The Airing of Grievances, Charge 3

Okay, so it's been a while since I've kept up with my Airing of Grievances, and the Festivus season has long since ended. That's what I get for being way too busy with school since January. In any case, let us proceed through the last two installments!

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To some degree, Laramie is indeed presented as a latter-day Grover's Corners, a cozy place where everyone appears to know everyone else's business and actually finds comfort in this. But if ''The Laramie Project'' nods conspicuously to Wilder, this play is ''Our Town'' with a question mark, as in ''Could this be our town?'' There are repeated variations by the citizens of Laramie on the statement ''It can't happen here,'' followed immediately by ''And yet it has.'' 

--Ben Brantley, New York Times

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Just for fun, and because I was avoiding reading things for my second field exam, I picked up a copy of Thornton Wilder's Our Town while I was staying with Coyote in Laramie.  Although I personally love drama (my only complaint as an Anglo-Saxonist is that there are no plays) I hadn't really read any of Wilder's work before.  My previous survey courses preferred the work of O' Neill and Arthur Miller, and so Wilder was squeezed out.

I found that I enjoyed Our Town more than I thought I would.  Wilder takes a blank stage and fills it with all the imaginary geology, history and even shop fronts of a tiny New Hampshire town; then he populates that specific space with a strange allegory of individual lives.  The Webbs and the Gibbs could be any two families in America, even though we know exactly where (on stage at least) the Stage Manager positions them.  The Stage Manager even gives geographic coordinates for Grover's Corners; but its people are individuals only in how they relate to one another-- cousin, child, neighbor, parent, spouse-- and it is those relationships in the course of their lives that Wilder is interested in. 

But the reason that Our Town worked as an embodiment of the universal human experience was because it had an aura of utopia-- it seemed to be a "good place" [eu-topia in Greek] that reflected all the best parts of the American dream (and some of its problems) at the turn of the previous century.  But, more importantly, for all its specificity and regional connection to New Hampshire, it was a "no-place" [ou-topia] that had no specific cultural coloring other than the ones which Thornton Wilder wanted it to have.  Grover's Corners was a symbol; it was a specific but fictional community existing at coordinates well off the map of America which could hold all of the nation's ideals and faults in the same space and reflect them back on the culture as a whole.  That was Wilder's genius: the landscape is American and it's real, but the specific location is not. 

But Laramie, Wyoming is neither of these things, really; it has too many of its own idiosyncrasies and small town problems to really be a utopia in the sense of a good place (although it is very good.)  And it is a real location.   I know that was part of the appeal for using Laramie as a backdrop for the national dialogue on homosexuality for Kaufman, but I'm interested in the complicated mess it makes of things as I think about TLP.  In what way does the factual location of Laramie, Wyoming complicate the kind of theater that Kaufman's striving for?  In what ways does the town resist any translation into a symbolic space, and is it a good idea at all? 

I would hereby like to submit charge number three in the Airing of Grievances:

3. Laramie is not Our Town. 

We need to understand that this is, in some ways, an unfair question.  Of course Laramie isn't Grover's Corners; it was never supposed to be.  But it's still a natural enough association I want to look at the consequences.  I don't know if this is going to be a real "grievance" by the time I'm done here, but I'm interested in what comes of it nonetheless.  And so, on to the analysis!  

The Buck Fence and Place

 Since I was in Laramie, did I go to "the spot" while I was there, some might ask?  No.  I'm not going to further that landowner's angst and resentment by trooping through his private property to gawk at a murder site.   My respect for private property is too strong to do so, and I don't need to get arrested for trespassing.  But I did drive through the Sherman Hills subdivision just to see how much it has changed in the last ten years.

As the Vanity Fair article (March '99) on the Shepard murder made clear, and as Beth Loffreda talks about in her book, Matt was murdered basically in between two subdivisions still under construction at the time; the empty field between them, stretching a little more than a half mile wide in either direction, buts up against the rolling hills of the more expensive district of Sherman Hills.  These foothills roll straight into the walls of Telephone Canyon, the Medicine Bow National Forest, and a large, beautiful state park about nine miles up the road.   

The two subdivisions couldn't be more different.  The first one is everything that gives me nightmares about subdivisions: large, overpriced houses so close together you can listen to your neighbor breathe at night, tiny yards, even less privacy...  just an upper middle-class nightmare.  It's still growing, too-- you can see dirt in some of these yards and a couple of unfinished frames at the end of the street.  (And yes, that is a throw pillow on the sidewalk.  I have no clue.)  No trees or room for lawns, but wide, overdone infrastructure: wide, paved streets, street lights, sidewalks.  I pass kids on plastic Power Wheels and playing horse with their friends in the driveways, bouncing their basketballs off of garage doors.  It's about as close to a pre-fab middle class Americana as you'd ever want to see. Give me west Laramie any day. 

Take a bit of a drive down Grand Avenue one more street to the east and you end up in Sherman Hills, which is a bit of a mixed neighborhood.  It started out as just a normal neighborhood on the edge of town, but a large tract behind it was bought by developers and turned into houses that run into the upper six figures to a low million.  The houses to the north and east of Sherman Hills are all enormous, high-windowed affairs that no one in their right mind would want to heat in the middle of the winter.  They have more rooms than most families could possibly need, and many sit right on the top of these low, rolling hills, where the view is spectacular but the raging winter winds sometimes blow hard enough to knock the fillings out of your teeth.  (This is why older homes are often nestled on slopes and low-lying areas, or alternately, have tree breaks around them.)

The houses themselves are massive, grandiose-- and yet they try to keep an "out of town" profile as well.  Unlike the area around Bill Nye, in this stretch of the subdivision there are few paved roads, and the few that are there are one-laners, winding and narrow, with no shoulder to speak of.  They're barely marked with street signs, even.  The landscaping around them is heavily manicured but natural: scrub juniper and cedars, imported granite rock, deer antlers.  One yard has a four-foot sculpture made out of what looks like old elk antlers twisting up into the air, perfectly positioned on a gently sloping hill of native grass.   The main colors are deep cedar green, prairie yellow, pink feldspar boulders accented with lichen.  There are no livestock, feed pens or horse sheds like in the liminal neighborhoods on the other side of Grand Avenue, either; you'll see no llamas here.  Offhand, I don't even see a watered lawn within eyesight. There might be some, but I'll be darned if I drove by any.

Those gravel roads aren't a sign of recent development, either; the house near the murder scene was under construction when Matt was murdered.  It was graded as a gravel road, and it has remained one still. And, every one of these enormous, beautiful houses sits on up to an acre of land.  Many of them are far enough apart to give the illusion that they have no neighbors, even though they might be just on the other side of the same hill.  While the newspaper reports used words like "lonely and "deserted" in their descriptions of this area on the night Matt died, the real estate catalog probably calls it "private" and "secluded." 

There's a strange, careful construction of identity in this area: they want to live in opulence and they want to live sequestered from the rest of town in their own private luxury, but they want to maintain the illusion of a rugged, rural existence. This isn't town space, the landscape proclaims.  And yet, it cannot really be anything else.

And yet, this is where I finally start seeing buck-and-rail fences in Laramie, Wyoming-- dozens of them, essentially, and I see some in both of these neighborhoods.  (The most are in Sherman Hills, however.)  Normally, the only place you'll ever consistently see buck fences is around state maintained areas, like city or state parks and rest areas, or around monuments like up on the Lincoln Highway just to the east.  And yet here, every fifth house or so has some kind of wooden or split-rail fence around it, and the buck-and-rail is one of the most popular I see. 

As I stare at the landscape around me and take in the aura, it strikes me how different my perception of this place is from my students, from the thousands of people who have tried to imagine what this spot is like and what that buck fence represents.   That fence wasn't there because this was the Wild West.  It was there precisely because this place wasn't the Wild West.  For me at least, the buck fence was a sign of class difference and exclusion, not small town ideals, or cowboy morality, or even rural existence.  The buck fence was there because this land had been co-opted to create a middle class utopia and an upper class getaway community; it was there because the wilderness and rural edges of Laramie were squeezed out and they wanted to create the illusion that they had never disappeared.  When look at these fences, I don't see of a story of western outlawry, but a story of two poverty-class men who kidnapped a rich kid because he was gay and murdered him on the site where the difference between them was still under construction, in the secluded red earth hills east of Laramie, on shaggy pine rails.

A Sense of Place: a note

So a few days ago I posted some thoughts about Laramie as a landscape and how Amy Tigner's sense of Laramie as a pastoral landscape might help explain how audiences may interact with Laramie as a space.  To recap, my main concern was that people from urban landscapes and are more used to seeing rural America as an "elsewhere" might have a harder time using the play for self-reflection.  

There might actually be some truth to that.  For instance, I was reading an article on a high school production of TLP in California back in 2003.  In an interview following the murder of a transgendered teen in his community, the director of the production, Dennis Kohles, made an interesting comment: 

No one was more shocked by the angry faxes [from Fred Phelps] and Eddie Gwen Araujo’s slaying than the play’s director.

“I guess I’ve lived in the East Bay too long,” said Kohles, a lifetime Oakland resident and O‘Dowd alumnus. “Our kids are very open and mature, more like college students. Some of them have gay relatives. And our religion classes here teach the kids to learn how to do a good discernment of tolerance and how people differ,” said Kohles, who remembers himself at their age as “naive.” (Abercrombie). 

I can't help but feel that he's contrasting his cast of mature young adults at his high school in Oakland to what he sees of Laramie in TLP. And, if that's the case, then he isn't seeing Laramie as a reflection of his own community; he sees Laramie as elsewhere.  That comment is particularly interesting when you know he's reacting to the murder of a transgendered teen from his own community.  If the East Bay community is full of "very open and mature" kids, then what about the four young men who brutally murdered Gwen Araujo in 2003?  It could be that's exactly what he's trying to figure out.  If that's the case, then he gets what this play is about.  Or, maybe he doesn't see the disjunction at all; it's hard to tell from the article the exact context of his comment.  If that's the case, then Laramie is still an 'elsewhere' that doesn't register as a 'here'; they don't grow children like that here.  He's lived in the East Bay too long.

But that's the awful, awful blessing of Laramie: we know.  That place is our place.  It's his place, too.  I would love to talk to this man now, six years after this high school production, that teen's murder and Phelp's picketing, and see how he reflects back on this time.  I wonder because the difficulties he's reflecting on are exactly my own.  

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My secret hope was that they were from somewhere else, that then  of course you can create that distance: We don't grow children like that here.  Well, it's pretty clear that we do grow children like that here...

-- Jeffrey Lockwood, in The Laramie Project (2001):46

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Source: 
Abercrombie, Sharon.  "'Defeating Hate' with a Play About a Killing: Local Murder Brings Matthew Shepard Story Home for Students."  National Catholic Reporter 21 Mar. 2003: 3. 

A Sense of Place: Further Thoughts

So, the reason I've been wondering about place recently is because I'm trying to figure out how The Laramie Project understands the way that the landscape and the space informs our reading of Matt's murder. Is this a really a universal landscape, or a particular one tied to the contingencies of a specific place, one that has a special significance to it?

I had a fascinating conversation shortly before the October 12 performance with a group of actors about this very issue. We were chatting about Matt's murder and the first play, and the conversation eventually turned to why Matt's murder happened to capture the national imagination and start a national dialogue on hate crimes. One group of people thought that it was how Matt died that was the major factor. This one guy in particular was emphatic that place wasn't a relevant factor: "it wouldn't matter where Matt died," he kept asserting. "We'd still be having this debate right now." This fellow was adamant about his point, and I sincerely respect his opinion; he has a good argument that I can't refute.

I and about three others, however, thought where Matt died had a lot to do with it, too. I firmly believe that, if Matt were murdered in, say, Boston, Massachusetts instead of Laramie, Wyoming, his death wouldn't have resonated with the nation in quite the same way. And I don't think we would be reading "The Boston Project."