The Religious Codes of Tectonic Theater: Using Your "Inside" Voice

When people speak about certain issues, they always do it from within a limited point of view: are they looking from without or within?  Each perspective is useful in its own way, but they're not the same thing.  Whether or not you consider yourself (or your conversation partner) inside or outside of your community can really affect the way you explain your view of things. 

Religious dialogue, for instance, is one of the places where the play has the hardest time breaking into, so to speak.  This is something observed by a "bench coach" for the original TLP, Stephen Wangh.  As I pointed out in a previous post, Wangh wonders a little bit whether or not Tectonic Theater found themselves unable or unwilling to address that society's "holy protagonists," and more often than not I find that I agree with him. 

But that's not entirely up to Tectonic Theater to decide; after all, those "holy protagonists" have a say in the matter, too.  For a variety of reasons, from doctrinal to social to political, each of these people can make a choice about where to align themselves in regard to Tectonic Theater.  If we look at how different people speak about the religious community-- Unitarians, Mormons, Baptists, and Catholics-- can we see where they see themselves fitting in?  

As for me?  At one time, I was an insider in The Baptist Church.  And now, where am I?  Do I speak now as an insider or an outsider of that community?  Well, just look above for your answer...

Free Stuff! Yay!

Okay, so an important goal for this blog is to make it useful for others who are interested in The Laramie Project or Laramie, Wyoming.  One way I've tried to do that in the past has been to put together a running bibliography of useful literature on the plays.  So far, it has (rightly) been the most popular page on this blog, which makes me quite happy.

The next thing I wanted to do was provide visual materials.  It's hard to find pics of Laramie or relating to TLP that are actually, you know, usable for free.  It's mostly protected under full copyright.  There's not a lot on Flickr for Laramie that's under Creative Commons, so I took a bunch of pics while I was in Laramie this summer, and I'm currently cleaning them up and posting them.  These range from pics of the campus and the plains to a surprisingly close reproduction of the Vintage cover of The Laramie Project (which, if you've ever wondered, is the exit from I-80 onto Grand Avenue). 

You can access the ones I have up so far (and the list will be growing) at the links gadget on the right.  There's one page right now for pictures of the town of Laramie, one for the campus area, and one for landscapes.  These pages will be growing over time, so it wouldn't hurt to check back in a month or so to see what's new.

These are free for any non-commercial or editorial use, and you're free to print them without specific permission in any materials, as long as you're not specifically selling them.  (And if you do want to use them for sellable stuff, just drop me a note.)

They're protected under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons copyright, so that gives you a lot of flexibility!

To give you a sample, here's one of my more interesting photos-- a picture of the Matthew Shepard memorial bench being put to good use.  Enjoy!

Oh, for shame, fellas...

My home college in Appalachia has a student-run newspaper that sometimes has trouble taking itself seriously, and the most common indication of boredom in the newsroom is when the staff starts screwing around with the headlines for some childish, Beavis and Butthead-esque humor.  One morning in a graduate class, I almost spit coffee all over the guy across the table from me when I read the headline  for a philanthropic showing of The Vagina Monologues:

'Vagina' Opens Tonight for Charity, Issues

I wonder what kind of 'issues' they had in mind...  anyhow, last year or so they got into serious trouble for a rather artsy headline in the sports section after our football team won a narrow victory over the USC Gamecocks.  (I'm sure you can figure out what they did with that.)  It was extremely unoriginal, actually-- just how creative can you really get with a fan base who already spent the entire game chanting, "Beat those Cocks!" at the top of their lungs?

Anyhow, I suppose the trouble they got into for that one has taken some of the edge off of the current staff, but apparently they have lost none of their subversive spirit.  When I looked to the Opinion section, I noticed that they have a section kind of like Newsweek's "Conventional Wisdom Watch" where they vote for or against things.  In a not-so-clever play off of the team's fight song, guess what they named it?  

Rocky "Tops" and "Bottoms"

I just about had an apoplectic fit of laughing when this struck home.  I'm wondering how long it's going to take anybody in the administration to figure this one out...

Codes and Community in TLP: Looking at Jed (and Jackrabbit)

So, we've been talking a little about how language is often a marker of certain social groups, that what we say, and how we say it, changes with one group to the next.  We code-switch into the codes of one social group into another.  When there's tension between those groups, like, say, the "town and gown" conflict in Laramie, choosing one's language is important because navigating between groups gets perilous.  And, if there's one character who is literally stuck in this divide in The Laramie Project, it's Jed Schultz.  

Jed interests me because I totally understand his plight.  Before I say anything else, let me assure you that Jed was a good kid when I knew him; he was always extremely outgoing and energetic, fun, easily overemotional, and he had a craving to fit in socially with the people he was around.  He also loves his parents.  Never doubt that.  I knew him a little bit from high school, but after I was baptized and attending The Baptist Church, I'd see him come to church with his dad occasionally.   I found him... interesting.  Jed still knew all the codes, from the shiny polyester button-down shirt and pleated slacks to the monogrammed Bible he carried in its nylon zip-up cover and handle, but he never seemed quite at ease.  Before that point, I had never known Jed to seem ill at ease anywhere. 

That sense of ill ease is where I can sympathize; I'm not in the SBC anymore, probably for the same reasons that he was uncomfortable in that church back then.  At the time of the first play, Jed was caught between two different societies, transitioning out of one and into another.  On the one hand, he was born into a Southern Baptist Convention culture with some pretty legalistic ties and proud of its religious independence and political conservatism.  I should know-- I was there.  On the other hand, he was heavily involved in theater in high school, which tends to be a fairly counter-cultural group anyhow, and then he was a theater major at the college.  Those two worlds can't be more opposite.  Again, I should know.  I spent most of my spare time in Fine Arts, just like Jed, and most of my friends were in dance, music or theater.  And in the course of the play, I think that Jed is trying to keep a foot in each world and having trouble figuring out where to stand.  His language, I think, betrays a little bit of that attempt to fit in.  Jed has to switch codes between different groups as he tries to navigate from one to the next. 

Why conservative Constitutional values might just be great for gay marriage...

Okay, so even though I'm moving to the center and even left-of-center on a lot of social issues (and especially those important to the GLBT community), when it comes to Constitutional law I can't help but see the world through conservative-colored glasses.  It's just the sphere I was born in, and I really do think that if you give the Constitution a fair chance, it's going to uphold equality and equal justice for everyone.

With that in mind, I just read a really interesting report in the Metro Weekly about the two new federal court rulings regarding the state/federal conflict regarding gay marriage and domestic partnership benefits.  The two cases are Gill v. Office of Personnel Management and Massachusetts v. U.S. Dep't of Health and Human Services.   The Metro article naturally focuses on the violation of equal protection by the federal DOMA regulation, but there's another, much more interesting argument here they don't mention: the federal government doesn't have the right to regulate or define restrictions on covenants.  That's specifically in the rights of the state.  So, if the federal government has to pay pensions or benefits to same-sex marriage in a state that says that marriage can consist of same-sex couples, they can't do a thing about it.  They don't have the right do define the terms of that covenant; they just have to pay out. 

That's right: Conservative arguments about state's rights prevent a federal DOMA restriction that short-circuits the state's right to define contracts.  Sure, it means that you can't just pass a federal gay marriage statute to force equality, but it means that if you win the fight on the state level, it might just stick. And conservatives, if they're really good conservatives, can't really fuss about it. 

So... um, here's for state's rights!  Woo-hoo!

Links: The "10 Years Later" Q&A Session, covered by The Daily Planet

To be straight with you, I spent most of the 45 or so minutes following the reading of The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later chatting with our cast here locally, so I missed something like eighty percent of the live linkup to New York.  I haven't found a full transcript or recording of that time yet, but the Twin Cities Daily Planet did a nice job giving a summary of the main questions and how Kaufman and Tectonic responded.  For those of you who would like to look over these again, I've linked it below. 

The full reporting of the Q&A session is here, and it goes through most of the Twitter session fairly carefully.  Enjoy! 

Source:  Everett, Matthew A.  "The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later—An Epilogue (Q&A session)."  Twin Cities Daily Planet 17 Oct 2009: n.p.  Web. Also linked here for reference.

Home Again

Well, it's back again to Appalachia after about three weeks reveling in the grass and hills of my real home.  I flew back into town yesterday from Casper, and I'm now trying to get ready for the rest of the summer at a photon's speed-- teaching, studying for exams, copy editing, writing-- and it's so hard when all I see when my mind wanders is the sky on fire, and the way the clouds broke over Pilot Peak after the thunderstorm.... I'll have a lot to write about the whole trip-- about Montana as well-- which I'll do as I have time.   That time I spent alone in the smells and sights I love was extremely revealing to me.  I learned a lot about my family.   And I learned a lot about Laramie.  But mostly, as I stood alone in the wilderness and remembered what the fleshy heads of wheatgrass smell like in the chilly evening breeze, I learned a few new things about myself. 

Yesterday was, admittedly, a sad day for me when my red-eye flight left from Casper to DIA just as the sun was coming up. 
As my little jet plane skated over the tops of the clouds at a low cruising elevation,  I stared despondently out the window at the terrain beneath the wing: Pathfinder and Alcova reservoirs shining, like gold leaf, in the early dawn light, clouds lapping around the mountain peaks like the tide around islands, a lonely Interstate 80 stretching south in a double-thread towards Colorado.  I saw the prairie lakes, which had been dry since I was a teenager, bight as diamonds, scattered over the fields.  And then suddenly I saw it: a town divided in half by rail lines, a cruciform intersection of two wide roads, the Interstate skirting to the south and east.  War Memorial Stadium was unmistakable even at that elevation-- we were flying directly over Laramie, my last view of Wyoming for a long time to come.

And, as I snapped this picture of my final glimpse of home, I realized that I could see so many locations that continue to define me.  I could see what was left of the field where I found my faith, watching the stars with my best friend; it has mostly turned into subdivisions now, and the houses are so close that stargazing would be nearly impossible anymore.
I could also see the college where I grew too quickly into an adult.  I could see the Interstate winding to the little knot that tied in to Happy Jack Road, the place where I fell in love with my husband under a summer's sky on Pilot Hill.  And I could also see the exact spot where Matt was murdered at the place where two unmarked dirt roads nearly meet, like creases in a crumpled map.  All of them were tied together by the same relentless stretch of land-- not just in the land, but in my mind, too, and I couldn't pick one place over the other.  From the air, they're all part of the same long stretch topography marked in shades of green, brown and red. 

That moment made me realize once more how much my search to understand Laramie, and The Laramie Project, is really an attempt to understand myself, those darkened places in my landscape which I want to forget but to which I have to be reconciled.  I can never be a passive observer of this landscape because those valleys and clefts carved out by that tragedy are a part of me, too.