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.

Freezing over in Hades

Well, we were warned when the New Orleans Saints made it to the Super Bowl that Hades must have frozen over.  Well, sure enough, it's happened!  We had a rather severe storm blow over our heads here in Appalachia last weekend, and I was treated to a wonderful, sloppy, wet weekend with four inches of snow.  So, to break up the Wyoming monotony a little, I went out with my camera and got a few pictures of a real winter day in the American South for you.

I had an absolute riot-- there were undergraduates everywhere doing everything from building snowmen in the quad to snowball fights to sledding down the main hill on our campus on cardboard and storage box lids.  Most of the town had to shut down for the weekend due to the slippery conditions, which meant, as a Wyoming driver, I had the roads almost entirely to myself. 

The statue you see here at the left  is the campus's main symbol, called the Torchbearer, ablaze and surrounded by snow. The heat from the torch kept the snow from building up on the statue, but it also meant that he had a drippy nose for most of the afternoon. 

This is a picture taken outside my college's library of the snow on a few early-blooming flowers.  It was a little sad this morning-- the temperature was below freezing last night, and most of the flowers were already frost-struck and turning brown.

Things were far from business as usual up at the main part of campus. Our "Old Main," if you will, pictured here, is still under renovations and currently sits empty. Nevertheless, perched on top the highest hill downtown and surrounded by snow, she makes for a lovely sight.
At the base of "The Hill," as we call it, other shenanigans were popping up.  A small group of students were sledding down the hill probably for the first time in several years.  One or two people, like these girls, had an honest-to-goodness plastic sled to running down the hill.  Others were grabbing construction debris from the renovation project-- like steel signs and industrial cardboard-- and running down the hill on them at breakneck speed, dumping themselves right in the middle of a bus lane (which, naturally, wasn't running.)  I didn't have a sled, but I had a lot of fun watching anyhow!  

So, that's how we all spent our weekend here in the South.  If you click on any of the images, you'll be directed to my Flickr photostream where you can see the other pictures I took.  As for me, now I'm crossing my fingers, hoping that the Saints win the Super Bowl-- I figure that has to be worth at least a foot of good, heavy snowfall, wouldn't you?

Shepard and TLP Reporting from the "Advocate"

For obvious reasons, the national magazine The Advocate was particularly interested in the Shepard story; they followed it longer and more thoroughly than most of the national media, and the quality of the coverage, from what I can tell, it a lot better than a lot of the other slash-and-type reporting that came out during the trials. Interviews with LGBT locals are also a lot more detailed and give more background information-- plus, they revisited the town periodically to get first-hand reports. Issue 796 has the most information if you need to get just one issue. 

For those that are interested, here is a list of some of the Advocate's best articles on the event.  Unfortunately, their online archive only goes as far back as 2008, so if you want to get these you'll need to find a source.  The Advocate is indexed by Academic Search Premier and Gale Cengage Academic OneFile if you have school access.

• "Back to Laramie." Advocate 1031 (2009): 71-74.  [About TLP: 10 Years Later]
  
• Martin, Michael. "Remembering Matthew." Advocate 1017 (2008): 28-35.  
• "Revisiting Laramie." Advocate 899 (2003): 31.  [Interviews w/ principal people 5 years later]
  
• Gross, Michael Joseph. "Pain and Prominence." Advocate 899 (2003): 26.   [Judy Shepard]
  
• Vilanch, Bruce. "Hallowed Ground." Advocate 815 (2000): 47.   [The Fence]
  
• Curtis, Phil. "More Than a Verdict." Advocate 802/803 (2000): 34.  [Sentencing; M&H's future as prisoners]
  
• Curtis, Phil. "A Town Reflects on Itself." Advocate 796 (1999): 44.  [Interviews with friends]
  
• Wieder, Judy. "The Shepard Family Heals." Advocate 796 (1999): 38.
• Bertrand, Stephen J. "Matthew Shepard One Year Later." Advocate 796 (1999): 36.
  
• Barrett, Jon. "The Lost Brother." Advocate 773 (1998): 26-30. [Interviews]
  

Fences, cont.: Memory, Tragedy and Entropy

The fence is gone.  

I can't really explain my feelings when I found out.  I saw in a photo essay shortly before watching Ten Years Later that the buck fence where Matt Shepard was beaten had been torn down, and I gasped.  From the picture I saw, it looks like it had been replaced with a single-rail,  low, log zipper fence just to mark the boundary, something I hadn't actually seen much out west.   It was a weird sensation; I had never specifically been out to the fence (I didn't want to be one of the gawkers) so I had no personal frame of reference.  And yet, taking it down felt like an affront, or admitting defeat, or something-- I don't know what.  All I know is that I didn't like it. 

My husband and I had a long conversation about the fence that evening when we were getting ready for bed.  When I told him about it, I was a little offended; it seemed like a deliberate attempt to efface Matt's memory from that area.  My husband, however, disagreed.  "Well, why shouldn't the landowner take down the fence?"  He asked me.  "It's his property." 

"Well, because he's just trying to forget what happened there,"  I grumbled.  "That's not right.  There are too many people trying to just forget it." 
"But when does the landowner get to move on?"  He insisted.  "He didn't have anything to do with this.  When can he stop having people show up unannounced on his property, respectfully or otherwise?  Does he ever get to stop having that crime brought to mind when he's on that property?  Does  that spot ever get to be something besides a memorial?"  I gave him a glare.   "Moving on doesn't necessarily mean forgetting," he insisted. 

I still don't know for sure what I think, but my husband has a point.   Just because the fence is gone doesn't mean that Matt's memory is lessened, and it might have honestly been necessary.  Let me see if I can explain to you why...

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+.

Looking at Life through Aphorisms

A fun place to visit on the Internet, I have discovered, is the blog "Out of Context," run by a fellow Blogspot blogger who goes by the name Nothing Profound.  The site is nothing but a collection of funny, quirky, and sometimes profound aphorisms that range from observations on Murphy's Law to short Nietzsche-esque quips that reveal a deep, complicated understanding of major philosophical questions.

I've heard a lot of people criticize the aphorism as a cheap, unthinking way of seeing the world, but I have to demur.  A good aphorism is a way of presenting complicated intellectual problems through the use of a single declaration that contains all its assumptions.  A really good aphorism creates a logical relationship between different ideas with grammatical constructions like parallelism or syntactic play.  A good aphorism makes you think.  Just ask King Solomon-- or William Blake.  The aphorism is a great way to start a meditation, to open up thinking-- not to shut it down.   

Anyhow, Nothing Profound has an aphorism this week that I thought I'd share with you:  

The order you seek is the confusion you feel.

If there is anything that sums up my life at the moment, this is it.  Especially my relationship to The Laramie Project and Matt Shepard's murder.  Where does my confusion stem from, and what am I actually gaining with this inquiry?  To what extent is this search for order create, rather than alleviate my confusion?  And is invoking that sense of confusion the end I'm actually seeking, something akin to Solomon's declaration that increased wisdom leads to increased sorrow?  The more I pick apart this aphorism mentally, the more appropriate to my situation it gets, and the farther down the rabbit-hole it takes me...

Fences

I grew up clambering over barbed wire, buck fences and snow fences as a kid, and in my childhood imagination I played favorites between them. I never liked barbed wire, first because I always ran the danger of a tri-corner rip in my jeans (and therefore my mother's wrath) every time I squeezed through them. It was an aesthetic dislike, too: barbed wire is too impersonal. It's a cheap fence, metal, thrown up and pounded in without the slightest thought other than to carve the wilderness into parcels. A forcible mark of ownership. And, it's hard to climb.

 

Buck fences are more conciliatory, I had always thought. They're made from the wilderness itself, more organic, lying on top of rather than punched within the ground. To me, they suggested a more symbiotic relationship between man and land, a way of showing a stretch of land as  both "home" and "habitat" at the same time.  Snow fences, however, were always my favorite because they don't actually "fence in" anything-- just long, parallel stretches of tall rails that comb the Wyoming wind to steal its snow. You climbed a snow fence just to climb, not to get anywhere.

The fences of my childhood never registered as being something worth any particular comment-- just another part of the landscape-- but living in the South has taught me to look at them differently.  For instance, it had never occurred to me that one's relationship fences might be cultural, that that relationship might need to be taught.  One of my favorite conversations so far at my new college has been trying to explain in detail how a "snow fence" works to a friend of mine from the southwest. I eventually had to resort to pictures. He was enthralled.