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.
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
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.
