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.

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?   

Scatter Plots, cont: Fudging the Data

Okay, so in my previous post I basically pulled the rug out from under a few (vaguely) identified people in the original Laramie Project in order to show one thing: this play represents the university side of the social divide a lot more heavily than it does any other.  I guess that the next question would be this:  does this matter?

In one important way, it does.  And in one important way, it doesn't.  That's what I'd like to go through with you today. Before we go on, though, I'd like to beg your attention to one thing:  you can't read this post alone because you'll get a distorted view of my opinion.  Definitely read the next two posts too, so you can get the full picture.

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Now that I'll tell ya, here in Laramie there is a difference and there always has been.  What it is is a class distinction.  It's about the well-educated and the ones that are not.  And the educated don't understand why the ones that are not don't get educated.

--Marge Murray in TLP (2000): 16

Henderson and Pasley live in a rural, windswept trailer park amid weeds, engine parts, fishing tackle, and barking dogs. A neighbor, John Gillham, 21, said the couple generally kept to themselves.

About a thousand people attended a candlelight vigil Sunday night near the University of Wyoming campus to show their support for Shepard.

-- AP Online report, Oct. 12, 1998

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Just past First Street in Laramie there is a huge railway switching station that divides the town in two; it's enormous, with the parallel tracks stacked up for at least the width of a city block.  Alison Mears and Marge Murray talk about their own connection to the rail yard in detail.  My own connection to the yard is a little different. I used to spend a lot of time out there when I was a freshman; there's a catwalk that goes over the tracks right next to Coal Creek Coffee Company, and I used to stand on that bridge to watch the trains go by so I could clear my head. Those tracks literally divide the town into two stations, the well-heeled university town and the proverbial "wrong side" of the tracks, West Laramie.

West Laramie used to be the housing block for railroad workers, mechanics and day-laborers, and the houses can be small, gentrified and shabby.   In reality, the distinction is more metaphorical than anything; some of the apartments that the university and Tech students rent on the east side get pretty run-down, too (Laramie has a bit of a college housing problem), but that's not the identity stuck on the other side of town.  For me, the tracks delineate that divide between "town and gown" in Laramie fairly effectively: the university represents wealth, intellectualism and (to the town people) class snobbery and intellectual elitism, and West Laramie represents poverty, conservatism and (to the university) social disorder, intolerance and ignorance. 

So, how bad is that divide between "town and gown" in Laramie?  Well, it's pretty distinct, and the angst on both sides can be bitter.   To be straight with you, this distinction is one I've struggled with for most of my career.  The phrase "oil field trash" might not mean much to you, but it does to me.  My father was a roustabout for an oil company most of my life.  When I got to college, I found out that my lived experience as the daughter of said oil company field hand didn't fit in with most of my white-collar, middle-class classmates and teachers, and I burned with anger every time I heard someone at the college talk about the laboring classes as "those people" or "ignorant" or "trash."  In reality, my father reads more, and reads more closely, than most of the grad students I've met-- and he's also a better poet.   When a beloved and revered professor of mine referred apologetically to my family as "white trash,"  I had to fight not to burst into tears of rage.  This divide hits a little too close to home for me. 

It's also a divide that has split my family.  When I lived in Laramie, both my siblings at some point were living in West Laramie while I lived on the campus, as my brother dropped out of college for personal reasons and my sister was working as a foreman for a traffic control subcontractor.   Our daily lives looked nothing alike, and since I was fulfilling my parents' aspirations for a college grad in the family and they weren't, my parents unfairly preferred me to them.  And, since they felt the bite of that class antagonism that they perceived coming from the campus, they often saw me as part of the same society and bit back.  My sister was convinced for a while that I judged her because she worked construction and her job was "dirty."  My brother constantly got into verbal sparring contests with me to prove that he was smarter than I was (although I've never questioned that).  Although it took several years of hard work on both sides, this rift has healed quite a bit.  In addition, my sister now holds a degree of her own and my brother is back in college; knowing how hard they've both fought to get there, I'm super-proud of them both.

So, that's how I've experienced this divide between "town" and "gown."  This same kind of tension between myself and my own siblings eventually turned into part of the problem after the Shepard beating: Matt was a college kid from a wealthy family, the "gown" side of the debate if you will.  Henderson and McKinney were from the other side of the tracks in the west, part of the "town."  The distinction couldn't have been scripted any better to create class anxiety.  And, since I don't feel like Tectonic was able to break in to the "town" side very effectively, it might actually exacerbate the situation a little bit.  I'm worried that the "town" feels like that the "gown" is judging them for their faults, something that I've outlined a little already in "Failure to Engage."

These non-identified people-- Lockwood, Woods, and Slonaker--  speak at crucial moments in the play, and to important changes in the community.  Lockwood realizes through the media slam that the community's ideals breed violence (46); Woods sees his dream of support for the gay community come true (63-64).  And Slonaker?  Well... he's Slonaker.  He's our voice of reason almost, the universal gay male experience who can stand back and look at the progress of the community critically, exploding its myths. 

Whether or not you see these characters as "inside" or "outside" the university can make a lot of difference.  For example, here's a little trick I like to play on my students: I have them put together a character sketch of Harry Woods based upon the information given in their edition of the play in preparation for acting his part.  I have them map out his position in the community and his acceptance within it, his career, life experience-- some students even go so far as to speculate where he got that broken leg and who they'd recruit to play his part.  The results are pretty stunning.  Every single group except for two (both extremely skeptical) placed him on the extreme edge of the Laramie society with no community where he finds acceptance, and he's in the laboring class, and that broken leg is often a work injury.  (One group even put him in a plaid shirt and jeans, which of course made me giggle.)  When I tell them that he's an actor and staff of the Fine Arts department, the characterization completely changes, mostly because they realize that he has a community in which he feels accepted and can find fulfillment. Then, I'm afraid, their characterizations of Harry become a tad less sympathetic.  

So, naturally, my students come up with a completely different character sketch of that dour-faced fellow I'd see in the Fine Arts building almost every week before my Wind Ensemble rehearsal.  Actors who play Harry run into the same thing, apparently.  I had the privilege to chat with the actor who played both Jed Schultz and Harry Woods from the 2006 production of TLP after the show, and I asked him how he constructed a character for Harry.  (It wasn't too far afield of my students' analysis).  Then I told him who Harry was, and he was really surprised; when I asked him if he would have portrayed Harry differently if he'd known his occupation, this actor said, "Heck yeah.  That really changes things."  He then told me how he believed that knowledge altered Harry's placement in the community and whom he speaks for. 

So is this a problem, I ask again?  I've already outlined how it is a problem in the way it exacerbates the class antagonism in Laramie.  If you're a Laramie resident and you know that these enlightened and more judgmental opinions are coming from the university (like so much of the rest of the play), this play really could feel like just another attack by the intellectuals on the mores of the society at large.  I can only imagine that people like my siblings, who know who Harry Woods is (and didn't like him) would have listened to Harry give his lines back then and reject what he has to say because of whom they think he represents.  In their minds, Harry doesn't represent them.  He represents others.  And covering up that fact in the play to them would just feel like deception. 

So, did Tectonic realize this problem?  Belber says they did, and that's part of why (I think) these people labeled as "residents" aren't identified by occupation like most of the other interviewees are.  I see a need on their part to have more of a universal voice for certain opinions-- like Jeff Lockwood's realization that "we really do grow children like that here"  and Harry Wood's relief and gratitude at seeing the cold war between straight and gay thaw a little at the homecoming parade.  They really needed those opinions to come from the community as a whole and not just from university professors and actors.  So that's what they became-- Laramie residents.  They flattened out the specificity of these people to remove their "gown" association on the "town and gown" conflict to make them, as Laramie residents, speak for the whole community and not just a part.  They effectively hide it.

So there's a really good reason to want to provide that kind of class anonymity for some voices, and that's what I'd like to look at in my final post on this topic.

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PHOTO CREDITS:

1)  The footbridge  across the tracks, Laramie WY, courtesy elmada's Flickr photostream:

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

2)  Looking north from the footbridge, courtesy elmada's Flickr photostream (same license as above.)  

3)  Coal Creek Coffee Company in Laramie, WY, courtesy elmada's Flickr photostream (same license as above.)

4)  The Laramie rail yard, courtesy of ChiaLynn's Flickr Photostream: 

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

Scatter Plots: Of Angst and Ethnography

In the beginning of The Laramie Project, one of the company members, Amanda Gronich, expresses a little bit of dismay at the task in front of them:"I've never done anything like this in my life.  How do you get people to talk to you?  What do you ask?" (10).   She's got a valid point.  I suppose that most people think it's a simple matter of just walking up to somebody and asking a few questions, but I'm getting  a better idea of how hard doing that can actually be.  The kind of information you get from an interview depends heavily upon the kind of relationship that the interviewer and interviewee have built between each other, and most subjects are reluctant to volunteer intimate details or make themselves vulnerable to a person whom they don't trust.  In a sense, they were working with the wrong model; they kept talking about themselves as acting like journalists, but some of them (Belber, at the very least) unconsciously start acting more like ethnographers.  Belber, for instance, is painfully aware of his relationship to the people he interviews.  That's part of what pleases me about Tectonic Theater: the kinds of conversations they managed to have with some of these people hints at the creation of a close and trusting relationship between themselves and their interviewees, and they managed to do that in just six visits. 

But how do you get people to talk to you?  I have a very good friend here at the university who is a graduate student in RWL.  Her main emphasis is composition and pedagogy with an ethnographic focus, and she's very interested in academically studying how students from her own cultural background learn how to negotiate in a college environment.  I watched her comb our campus and other colleges in the area trying to find undergraduates who wanted to be interviewed, but after months of fruitless effort, unanswered phone calls and IRB limitations, she had to scrap her original topic for something else.  Now she's drawing her study subjects from among friends and colleagues who fit within the same demographic. 

My friend "Colleen" has been heavily trained in the techniques, ethics and processes of ethnographic inquiry, and even she couldn't break in to the undergraduates' lives enough to convince them to speak to her.  She's even an "insider"; she comes from the same background as these students.  So she had to back up a little and work with people she could count on and who were already comfortable talking with her.  She needed to find people whom she could trust and could also trust her, and that took a prior relationship.

So, what does this have to do with The Laramie Project?  Quite a bit, actually.  "Colleen" discovered how hard it was to break into the lives of a community of people (in her case, college undergraduates) without prior connections; I anticipate that Tectonic had the same problems when they approached a hurting and traumatized community very much aware of how outsiders saw them. 

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:

Blog link: Read Jonas Slonaker's Editorial, Interview, and More!

[Update: I think I have the link fixed now.  Sorry for the annoyance!]

The blog Ten Thousand by the Fourth of July is a blog o' potpourri: some poetry, personal reflections, reviews...  a little bit of everything.  It's run by Pennsylvania based blogger CA Conrad, who is also a cousin of Laramie resident Jonas Slonaker.  Conrad interviewed Slonaker after Tectonic interviewed him for The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later back in October 2008, and attached are a list of personal reminisces about life in Pennsylvania and the struggles of their family.  It's utterly fascinating, people.   

Okay, so you already know that I've always harbored a soft spot for Jonas Slonaker in the play, mostly because he's so honest and straightforward about how he sees the world, and he's resistant to happy endings.  This interview, and the personal information attached, only makes me like the guy a little bit more. There's info on everything from the HBO movie to the limo driver interviewed for the first play. 

And, there's one more thing you should know: the full text of that letter to the editor that the Boomerang refused to run is in the post, too (look near the bottom).  It's the only source I've found for it so far.  I didn't want to post it on my own site because that felt like cheating.  So, go!  Read! Look for yourself! 


http://tenbyfour.blogspot.com/

Online articles about TLP from American Theatre

The Theatre Communications Group has two good articles for research on The Laramie Project.  Their publication American Theatre has two good feature articles about The Laramie Project available for reading online.  One is a background piece about the process of creating the play, and the other is a short explanation by Kaufman himself.

Browse down to the May/June 2000 issue on the link above to find both articles.

Source Citation:

Kaufman, Moisés.  "Into the West: An Exploration in Form."  American Theatre May/June 2000: 17-18.

Shewey, Don.  "Town in a Mirror."  American Theatre May/June 2000: 14+.