[NEohioPAL] Audience Review - You Should See 'The Laramie Project' at NCP

[JT Buck]

Dear Neohiopal Readers:

10 years ago this October Matthew Shepard of Laramie, Wyoming was murdered, the victim of a drug-fueled robbery exacerbated to lethal proportions by his attacker's deep-seated homophobia.  

The ensuing media frenzy brought America face to face with it's own deep-seated anti-gay bigotry.

The Laramie Project, a play (and later a film) written by New York's Tectonic Theatre Project is perhaps the most widely-known and critically acclaimed artistic response to this tragedy. 

This is a fine time to re-visit 'The Laramie Project', to take a measure of the theatrical power the text retains long after it's topicality has faded. In this case, the gay rights juggernaut of the 1990's has also largely been sidelined from the cultural conversation by issues of Homeland Security and economic instability.  

Does the play still work?  Yes.  Yes it does.  

Currently onstage at the North Canton Playhouse, 'Laramie' stands 8 years after it's professional premiere as a brilliantly constructed experiment in playwrighting.  Capturing the experience of Laramie locals in the aftermath of Shepard's murder, this 'docudrama' captures the actual words of Laramie residents drawn from private interviews and the public record.  Scenes are arranged in a sequence which captures a sense of plot, but also an internal emotional and thematic logic.  This frees actors to take a personal point of view on what they are playing without trivializing the essential dignity of any particular person represented.  

On a personal note, I have a lot of experience with The Laramie Project.  In 2001 I directed a series of community readings of the play at several area colleges and churches, as well as NCP's first staging of this play in 2002.  I have seen several other productions of the play.  

TLP only ever works when the actors have a deep personal connection to the material.  The temptation to play this text with anything less than total commitment to both it's humanity and it's unabashedly partisan point of view results in cold, clinical chracter study which no level of acting or directing craft can save.  In the tradition of Bertolt Brecht, it is the actors, not the characters, we must believe.  Otherwise this highly intelligent cry of the heart is rendered a dry scrapbook of quirky people, too easily dismissed and too shallowly rendered. 

Thankfully, the current North Canton Playhouse ensemble takes full advantage of the play's highly subjective but compassionate point of view by engaging in acting that is full-throated, visceral and sincere.  The story moves with the unpredictable pace and flow of anger itself.  This is Community Theatre in the truest and best sense of the label.  A group of local actors of diverse ages, backgrounds and acting styles, coming together to talk about a problem that still exists, to raise again the alarm that, in the words of one character 'We are like this.  We ARE like this."

With an unsurpassable sincerity of purpose, the current NCP production of 'The Laramie Project' has the power to remind us that anti-gay bigotry is not a 'distraction', as even our current most liberal politicians would have us believe, but a present evil impacting the lives of too many Americans.  

Sounds like a worthy and useful night in the theatre to me.  

Go see it.  Now thru Oct. 7th.  www.northcantonplayhouse.com


JT Buck
Arts Director
First Grace United Church of Christ
350 S. Portage Path
Akron, OH 44320

Office: 330-762-8469
Cel: 330-212-6709

jtbuck at ameritech.net

www.firstgraceucc.org

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