's the labyrinth I'd like to plunge us into over the next few weeks.  

But before I get started, please, please understand-- I don't intend to "out" anybody who doesn't want to be found (for instance, I'm not telling you who The Baptist Minister is).  After all, I'm coveting my own anonymity at the moment, so I insist on maintaining that for others.  I'm just going to give you the information that any regular person walking around the UW campus can find out-- no dirty laundry.  I'm not going to tell you the name of anybody who asked for anonymity, and I'm not going to give out anything that isn't revealed elsewhere or isn't common knowledge.   


Okay, so here's some information about a few interviewees that aren't volunteered by Tectonic in The Laramie Project:

Tectonic in a Mirror

Okay, so I'm starting to have some doubt recently, and it's coming from my personal relationship to some of the analysis I've been doing on Tectonic and their techniques.  As you've probably already figured out, I think that at least part of the negative reaction following Matt's death is from the (unintended) offense Tectonic caused in Laramie by breezing in uninvited and proclaiming that the Emperor wasn't wearing any clothes.  I'm a little worried that I might be doing the same thing-- maybe not so much for the larger social good as the childish glee of getting to hit back.  In short, I really need to work out my own ambivalence about pulling a Tectonic on Tectonic.  Is it fair to pull back the curtains on them and show their faults like they did Laramie?  Am I really trying to be fair in how I see their work in The Laramie Project,  or is there some sense of 'Gotcha!' journalism going on with what I'm trying to do?  I don't believe in an "eye for an eye" system of justice or Christian theology, and I sure as heck don't want to wake up one morning and realize that's exactly what I've done here.  This isn't about "getting back" at Tectonic at all, and yet I also realize that the temptation to do so is there.  I've had a lot of negative experiences due to this play.   Stephen Belber and company did some serious soul-searching about their motives in the course of their project.  How clear are my motives, after all? 

If you've been following this blog for awhile, you'll understand that question.  Sometimes I've gotten fairly snippy with Tectonic's treatment of certain things, such as the robbery motive they effectively ignored in The Laramie Project in 2000 only to trot it out as a surprising development in Ten Years Later.  If you haven't been following this blog...  you'll understand why I'm asking this question after next week's post.

When I first plunged down this rabbit-hole and tumbled through its meandering passages, this was not one of the things I had anticipated finding out about myself.  I guess that the reason I'm blogging about this now is that I want my motives to be clear-- not because I think my motives are pure and might be misunderstood, but because I'm afraid they aren't.  I'm hoping that full disclosure will help keep me honest.  Since I've seen what happened when Laramie became a "Town in a  Mirror," I need to be sure not to visit that same kind of harsh scrutiny on others just because my own wounds still sting a little.  And, selfishly, I'm kind of hoping that you all out there can help me.

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PHOTO CREDIT:

"Goodbye, Grand Tetons," from Jeffrey Beall's Flickr Photostream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/denverjeffrey/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

The Second Casualty is the Truth: Some Thoughts on the Murder Narrative

[Our Spanish door poses a very good question: what is truth, exactly?]
[You may decide for yourself, but the door requests that you check John 18.]

Like I've said before, I did not want to hear from Henderson and McKinney when I watched The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later.   There were a lot of reasons for that which left me conflicted after the performance.  But one upside to hearing them speak, I figured, was that perhaps we'd finally hear the truth come out.  At first, when I started to think over McKinney's revelations in the play, for a moment of two I thought that we had finally heard the truth.  But the more I reflected back on the different versions I've heard and read, I realized that I don't think that was the case.  I started to see more and more holes in the new stories until I couldn't trust their version of events.  And the more I thought about it, I didn't trust what they told us in the 20/20 interview-- and they told us then that they weren't telling the truth when they talked to the cops the first time, either.  The more I mentally sorted through all this narrative debris, I started to wonder: have they ever told the truth?  And if they did, how on earth would we ever know? 

There is an old saying that in war, the first casualty is the truth.  With the two plays of The Laramie Project, we can see a similar principle at work:  Matt Shepard was the first casualty of McKinney and Henderson's rage.  The truth behind his murder, it seems, was the second.  It may be time to finally realize that of the three people who know the truth of that night, one is dead, and the other two, after so many years of rehashing this story for different purposes, have apparently lost the ability to tell us.

At this point, I feel like I can no longer treat McKinney and Henderson as capable of telling me anything about what happened on that night.  If there was ever any truth there, it's lost.  All that leaves me with is to see their stories as just that--  narratives they tell us.  Each narrative is an attempt at a relationship between them and their audience, told for a specific purpose.  Certainly, each narrative contains elements of the truth, but we have so few tools to help us discern what the truth is that the forensic truth of what happened that night might just be gone forever.  All we can do is look at these different narrative strains and evaluate them for their purpose and effectiveness.  What are the advantages to telling each story, and how were these narratives applied?  What were the perpetrators responding to when they told each story? 

A Piece of Rope

I've been thinking a lot recently about what we learn in the Epilogue from Henderson and McKinney about Matt's murder.  I saw some interesting things come out of those two interviews, such as McKinney's sociopathic lack of sympathy and the way Henderson believes he's eternally helpless over his own fate.  Tonight I guess that I'm interested in something else entirely: in the Epilogue, Henderson and McKinney's stories about who tied up Shepard to the buck fence simply don't line up.  This isn't entirely surprising; it would make at least the second time that McKinney has changed his story about that night.  It's easy enough to just assume that they're both lying, but what if one or both of them are sincere?   If we picture that scene eleven years ago, who was holding the end of that piece of rope? 

Getting into the vagaries of personal memory usually makes me want to beat my head against a wall because the more I read into the psychological and philosophical perspectives on memory, the murkier it gets.  Right now, I tend to side with St. Augustine; in his view, all of our experience, past and future, only exist on the "knife's edge" of the present.   Since the past can never exist except as a memory in the present, we can only access them in the present-- by reaching through our current perspective and experiences to grasp at the point in the past.  The past becomes, in a sense, eternally colored by all the things which proceeded from that point and our current, present experience.  When it comes to memory, you really can never go home again; just as our present eternally changes, so does our perception of the past along with it.

But what can this tell us about the extent of Henderson's culpability in Matt's murder?  Probably nothing factual; but we might, however, tease something out about the narratives McKinney and Henderson have told themselves over the last ten years since their convictions.  This single piece of rope, stretched through ten years of retrospect-- tied by whom, and in what manner-- can tell us a lot about the nature of our memories, and perhaps how McKinney and Henderson try to understand their own histories as well.