The Laramie Project

Matthew Shepard, an openly gay college student was tied to a fence post and brutally murdered in a prairie outside Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998 because of his sexual identity. Shepard’s murder is one of the most well-known hate crimes in recent American history.

For “The Laramie Project,” the Tectonic Theater Project travelled to Laramie just four weeks after Shepard’s death, with the intent of creating a theatrical portrait of a town coming to grips with hate-fueled violence. Over the course of a year and a half, the group interviewed over 200 people, collecting a wide array of different perspectives on the crime. The dialogue and monologues that comprise “The Laramie Project” are taken from these interviews, along with news reports, courtroom transcripts, and journal entries.

Hailed as one of the most captivating and encompassing pieces of contemporary theatre, the play shocks, challenges, and moves all who watch it as it reveals the lowest depths of hatred and greatest heights of compassion that lies within all human beings in any seemingly average community.

An Amateur production by arrangement with Dramatists Play Service, Inc