“Laramie Project” revisits hate crime

More than a hundred productions of the same play will be performed at the same time. That play is “The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later.”

Theater students at Temple University will be joining thousands of other performers across the country in a coordinated theatrical event Monday. More than a hundred productions of the same play will be performed at the same time. That play is “The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later.”

Listen:
[audio: 091009pctheater.mp3]

10 years ago a New York-based theater company created “The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later,” a production based on interviews with residents of the town where Matthew Shepard was killed in 1998. Shepard was a gay man beaten to death by his townsfolk.

On the anniversary of that crime, a new play, called “The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later,” revisits the town. Temple University Theater Director Ed Sobel says in the play, Laramie becomes a microcosm of the long-term effects of tragedy.

Sobel: How is it that terrible things can be done by people whom we might want to think of as monsters, and yet they are still part of the human community. What they did was reprehensible and yet somehow they are part of us.

“The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later” will be a staged reading – no sets or costumes.