A Little Piece of Laramie

So: I would just like to announce for the world that, not only did I see another performance of The Laramie Project, my first since 2006, I didn't have a total mental breakdown this time.  As a matter of fact, it was great.  It seems that a year and a half of blogging about TLP is doing me some good: just maybe, I'm starting to heal.  Perhaps the ghost has gone and I'm no longer haunted.  It felt so good to have such a normal, healthy interaction with this play.  Everything's perfectly normal. 

I still cried a little, though. 
Not that there's anything wrong with that.  

In a lot of ways, I think that I liked the overall vision and creative performance of this crew even more than Tectonic Theater's 2000 run of the play, and there are a lot of reasons for that.  The way that this company adapted and creatively used their lab theater space allowed for a much more dynamic performance than Tectonic had done.  A lot of that is the difference between working in a lab space with creative arrangements and performing in huge, fixed-space theater halls on tour, but even more important was the kind of interaction with the audience and willingness to doubt their text that the Duke performance brought into the theatric space.  But I'll get more into that later. 

And so, thank you, Duke cast and crew, for giving me a little piece of Laramie re-created on your campus last week, and I hope the final three days' run were as magical for everyone else as Thursday was for me.  Regardless of what you think about all the arguments of "artistic license" or "accuracy" or "documentary" aspects of theater, you embodied a genuine little bit of Laramie in your performance-- and not because of your heavy research or need to get every little detail exact to the place.  Actually, it was quite the opposite.  In your willingness to let yourselves and your characters bleed together in all the strange little ways you've been talking about on your student blog, you invoked Laramie and brought it to life on the stage.  And it was awesome to watch, you all. 

I never got a chance to explain to everybody about the little pieces of Laramie's collective memory I gave you after the performance.  As you know, Matt passed away in the Sherman Hills subdivision in a barely developed area that, back then, was still full of prairie smells and and wind, the marks of its still-lingering isolation from the community.  That area of Laramie's eastern edge is named for the Sherman Range, a geologic upthrust which pushes out coral-colored mountains out of the living earth.  Sherman Hills sits right at the base of their western edge, and the Sherman Granite peeks out of the earth not too far after.

Sherman granite has a remarkable story.  This rose-colored stone was first created deep in the geologic furnace 1.4 billion years ago, but about 70 million years ago, the upthrust which created the Laramie range forced the granite back into the sunlight.  It is a brilliant pink from its high iron and feldspar content, highly crystalline, full of quartz, and it sparkles.  The crushed granite on the shoulders of I-80 glitter in the early morning sunlight.

One would think that an igneous rock made by fire and cooled in the living earth would be impervious, but Sherman granite is more vulnerable than one would think.  Over those millions of years, that granite has weathered under the winter's freezing melt, cracking it into blocks and eating its surface.  The oldest and smallest boulders, isolated from the living rock, crack easily; sometimes their surface comes apart under the push of a strong finger.  The weather has turned both Curt Gowdy State Park and Veedauwoo into castles of strangely broken granite: 

As for your little pieces of the Sherman range, I didn't want to bring you a piece of a grisly tragedy, so your rocks come from a few miles east, from where people camp and hike in a place where the granite stands tall.  I picked up pieces from one of two locations. Your rocks either came from here, deep within Kurt Gowdy where I collected my own little piece of Laramie:

This old boulder-field is deep within the park, full of lichen-covered chunks of granite, where trees and scrub twist deep in their cracks and break them apart.   I'm pretty sure I picked up a bottle of rocks right at the base of that twisted old tree. 

Or, perhaps they came from here, at my favorite star-watching spot not too far from the entrance to the park:

Laramie sparkles, doesn't it?
Thanks for bringing me a little piece of Laramie. I hope you also enjoy yours, and thank you.

--Jackrabbit

Feeling the Textures of Memory in TLP

[Hello all!  I'm starting my Renaissance field exam this weekend, and so while I'm tearing my hair out over Christopher Marlowe and John Donne, I've written a couple of posts to bide the time while I'm away.  Hope you enjoy them!]
 

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As is pretty obvious at this point, I am fascinated by memory and how people create their sense of identity from their experiences.  When I teach my research course here at the university, we use autobiographical memory as a theme that we study and learn research techniques about.  In particular, we spend time learning about how frail memory actually is, and how those memories we  use to define ourselves get molded to fit how we see the world.  If you look at the two previous blog series about my own memories of this event, that's really clear, too: my memory is riddled with inconsistencies which are often dictated by the stories I want to tell-- or want to hide-- about who I think I am.

No memory can be told without a narrative, but the contingencies of storytelling-- of audience, of intent, overall meaning, interpretation-- will invariably rework the material of memory into something else, something with a different texture than before.  And those who listen must take that narrative and reverse-engineer it to glean information, to re-create an idea of what that original, "pristine" memory once looked like.  They try to flatten out the textures of memory to make it what it once was.  And I think many would argue that such an exercise is folly.  Instead of trying to flatten out those textures, a better tack might be to run our fingers over them, feel its knap and inconsistencies as part of their makeup. 

Fear, Loathing, and "The Laramie Project": Hindsight

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He who learns must suffer

And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget

Falls drop by drop upon the heart,

And in our own despite, against our will,

Comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

--Aeschylus, Agamemnon; tr. Edith Hamilton

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Okay, so all bets are off: this is memory stuff no longer any fun.  It seriously sucks.  

Just like I did with my first posts on my personal memory, I wanted to look back through my memories of 2000 to 2009 and see if I could find any similar lapses in memory like I saw in my first stories.   This little exercise, however, has led to some seriously personal introspection that I didn't want to have to do.  If you therefore don't want to read any extremely personal and depressing revelations about the Jackrabbit, then by all means read no further in this post.  Consider yourself duly warned.  

 Anyhow, I figured that, since these memories were more recent, I wouldn't have quite the same problems of recollection I had earlier.  I discovered that this wasn't necessarily the case; the more recent memories have just as many vagaries, and regarding one very important omission, there's more.  Here are some things I discovered that I fudged, left out or misrepresented in my previous recollection:

Fear, Loathing and "The Laramie Project": 10 Years Later, 1500 miles away

The October 12 performance was a watershed moment for me.  For one, it was the first time I had had a healthy interaction with a TLP performance, and it was only the second time I had actually dialogued back with the play-- two plays, now. 

The performance has given me a lot to think about, a lot to question, and especially a lot for introspection.  This blog entry is my first attempt to try and work through what the play experience was like from my observer's perspective.   

I hadn't really slept since the Friday night before the performance.   Adrenaline kept me moving through most of Sunday when I chatted with the cast, but by Monday I was absolutely dragging.  I was actually in the middle of an LGBTA meeting right before I left for the performance site and nervous as heck.  (Yes, I'm a straight, conservative evangelical who's actively involved in the LGBT community-- please, just... deal with it.)  This week, I was catching up with a friend I'll call "Lucas"  while everyone else chatting about the National Coming Out Day activities and were planning on seeing Milk that evening on campus.  "Lucas" and I whispered back and forth confidentially in the middle of the hubbub; he'd had an absolutely miserable weekend.  

"I've got to run to the play," I finally said when I couldn't wait any longer.  "I'll catch you later."  My friend gave me a funny look.
"You okay, hun?"  He asked.
"This play scares the hell out of me,"  I confessed.  Naturally, this confused him.  You see, I had never told anyone in that room except the club president my history before. 
"Why would it scare you?"   He asked.  So I came out with it to my friend "Lucas" right there. He was dumbfounded.  "Lucas" gave me a bear hug to comfort me before I left, and then I slipped out the back door.    

Fear, Loathing, and "The Laramie Project": Narratives

After the 2006 production of TLP at my college campus, I continued to teach the play; but, but following that traumatic evening, my pedagogy changed.  For one, I adopted instead a much more autobiographical focus in my classroom.  Our department allows us to pick themes for our 101 and 102 English classes, so I picked autobiographical memory for mine.  Actually, "Memory and Atrocity" might have been a better name for my class; in addition to TLP we generally read Maus and study the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (a "semester of depression," one student quipped).  I've taught Jane Taylor's Ubu and the Truth Commission alongside TLP before, which had unpredictable but interesting results.  (Comparing TLP with autobiographical theater in South Africa is a rich, rich field of study I'm trying to research-- but more of that later.)

In my course, we read TLP as a reservoir of a crafted, collected (as opposed to collective) memory of Matt's murder, and we talk about the strengths, pitfalls, and limitations of memory to capture a specific moment in time.  We read TLP to look at the collective understanding of Matt's murder, the whys and hows of how people remember, and why personal memory is such a powerful tool for social change.  This would ultimately be good training for me, psychologically speaking, because I would have to face this play one more time:  the October reading of The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later.

Fear, Loathing and "The Laramie Project": Haunted

I left Laramie in 2001 for the other side of the country.  I was recently married and my husband had a promising job lined up, so I was destined to finish my English degree at a small college in the deep South that smelled like mildew and looked like the set from a Civil War romance.  Once I left Laramie, however, I started to get an idea of what the rest of the country knew about Laramie and how the media, and how The Laramie Project as well, had colored their impression of us.  For the next eight years, it felt like every other new relationship I started also had to start with a defense of my home state.  I feel like ever since I left the Rockies I've been haunted-- haunted largely by this play.  Much of my own struggle to contend with the issues surrounding Matt's murder really come down to how I contend and find peace with The Laramie Project, but as you'll see from my story, that attempt to find peace is still very much a work in progress...

Fear, Loathing and "The Laramie Project": the 2000 Production

Now that I have explained my relationship to the Matt Shepard tragedy and the two trials, I need to explain the next phase.  My story doesn't really end with the conviction of Matt's killers; it continues through my experience with The Laramie Project to the reading of Ten Years Later.  A lot of my fear and loathing really comes out in relation to the play than anything else-- so I suppose that is what I'll have to explain next: my first experience riding out the shock waves of that earthquake of a play produced by Tectonic Theater.   

Before the 2000 Tectonic performance in Laramie, I never really considered myself "traumatized" by what had happened after Matt's murder. It was merely a headache, one among many. After all, I never knew Matt; In comparison to other people like "Sascha," who was his friend and was still hurting two years later, what right did I have to bear those kinds of psychological wounds?

Besides, I had bigger problems: screwing up the relationship I was in; trying to deal with seeing what was left of a suicide jumper from the top of my dorm; worrying about my brother dropping out of college and getting into trouble and my sister still trying to deal with the wreckage of a messy divorce; the death of a favorite high school teacher in a car wreck; running into spiritual questions I couldn't answer. The Shepard incident and the media problems seemed to be just one minor problem of a whole host of other issues that hit much closer to home and consumed much more of my attention.

Down the Rabbit-Hole: It's my memory, darn it!

So, I've been looking back on the first four parts of my personal memory this past week, ruminating on the way I've told this memory.  A few weeks ago, before the Christmas break, I checked that memory against some kind of official record (newspaper articles and my student papers) and teased out a few inaccuracies in my personal memory.  I also gave a few suggestions as to why some of those inaccuracies probably crept into my memory.  I suggested that the kind of story I'm telling (in this case, largely a coming-of-age story) was dictating to a certain extent what details I recalled and the order I told them in.

When I looked back at my personal memory a second time, I think I may have found a second narrative framework (called a schema in psychology) that may be unconsciously dictating the form of my memory, and it's not a very surprising one: The Laramie Project.  And for some reason, this annoys the heck out of me.  Let me give you a run-through and see what you think...

Down the Rabbit-Hole: Hindsight

 Whoever said that hindsight is 20/20 probably never studied memory.   If anything, hindsight needs bifocals and blinders.  On the one hand, memory is extremely susceptible to the decay of time; the details slowly get effaced, warped and rearranged.  But there's also problems in the way we record memories in the first place.  You see, ever since I did some digging into the cognititve/ psychological aspects of autobiographical memory for the class I teach, I've become extremely sensitive to the vagaries of memory and the way in which we schematize our stories for different purposes.  In layman's terms, we have to fit our memories into stories-- and the story format we use to make our memories make sense can change the details we remember.  For instance, Schacter's The Seven Sins of Memory and Memory Distortion are great reads for the general reader-- but they'll make you a little bit hesitant about what you say you "know" you can remember.  On a more abstract level, James Young's book The Texture of Memory gives a wonderful case study of how we put those memories to use and build a sense of our histories and identities.  His book focuses specifically on Holocaust memorials, and it's fascinating.

One of the little exercises I have my students do in class is to research a personal memory; they do interviews to get three different perspectives on the same event and then compare them to see where the differences lay.  A lot of times the differences are just a matter of emphasis, but many find substantial errors in one version of their memory.  One student a couple years ago discovered that her childhood memory of a fishing trip was, in a phrase, a complete fish story.  She put people in the story who weren't there, changed locations, events... everything.  She concluded that she had told the story so many times since she was a kid that the story became what she remembered and not the actual event.  She was extremely interested to discover this so many years later. 

I thought I'd try the same thing by researching a little bit to see if I can find holes in my own narrative.  Now that I've told my story and have had a bit of time to reflect upon the version I told you, here's a list of the places where I think my mind might be playing tricks on me.  Some of them aren't very important.  Others make a lot of difference.  I'll be interested to see what others think:

Down the Rabbit-Hole: Jackrabbit's Story, Part 4

You know, up until three years ago, I was extremely resistant to admit that the Shepard murder had any profound or lasting impact on my life. I'm not entirely sure even now why that was the case; I think maybe it was because how much the whole experience left me jaded and worn out. It probably also had to do with denial; it didn't hit home until I saw a TLP performance just how psychologically battered the whole mess had left me, and the less I thought about everything, the better.

But Matt's death, and the trials, did leave a lasting impact on me. Like it or not, the worldview I had inherited from my conservative parents and my farm-born grandparents was undergoing a sea change. In a lot of ways, I still consider myself more of a conservative on some things, but I was rapidly turning into a rabid egalitarian when it came to issues of human rights and tolerance. When I later became a believing, evangelical Christian, I took those lessons with me into my faith; I moved progressively away from the staunch, legalistic individualism of my Western American upbringing (and the Baptist Faith and Message) to something much more closely akin to Desmond Tutu's ubuntu theology.  I can't deny that these years following Matt's death have been a major influence for all of that.

Down the Rabbit-Hole: Jackrabbit's Story, Part 3

You know, I'm not really sure where the next place I should go with this should be. There was a pretty long hiatus between the insanity of the first weeks, the arraignment of Henderson and McKinney, and then the news reports, but that doesn't mean that time was calm. Someone in our program died in a wreck in Telephone Canyon, which was extremely tough for some of the upper classmen. I went home for Thanksgiving for the first time since I had started college and all hell broke loose. It seems like everyone except me and my parents were drinking like fish, and we all spent most of our time yelling at each other.   I retreated into my books instead, reading Wise Blood and The Violent Bear it Away, and I marveled at how O'Connor's spiritually distorted, disjointed world looked a lot like the one I was living in.  Over winter break I tore into more Nabokov and tried my hand at some Faulkner.  Quentin Compson hit just a little too close to home, so I put The Sound and the Fury away for a little longer, until I took modern literature with Dr. Loffreda. 

That spring hit us with a dizzying salvo of personal tragedies. Russell Henderson's trial and plea bargain had to compete with a suicide jumper from the 12th floor of White Hall and one of the more ridiculous bomb threats ever concocted. The Columbine shooting was that spring as well, and some of my fellow band students from the Littleton area were devastated. I have a vague memory of Henderson's sentencing sometime around the suicide and just before the Columbine shooting, but it's not very clear to me at all.

Down the Rabbit-Hole: Jackrabbit's Story, Part 2

One of the interesting things I've started to notice about trauma is the need to talk-- to talk to anybody, it seems. The few short days between Matt's assault and the night when he died were almost consumed with people talking-- about the beating, about sexual orientation and violence. That was the week I think I heard the word "hate crime" for the first time, and probably "homophobia," too. There was a sudden need to try and talk through the trauma, I guess in hopes of making it fit into how we saw the world.  But that's the problem with trauma-- it doesn't fit into how we see the world at all.  We can't just fudge it around until it squeezes into our sense of right and wrong.  For most of us, however, talking ended up being impossible anyhow because of the descent of the national media, and whatever dialogue that was happening after the beating promptly vanished.

Down the Rabbit-Hole: Jackrabbit's Story, Part 1

So, part of what I've been trying to do as I think through The Laramie Project is to reflect back on how much I can actually remember of Matt's murder and the events before Tectonic Theater showed TLP in Larmie in 2000. To be honest, for a long time it was something I didn't like to think about; as a result, many memories are gone, and others are now colored by later events or Tectonic Theater's portrayal. Besides, it's hard to put myself in the shoes of an eighteen-year-old again. I have resisted actually telling this to anybody up to this point because it just felt too narcissistic and self-indulgent, but it's going to be hard to talk about the creation of memory and the constructed nature of identity in a play like TLP if I'm not willing to explain my own.

And part of it is the fact that I'm nervous.  I've had my fingers clamped around this story in a vise grip since 1998.  That grip didn't loosen up until 2006, and this year was the first time I tried setting it loose.  It's time to let this one go.  

Okay, so bear with me-- I've only ever explained all this clear through twice. I blundered through telling the whole thing to a very patient and understanding member of the TLP: Ten Years Later cast locally, and then I chatted with some other members of the cast a few days later. Now, I feel like I need share it to a larger audience.  I still don't feel totally ready to do this, but I have decided that personal blogs are supposed to be a little bit self-indulgent anyhow so what the heck. Here goes...

Why the hell am I doing this again?

Okay, right now nobody is actively crawling this blog yet, which means that I'm more or less still blogging under the covers with a flashlight and nobody's listening.  So, in this moment of silence, I'm starting to panic: do I want to pull the plug on all this?   Do I really want to bear my soul to the cold scrutiny of the Internet?  Moreover, while the Internet is deep enough to allow some anonymity, Wyoming is not.  I swim in pretty shallow waters back there, and there's no good place to hide.  I can only run so fast before my own story catches up with me.  If I'm as honest with everyone as I really want to be, I will have to give everyone enough information to finally corner and catch the Jackrabbit if they want to.   And, while getting picked up by the ears and getting unmasked won't harm my career, it'd certainly strain my relationship with my parents, who would hardly approve of this sort of thing: good plainsmen don't air their family's dirty laundry for just anybody to hear.  So far, the risks seem to outweigh the reward. 

So please excuse me while I scream and wring my hands a little backstage before the curtain goes up.  Somebody tell me, why the hell am I doing this again, please?... 

First Thoughts: It's More than Just a "Project"

I guess a good way of explaining why I felt the need to start a weblog about The Laramie Project would be with an anecdote. I was walking with a friend to grab some dinner a few weeks ago when he cheerfully replied to something I said with the quip, "Well, tie me to a fence and pistol-whip me." I felt like he slugged me in the stomach. To my friend, who is an out gay male, that image is little more than a cultural reference used just a little too casually among his like-minded friends. To me, I can't see that image in my head without seeing Matt Shepard's face right in front of me and revisiting everything that happened afterward. My friend had no clue how badly that quip shocked me because at the time, I had never told him that I was there.

You see, I am one of thousands of media casualties left over from the journalistic onslaught in Laramie from 1998 to 1999, when we were caught in the crossfire of journalists, protestors, and pundits who descended on our campus and consumed our lives. I was a freshman in college in Laramie, Wyoming when Matthew Shepard was beaten to death; Matt and I never knew each other-- we merely shared a co-incidence of friends-- but his death, and the media conflagration and protests that followed, defined my early adulthood. Whether I like it or not, Matt Shepard changed my politics, my morals, and my sense of identity in ways I'm still trying to sort out. And every time that event is invoked, it brings up the angst and personal trauma of my freshman year back in my face, and the shock of it paralyzes me.

As you imagine, this makes The Laramie Project nearly impossible to watch. I've only put myself through two performances of the original version, Tectonic Theater's Laramie performance in 2000 and a university production in 2006; both times I swore I'd never do it again because I keep having panic attacks. And yet, I'm obsessed with this play in ways I can't even begin to understand. I can't watch it without bawling, but I've taught it to my freshman for three years running now. And I keep reading all the secondary literature on the play even though I can't bring myself to watch the HBO movie.

I more or less forced myself to go to a local production of The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later in Appalachia on October 12 after some chatting with the local director and the cast. The performance was beyond amazing; the way that the cast resonated with their characters was electrifying. It has been three weeks now since the revelations of the new addition, and I am still reeling. I really don't know what to do with everything I'm trying to think through. After all the personal growth and self-reflection this play has caused me to undergo, I should think that I would owe Moises Kaufman and Tectonic Theater my gratitude. So why on earth do I resent it so damn much?

After the performance, I've tried to get these things out of my head and on paper, but I don't really seem to be getting anywhere with it-- and it's eating up all of the time I'm supposed to be using to, you know, be a graduate student. I'm supposed to be studying for my exams. I'm supposed to be learning French. I'm supposed to be working on an article about a fifth-century Spanish priest nobody's heard of. But instead, I just keep thinking about The Laramie Project-- and about memory, and the way we write history, and how the things we use to define ourselves and who we are is so vexed, so full of contingencies. I also think about trauma, and the need to tell our stories in an attempt to make meaning from tragedy, and whether or not that's always a good thing.

So is that the project here? I think maybe that's what I'm doing-- I need to tell my own story in an attempt to make sense of things that can't be grasped. I need to think aloud about the work of art that has, to be blunt, messed with my freaking head for eight years now-- and not always in a good way. And I think that I can't be the only one out there.

Actually, I know I'm not the only one. To all of you out there who might be reading this: what is your relationship to this more-than-just-a-play? What is your own attachment to it that defines (willingly or not) a part of who you are? I've talked to LGBT people, actors, directors, and westerners who all have some kind of unique stake in the play as a part of one of its many communities. Only a few of those people were interviewees for Tectonic or had any kind of attachment to Matt Shepard. And yet, the play connects with them just as strongly, and it makes unfair demands of them just like it does of me. What are your thoughts on how the play portrays, and questions, how Laramie sees itself-- and how does it do the same with how we construct our own communities and identities? How does its nonfictional basis change how we relate to it as audience members? And do you have the same sense of angst, or frustration or ambivalence, about this play that I do?