The 2006 Production of "The Laramie Project" in Appalachia

Laramie Project 33, originally uploaded by rogerchoover.

If you'd like to see some stills of the well-acted undergraduate performance of TLP back in 2006 that sent me into a minor panic attack, Rocher Choover here at my college has put up a good series of stills from the performance. You can click on the picture above to follow it to his Flickr Photostream and the set for The Laramie Project.  (He also has sets for their other major performances, including Tommy, Flyin' West, Copenhagen and A Christmas Carol). 

This picture is from early on in the play, and (I think) depicts the Tectonic Theater crew discussing their upcoming project. The tall kid with the black hair with his hand on the chair is the actor who played Jed Schultz in the performance, and he interpreted his part close to the real Jed that it was really kind of scary. If memory serves, he was barely a sophomore when he did this performance. 

Looking through these pictures again actually made me feel a little queasy and jittery. But for you, I think they would be a helpful guide for picturing the nature of this second performance. Enjoy!

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...

Fosco Lives! Talks about visiting the fence

California Blogspot blogger Fosco (of Fosco Lives!) drove through Wyoming back in 2006 and went to visit the fence site.  He wrote up his experience (and a short reaction to Beth Loffreda's book) on his blog later.  Actually, if you'd happen to like the perspective of an intellectual hedonist driving through the most desolate patch of Western Americana, Fosco's writeup of the entire trip makes for some hilarious (and scathing) social commentary.  But, his perspective on the fence is interesting, and it's one of the last references I've found so far to the fence actually being up.

Since I recently wrote on the fence, I thought I'd include it here.  You can visit the page at:
http://foscolives.blogspot.com/2006/07/my-laramie-project.html

Let me warn you ahead of time: Fosco writes for mature readers with a sharp sense of humor (and he gets very sharp with the west).  Don't wander by the way if you can't handle it...

No Fog West Theater Company: Doing TLP in Wyoming

So how far would you be willing to go in order to stage a production of The Laramie Project in the state of Wyoming?  No Fog West Theater was started when a Sheridan high school student wanted to perform The Laramie Project in high school, but the play was banned for its language and explicit content.  That student went to Vassar the following year, drummed up a cast, director and financial support, and then they brought The Laramie Project to Sheridan, Wyoming for a two-week run at the Carriage House Theater.  They repeated the venture again in 2008, performing Talking to Terrorists.  You can read about the company's Wyoming run in the Casper Star-Tribune, linked here. 

How's that for dedication?  It's an interesting story, and you can read some of their reactions online from their blog for No Fog West; they basically only write during their summer performance season, so there are posts from their 2007 and 2008 seasons. 

It seems that they have let their website domain expire, but you can also track them via Facebook.  Definitely check them out!

How Geoffrey Chaucer Changed My Life

As you know, I've spilled a little bit of ink giving my own relationship between academia and my home culture the talking cure, especially because I've not had a lot of luck integrating the two in any meaningful way.  A lot of times I feel like I'm trying to walk down the top of a split-rail fence without falling into a pond on one side or concrete on the other.  In particular, it's been hard making my family understand why on earth I'm still in college twelve years after high school and training to be a medievalist of all things.  I really have a hard time trying to make my life in academia useful and relevant to theirs. 

Well, the other day I got a phone call from my brother "Coyote" during dinner.  He lives in Laramie and, after about a ten year hiatus, he's finally going back to school at the University of Wyoming. He's had a few lumps and bruises, but at this point, he's doing pretty darn well.  He and I have always had a fraught relationship, but in the last five years or so it has settled out to a pleasant formula: three parts sarcasm and one part vinegar.  But, you need to understand: my brother never calls anybody.  In fact, Coyote's name pops up in my cell phone as "The Invisible Man."  If he's calling me, it's because he wants something. 

So, I pick up the phone and tell him, "Well, hi, Coyote, what's up?" and he says, "Hey, Jackrabbit, so I'm writing this paper on Chaucer's Clerk in The Canterbury Tales, and it was due forty-five minutes ago, and I'm completely stuck and can't get this paper finished.  What do I do?!"  So, I long-distance coached him over the phone for almost an hour about his paper and helped him get his ideas straight.  As it turns out, he wasn't stuck as he thinks he was; he had some awesome observations, but he needed somebody to tell him he was on the right track and fill in a little cultural context he hadn't gotten in class yet.

Coyote and I had the longest conversation we have probably had about anything since the road trip after my grandmother died last March, and about medieval society and biblical exegesis in "The Clerk's Tale" of all things. He was genuinely interested; and I was genuinely happy to help him out. 

When we were done, he said, "Okay, little sister, I better hang up and write this thing finally.  Thanks for your help."
"No problem, Coyote," I said.  "Anytime."  There was a brief pause on the other end of the phone.
"I always knew I'd figure out something you were good for eventually," he wisecracked.  "Catch you later."   And then he hung up.  

I was absolutely flying with joy for the rest of the night.

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?