The Bibliography Upgrade is Complete!

The updated bibliography lists are now available!  You know, for all dozen or so of you currently studying TLP.  But I hope it helps nonetheless...

After I had gathered a lot of things I wanted to add to my old bibliographic master-list on this blog, I made things easier on myself by dividing things up to make searching through it a little easier on the researcher. 

When you now click on the Bibliography link, which is now just under the title bar at the top of the page, you will be directed to a page asking you to choose which page you want:  literary/dramatic, or non-literary/dramatic sources.  Things which are useful in multiple applications, however, appear on both lists. 

With this also came an increase in useful material on both lists.  If you have any questions, remember you can always email me at jackrabbit.blog@gmail.com and I'll help out as much as possible.  I'll even ferret things out for you from my capacious Research I library if you need it. 

Also, if there's something that should be on this list that currently isn't, please, by all means let me know!  I'll happy to add it to the list. 

Links: Study Guides for TLP on Sub/Text

For those of you who teach The Laramie Project, one of the most useful things available online are theater website productions who produce study guides.  For instance, verybody knows about the Guthrie Theater and their semi-famous student guides for their own productions (if you don't, you need to look.  I used their guide for Amadeus during my first year teaching), but they don't have material for everything.   Unfortunately, the Guthrie never performed TLP until 10 Years Later came out, and their only available material is a link to Tectonic's study guides.   

A lot of other productions, however, have picked up the slack, and one particularly useful source of information is Sub/Text, which was created by Jeanine Sobeck in connection with the Mead Center for American Theater's Arena Stage.  Sobeck creates pages of background information for different productions every theater season, and there's a great guide for The Laramie Project and the Epilogue, which has some great background material for the study and discussion of the two plays. 

The study guide is full of useful stuff, but the page which first got my attention was this super-useful timeline of events leading up to The Laramie Project and its sequel, which would be great for those teaching students who can't remember the Shepard murder.  

Let me give one more quick shout-out to Jeanine Sobeck for doing such a great job with the Arena Theater's "Online dramaturge," and be sure to check out all the available guides if you teach drama! 

Links: The Laramie Project at Duke University

Okay, so I found out about this upcoming production of The Laramie Project in an odd way: linkbacks.  While I was cruising through my Flickr account the other day, this website I hadn't known about showed up in the stats, and when I followed the link back, I found this really, really great classroom and theater production blog.  The space includes a lot of great posts on producing, directing and acting this play, and those are things I can never talk about with authority.  Well, until I quit my job as an Anglo-Saxonist and take up stagecraft or something, that is.

You can find the blog here, where you'll get a variety of different meditations about the entire production process.  It's very, very useful for teaching The Laramie Project.  One of my favorite posts so far, on acting the roles of characters, is linked here if you'd like a good place to start digging through the posts.   If you're in NC or the surrounding area and would like to see the production, opening night is April 7th at the Sheafer Theater.  With this much thought and careful preparation, it's bound to be a great production. 

Advocate article by Greg Pierotti on TLP and "10 Years Later"

In the middle of all this personal angst about how the members of Tectonic related to the larger Laramie community, I nevertheless feel a certain amount of personal connection to two of its members: Stephen Belber and Greg Pierotti.  Perhaps it is because these two writers and actors of Tectonic Theater have both been willing to lay bare their own experiences with Laramie, their struggles and mistakes, and how the play still haunts them.  Maybe that's also the reason I've found it so hard to find a similar personal connection with Kaufman.  In contrast to Belber and Pierotti, Kaufman usually positions himself as the artistic theorist or architect, and perhaps that distant, forensic persona makes it harder for me to relate to him.

In any case, if you want to see why I tend to sympathize with Pierotti, he has a great article in the Advocate you should really check out.  In a real sense, the first article is telling his own story, and how Matthew Shepard and researching TLP changed his life.  The series ballooned into, so far, a seven-part exploration of the two plays as the company prepared to put both on tour last fall, and the whole thing is a fantastic read.  You can get Pierotti's perspective on everything from how the Tyler Clementi story relates to TLP to safety on college campuses to the problem of making snap judgments-- about gays and lesbians, but also about Christians, and he's very up front with where his own snap judgments lead to.  Please forgive me if I label the whole series a "must read." For those who want to see how Tectonic-- in this case, Pierotti's view, at least-- sees the world, it's quite valuable.  And it will challenge your assumptions about Tectonic Theater and the way they operate. The links to all seven parts are below! 

On the Road with Laramie, Part 1-- August 10, 2010
On the Road with Laramie, Part 2-- August 25, 2010
On the Road with Laramie, Part 3-- September 14, 2010
On the Road with Laramie, Part 4-- October 6, 2010
On the Road with Laramie, Part 5-- October 18, 2010
On the Road with Laramie, Part 6-- Jan 11, 2011
On the Road with Laramie, Part 7-- February 8, 2011

Links: Morning Has Broken- Una Vita Spezzata

Well, it seems as if my Flickr ticker on the blog has yielded another loose Laramie narrative running free, this time in Italy.  The photo you see here (and which showed up on my blog a couple weeks ago) is from a concept performance called Moring Has Broken- Una Vita Spezzata, which debuted in Firenze, Italy back in November around the same time that we were having Thanksgiving back stateside.  The performing company described it as a "reportage" moments and excerpts from both The Laramie Project and Judy Shepard's book The Meaning of Matthew. 

As you can see from the photo at left, the staging is extremely minimalistic, it focuses on the abstract, and...  well, it's in Italian.  (If my Latin doesn't fail me, that sign says "The shining lights of Laramie.)  Unfortunately, I can't find any information about the content or staging of the performance, so I can't really speculate about the content.  I'm fairly intrigued, however, by the idea.  By calling this a "reportage" they claim to be relaying news in an abstract sense, but their main texts are a memoir and a play.  So, if anything, it's a reportage of first-hand accounts, creatively rethought.  I wish I could find a little video clip of this, but there's nothing up on that, either.

There are, however, some nice stills of the performance if you want to get a sense of it.  You can view most of the set on a Flickr Photostream here, including a poster for the event, but if you're the sort that prefers your Internet searching to have a soundtrack, someone involved with the production set them up as a slide show with some old school Cat Stevens as a YouTube video. 

And, there is contact information via a Facebook event if you'd like more information here (and have better Italian skills than I do.)

Oh, Manhattan Declaration, you unruly thing...

Good grief, Steve Jobs, do not make me have to stick up for the freaking Manhattan Declaration...

Okay, so CNN's Belief blog is reporting that Apple had removed the Manhattan Declaration's app for iPhone from their app store, citing complaints about the offensiveness of the content.  (Well, gee, I never would have seen that one coming.)  The main issue, it seems, is a quiz you can have your friends take to show your Manhattan awesomeness or something by asking if you're against gay marriage and whatnot. 

Supporters of the Manhattan Declaration, naturally, are pitching a fit. Oh, and they've also started a petition, as it turns out.   Right now it's only got about 40,000 signers, so it might go somewhere.
Maybe. 

Okay, so on a serious note, I really don't like this due to the issues of free religious speech surrounding it.  Sure, I don't care for the Manhattan declaration one bit.  (you can see me rant about it even more here and here.)  But this is dealing with speech specifically protected by the Constitution.  Besides, the App store has tons of religious apps, from a compass that will help me determine the direction of Mecca to Ba'hai commentaries to a complete Catholic liturgy I can run on my iPod (I almost bought that, actually.)   Some of the apps I see in this category I find just as annoying as the Manhattan Declaration.  So, why single out an app that's specifically designed to be a free declaration of a person's beliefs about their faith and its intersections with culture?  (Well, it's a squeaky wheel issue, of course.  That's a rhetorical question I guess.)

Apple Inc. has never really shown itself to be a huge proponent of free speech-- rather, they are usually more proponents of huge profits, and in order to do that, they tend not to stir the muck.  Sure, I didn't complain too much when they discontinued the "Wobble" app and limited other sexually explicit content.  But then again, there wasn't such a clear component of protected speech about that one, either.  Apple reserves the right to oust content they determine to be "widely offensive," but, come on-- stating one's moral opposition is not inherently offensive.  And I'm even saying that as a strong opponent of the MD who has read the thing. 

And so, I find myself in a strange position now.  I'm all for free speech.  I'm especially for free religious expression, whether I like what others have to say or not.  On the one hand, Apple is a private corporation and they have the right to police content.  On the other hand, they are the only way to get apps onto an iPhone.  Their decision to discontinue, then, really moves into the realm of digital censorship at that point, and in my mind, that's where things get sticky. 

So, based on my personal beliefs... do I really have to stick up for the Manhattan Declaration??!?  Blech.  I'd feel like such a hypocrite...

UW's Web archive collection for Matthew Shepard

 The University of Wyoming has collected a web archive of information relating to the murder of Matt Shepard and the political aftermath through the Internet Archive.  The information is collected and stored via archive-it.org. 

You can access their link pool here and check out what they've amassed.  It ranges from LGBT activism to WBC home movies.  If you're more interested in the social issues surrounding Shepard, it's a good resource.

Watch "TLP: 10 Years Later" online!

You can actually watch clips from the New York performance of The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later, an Epilogue online!

Tectonic Theater has launched a new website for The Laramie Project with a variety of great things included-- there's going to be community access, it looks like, as well as blogs and photos.  But the thing that's particularly exciting for me is that you can see eight minutes of the Lincoln Center performance online.  That means I have something I can actually cite from!  I can talk about 10 Years Later in a meaningful fashion-- sort of. 

If you wanted to see the sequel but couldn't, now you can have a taste of it online.  The performance recorded here includes some post-performance discussion as well.  I don't know if the plan is to keep this up, so visit while you can...

Big Gay Jim's Bigger, Gayer Blog

One of Matt Shepard's friends, Jim, still livesthere and runs a personal blog.  His blog's name makes me crack a smile every time I see it:  "Big Gay Jim's Bigger, Gayer blog."   As you can tell by the photo on the right, he was an Angel Action angel, and he's been deeply, deeply involved in Wyoming and GLBT activism since then.

I barely knew "Big Gay Jim" in college-- he was actually my boss at one point-- but he has about the quirkiest dang sense of humor of anyone I've ever met.  But that's beside the point.  His blog has some great first-hand stories about what he's been up to since 1998.

But it's a personal blog, y'all.  If you don't like personal blogs, it's probably not your cup of tea.  But he has a great perspective on the GLBT community in Wyoming and how it's been developing over the last ten years.  If you want a quick link to the relevant posts from the 10th anniversary of Shepard's death, just go through UW's online archive of Shepard materials, permanently linked and archived here.

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!

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.

Eat Romaine! Romaine Patterson's official website

I can still remember the first time I met Romaine Patterson.  I was a freshman in high school, and I was competing in my first big speech meet in Powell, WY as an extemporaneous speaker.  Speech meets are pretty awesome places in Wyoming if you like teenage fringe culture: we had everything from bona fide conservative Young Republicans in their blue jackets, red power ties, and Maalox in their briefcases to punkers to to hippies to a Humor competitor who always wore a three-piece suit made of silver duct tape.  He had a duct tape fedora and wingtips, too.  Did I mention that?

Anyhow, I was on a real, live college campus, hanging around in the student union in between rounds in my event and pretending I was so cool, lounging on the couches and drinking my first honest-to-God Italian creme soda from the coffee kiosk.  (It was raspberry.  Oh yeah.)   Never mind the fact that I only weighed about eighty-five pounds and looked like a twelve-year old; I was at college, and it felt like heaven.  I was sitting about ten feet away from my coach/theater director Mr. "J" when two rambunctious girls, an orator and a poetry person, came trampling breathlessly into the lounge.

"Mr. J Mr. J, Mr. J, Mr. J!" one of the girls shrieked.  "You'll never guess what We! Just! saw!"  My coach's eyes bugged out in alarm.    
"What?!"  He asked.  Judging from the look on his face, I think he was expecting something that would require several fire trucks and at least one ambulance.  The two girls turned to each other and gaped, their eyes bulging.  
"LLLLESBIANS!" They gasped in unison.  Mr. J just about choked on his own amusement. Then the "lesbian" in question walked through the door in a black leather jacket,  and that was the first time I met Romaine Patterson.

 I always liked Romaine in high school, and we knew each other slightly.  When I introduced myself to her that afternoon, she quipped, "Hi, my name is Romaine.  Yes, like the lettuce," she continued with a mock eye roll and a grin. And with that she eternally won my approval. 

In any case, Romaine was always a talented actor and personality in high school, and it seems that part of her character has served her well.  Since Operation Angel Action, she's worked pretty tirelessly on the political activism scene, she wrote a book, and she has a job on Sirius satellite radio as a talk show host. 

She has a dedicated website that gives a lot of good information about her activism work, her take on Shepard's murder, and her life.  If you're interested, check out Eat Romaine  for information.  You'll discover that she's been up to a lot. 

Oh, but let me give you a quick heads-up...  Romaine's a pretty open lady-- meaning, there's a link to a store on the left-hand side for her favorite "love aids"  which is probably SFW but might garner you some pretty funny looks from your boss.  You've been duly warned.

http://www.eatromaine.com/

Hunter of Justice talks about TLP: 10 years later

Hunter of Justice is a blog run by Nan Hunter, a professor at Georgetown Law which focuses on issues of human rights and equality, and it's a great read.  She focuses especially on issues of gender and sexuality.  You can visit "Hunter of Justice" here and check up on some current posts if you like.  

Nan Hunter had a guest writer give a writeup on the Ten Years Later performance. and you can access the article on 10 Years Later here.  It has some great observations about the play!

Well, just... darn.

Every once in awhile when I'm wandering on "teh Internets" I run across something that just makes me burst out laughing so loud that it makes my husband jerk his head up from whatever statistics work he's doing and give me that "are you nuts?!" look.  Well, the other night was one of those nights as I wandered through a site with a bit of Internet potpourri on it.

What got my attention, you might ask? This, actually:

It took just a second or two to track down the original website, which is full of really, really bad English translations from around the globe.  I don't even know where to start. But if this is what other countries think about where I'm from...  maybe we better start up an exchange program to clear the air, perhaps?  

Hope you enjoy it! 

TT writes for Newsweek: "Has Anything Changed?"

Tectonic wrote a short but illuminating online piece for Newsweek talking about the Laramie community-- it's called, naturally, "Has Anything Changed?"  It's also basically the sentiment of the prologue they read before the performance of The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later and includes a certain amount of the information they used in the final version of the play.

I found it an interesting view into Tectonic's attitude as they prepared to enter into Laramie one more time, and it was good to see how much they tried to keep an open mind of what "change" might look like in a community.  But it also outlined some things that I'd like to write about over the next few weeks.  Check it out!

URL:  http://www.newsweek.com/id/163027

Fred Phelps: civil rights activist?! CNN Reports...

Well, well-- if wonders never cease.  It seems that Fred "I'll protest anything" Phelps has a stranger history than even fiction could produce.  According to CNN, the head of the Phelps family was once a full-time civil rights attorney-- although his commitment to African-American equality is still very much in doubt, as conflicting reports are coming from the Phelps children.

The CNN article, linked above, does clear up one question I've never found an answer for-- how the Phelps clan can afford to gallivant over the nation doing protests.  CNN reports that 11 of 13 of the Phelps kids are attorneys, which might be the answer to how they collectively have the cash to pull off so many publicity stunts all over the country.  Not that Phelps is still a practicing attorney himself, however; Phelps was disbarred in 1979 by the Kansas supreme court on account of witness badgering, CNN's John Blake claims.  Phelps' daughter, however, claims that the disbarment was on account of animus against her father for his activism for blacks. 

The article is an interesting read, for lots of reasons-- quotes from Phelps-Roper on her father and from a son who's left the church, as well as anecdotes from people who knew Phelps before he started carrying placards at Shepard's funeral.  You have to read it to believe...

Make your Own WBC Protest Sign... um, really?

Obviously, I've been thinking about protests lately, first from the side of the spectator, and now from the side of the protester.  As I was cruising about on Flickr, I ran into this beauty.

If you're wanting to push the boundaries of taste, a few extremely imaginative counter-protesters have created a website where you can create your own WBC counter-protest.

It works a lot like the lol-style caption sites-- just type in a phrase and create your own protest sign in a variety of Phelps-approved color schemes.

As I look at this, I am both appalled and yet somehow thrilled.  The Flickr photostream for the image above has other pictures of this same fellow protesting the WBC with some rather funny signs. My favorite?  His friend is holding a sign that says "Mikey hates everything."  Enjoy (if you can!)

---

PHOTO CREDIT:

Picture by Sir EDW, available through Creative Commons License: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sir_edw/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Research for TLP and Matt Shepard: Comm, Journalism and Soc. Sci.

Due to the nonfictional nature of The Laramie Project and its engagement with both the underlying historical event (Matt's murder) and the social issues surrounding it, I've come across a lot of scholarly work regarding the play, the movies and the historical event in other disciplines.  The media onslaught has naturally piqued some curiosity in the Communications discipline, but I was surprised at some of the others-- psychotherapy, for instance, and education.  I've compiled a list of the more interesting ones for you below. 

A couple of the trends are quite interesting.  Note, for instance, that five of the articles are psychoanalytic approaches to the play that attempt to understand the nature of forgiveness; one of the authors in that list is Stephen Wangh, one of the authors of The Laramie Project.  Two others are looking at the play as a tool to foster LGBTQ acceptance in a social setting, and one tracks the impact of such violence on communities.  The Pace article is pretty neat-- it tracks a small handful of Matthew Shepard Scholarship winners in their college careers. 

And, my favorite topic-- the unhinged media coverage of Shepard's murder and the aftermath-- also makes a showing here in the bibliography.  The complete list is just after the jump! 

Vanity Fair: "The Crucifixion of Matthew Shepard"

In March 1999, Vanity Fair did an interesting and thorough coverage of the Matt Shepard murder that includes a lot of interesting information from central figures who didn't get a lot of press later-- Tina LaBrie, for instance, and Matt Mickelson, the bartender who served both Shepard and his killers on the night he was beaten.  But the real reason I started reading it was for the illustration you see at the left.  To be honest, the first time I saw this layout in the magazine, it literally stopped me in my tracks.

As far as I can tell from this point, Thernstrom's article is the most detailed of all the earliest coverage of Shepard's death in the first six months of the case.  The details it contains are interesting for a lot of reasons-- first because it was the general public's closest look at the case for a long time to come-- but also because you can see a lot of the mythmaking of the Shepard story starting to crystallize.  Thernstrom's article contains the early facets of what would become the Shepard "narrative" later on-- the comparison to the murder site and Golgotha, for instance.  And you can also see all the details that fall out of the storytelling later-- like the actual location of the fence, or LaBrie's involvement in that limo ride to Fort Collins.  

Vanity Fair itself does not have a link up to this article online (their online archive doesn't go back 10 years), but the magazine itself is pretty easy to locate for those of you who want to track it down in a public library.  For those of you who can't find the hard copy, there is a less-than-authoritative (and probably less than legal) version of the story floating about on the Interwebs.  Beware the typos.  In the long run, you're better off digging out the hard copy. 

Source:

Therstrom, Melanie.  "The Crucifixion of Matthew Shepard."  Vanity Fair Mar. 1999: 209-14, 267–275.