https://dbknews.com/2016/08/12/article_ccbc6ee5-89de-5fd8-9d0a-b44da805642e-html/

The brutal murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard in the town of Laramie, Wyo., resonated around the world again last night.

The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, the sequel to the play based on the infamous hate crime, was simultaneously performed at 150 theaters across the globe, including at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.

Nearly 600 people packed CSPAC for the performance, which examines the aftermath of Shepard’s murder on its 10th anniversary.

After Shepard was brutally beaten and killed in a hate crime in 1998, members of the Tectonic Theatre Project in New York traveled to Laramie to interview residents and put together a play comprised of conversations, news reports, court testimony and the theatre members’ own journal entries. The play opened in 2000 and has since been performed in six countries by various theatre groups.

For part two, members of the original Tectonic Theatre Project returned to Laramie in 2008 around the 10th anniversary of the murder to speak with the same people they had talked to before in an attempt to figure out how the murder and its aftermath had affected and changed the community. And for the first time, they interviewed Judy Shepard, Matthew’s mother, and the convicted killers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson.

What left some audience members dismayed was the high number of people interviewed who, after 10 years had passed, continued to write off the murder as a robbery gone wrong rather than the hate crime that it was later found to be in court.

“They keep spreading rumors to try to play down what happened,” senior theatre major Kevin Tomlinson said. “That was what really effected me.”

Past productions of The Laramie Project have been picketed and protested because of the nature of the play, as was Monday’s reading at Lincoln Center in New York City. But CSPAC Executive Director Susie Farr said the College Park reading met no opposition.

“The Clarice Smith Center has a pretty strong reputation for presenting work that doesn’t happen other places in the D.C. area,” Farr said. “We’re interested in work that supports the learning message of the university and engages in issues of our time.”

Overall, the play was well-received by the audience.

“I thought the staging was great,” said Tomlinson. “I saw the play in the spring and it was nice to see the updated version. I really liked the live feed.”

In addition to enjoying the production, some community members appreciated the message it sent to the university community.

“I think it strongly shows that Maryland is one of the major theatre houses in the area that is very progressive towards LGBTQI rights,” said senior art studio and theatre double major Justin Fair, the webmaster for the Pride Alliance at the university. “It shows that our department is very active on campus and a great reflector of student life.”

Others, however, felt that the second version was focused too much on the current state of LGBT legislation and not enough on the original murder or its repercussions in the town of Laramie.

“The original play was moving because of its immediacy; because of the emotional response to the murder of Matthew Shepard; because it was personal at the same time as it was political,” senior American studies major Jenna Brager, a Diamondback cartoonist and the field organizer for the Pride Alliance, wrote in an e-mail. “This round felt to me like [Human Rights Campaign]-driven political posturing — two and a half hours of hammering the need for national legislation into our heads.”

A common issue that audience members expressed was that people on campus and in Washington need to realize that the play hits much closer to home than they like to think.

“The play kept driving home the point that Laramie is every town,” Brager said. “I think there is something ironic about D.C. audiences crying about a murder that happened 10 years ago in Wyoming when transwoman NaNa Boo Mack was killed this August in broad daylight on Q Street, and people are trying to say it wasn’t a hate crime. …this is happening here, now.”

jborowski at umdbk dot com