The Airing of Grievances: A Retrospective

I have thus laid my disappointments in The Laramie Project bare to the world and my personal Festivus has now ended; now, we need to take one step further than the regular Festivus airing.  It's time for me to reflect upon these grievances to determine which disappointments are legitimate and which are just my plaintive whining about how Tectonic did not write the play I would have wanted them to write.

I wanted to get my grievances out in the open with this series, sure, but I also wanted them to turn into something more productive (and less pathetic) than using the Internet to whine like a tragically middle class emo kid with a YouTube channel.  If I am to accomplish that, then I need to step back and look at these criticisms with a little more distance and a lot more insight.  I need to be radically reflexive, which means that I have to rigorously examine my own motives and interior monologue just as rigorously as anybody else's-- and I have to be consciously aware of that process.   If the Scripture calls us to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, then our scholarship should call us to work out our conclusions with fear and loathing.  That means it's once more time to dig deep and think hard about fear, loathing, and The Laramie Project.   

Why?  If there is anything I've learned so far from this experience, it's this:  Understand where your own perspective and prejudices come from, and act in awareness of that knowledge.  Every time.  The most inadequate (and inaccurate) scholarship sometimes comes from a failure to understand one's own personal tilt or experiences informing their scholarship in ways they don't intend.  Some of the best scholarship comes from those who do.  And, since I'm in the precarious position of being personally and emotionally tied to this event and the play it produced, I need to be extra aware of how that changes my perspective.  Know thyself, Jackrabbit, and thou shalt improve thy scholarship.  I think the world would be a better place if everybody followed that advice, and since I kind of turned Tectonic over my knee for it, I had better do it with myself, too.

So, which of these ways in which I feel like Tectonic has disappointed me are perhaps legit, and which are merely a difference of opinion or personal taste?  That's a very important question to ask, so let's see how my summation of the Grievances holds up after the jump!  

The Airing of Grievances, Charge 4

Being the Final Grievance (hooray!) Against Tectonic Theater

During this Festivus Season 

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 I was having a conversation a while back with an acquaintance of mine who also studies The Laramie Project.  Dr. F, as I'll call her, is this beautiful, crazy, wonderful, innovative rhetoric and composition professor in our department, and she's a theater fanatic on the side.  Our chat eventually wandered over to Angels in America, a play which we both love, and she started talking about staging.

 "One thing I've noticed about American theater right now," she told me, "is that most directors don't  seem to trust their audiences as much as those abroad."  I had to ask for clarification on what she meant.  "Well, take the Central Park encounter in Angels," she responded.  "When I was studying in London, I saw a production where the two actors in that liaison were on opposite sides of the stage.  They just trusted the audience to make the connection about what's going on without having to stage the action with each other or even act it out.  It made that moment of sex look as disconnected and lonely as it really was."  Having seen the Laramie production of Angels, I could really see her point, where that sexual encounter was enacted on a platform between the actor playing Louis and Jed Schultz. 

"Most of the plays I saw in London played fast and loose with the directing, which opened up the stage to all sorts of new possibilities," she continued.  "But that meant that they had to lean on the audience to make the connective leap.  I really haven't seen a lot of theater here in the States that is willing to trust their audiences quite like that."  

Trusting the audience.  Although I'm a little on the fence about her judgment of American theater, I've been mulling those words over for quite a while now.  What's more, I think I'm starting to see a connection to that idea with some of the aesthetic differences I have with The Laramie Project.  As I've been working through my "Airing of Grievances," I've started to notice a few patterns; sure, I have problems with the structure of the play and how the concept relates to Laramie as both a community and place, but there's something else here, too, that has more to do with the structure of the play itself.

I think that maybe 1) these people are incredible, brilliant, and talented writers with a clear interest in dramatic form, and 2) these form-driven dramatists are afraid to trust their audiences too much with the factually ambiguous story of Matt's murder. Perhaps, Tectonic wants to tell a story of cause/effect through Laramie's voices, but the narratives we have don't lend themselves to it, and the only way to get their voices to tell that cause/effect story is to push them that way.  This problem of overworking, strangely, has an element of narrative and truth to it, too:  Tectonic's willing to let narrative drive most of their play, so long it never gives any doubt about the forensic facts of the murder, of the cause and its effect.  A fear about the fragility of forensic truth might be forcing them to heavily edit the narrative truth. 

And so, I hereby submit my final charge against Tectonic Theater regarding their production of The Laramie Project and 10 Years Later, which I guess isn't really a bad thing at all:

#4: Trying Too Damn Hard

Maybe this is just a difference of aesthetic taste on my part, and on that note, failure to meet the needs of my literary palate shouldn't really be a grievance per se.  Nevertheless, it's a concern I want to discuss. 

Okay, so I know I keep wandering back to South Africa's apartheid past and the TRC whether it fits or not, but hey, it's the only analogue to narrative and determining truth I can comfortably speak about.  So, here goes...

The Texture of Memory Is Corduroy

[Jackrabbit is nearing the home stretch on her field exam!  In the meantime, here's part two of that conversation regarding cognitive literary studies and The Laramie  Project.  If I have any brains left after the exam, I'll rejoin you shortly.]  

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So, in my last post I shared a personal anecdote that created a little doubt about Jed Schultz's version of events regarding his parents' ambivalence to his acting career in The Laramie Project.  He claims that his duet from Angels in America was the first time his parents hadn't come to support him, but my friend "Andie" can remember lots of times that they didn't come to events because of scheduling conflicts.  So, whom do I believe?  Now that we're almost ten years down the road...  I believe them both.  Perhaps I don't believe that they both represent objective reality.  But I do believe that both versions have story truth, and without any way to determine the objective facts, that's what I have to settle for.

Here's what I mean: I thoroughly believe that this moment was the first time Jed felt disappointment in his parents; it's also the first time he had to break away from their authority and suffer the consequences.  I believe that his dismay and disappointment is real.  And, as for "Andie?"  I believe that her memory accurately represents her childhood recollections of paling around at school and church together with Jed because both of them had extremely busy parents.  Now that the objective truth can't be discovered, I have to settle for story truth.   He remembers the disappointment.  She remembers the strength of their childhood relationship in the face of parents who couldn't always be there.

So, story truth isn't the same as objective truth, but it has value nonetheless.   It's not a distinction we're normally willing to make, but it's an important one for understanding how we should approach the truth of The Laramie Project.  If we treat this play as only forensic, verifiable fact, two things will happen.  One is that people will discover that a lot of it's not "true"  and want to reject what it has to tell us.  The other is that they won't understand the depth and complexity that this play has to offer.  We have to understand that the texture of memory is uneven and full of gaps, layers and crevices.  We have to feel the textures of memory more like it's corduroy than silk.

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. 

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.