Jerry Prell directs “The Laramie Project” at El Camino College
It was one of those tragedies that could have slipped away from the headlines and into obscurity. But in 1998, after Matthew Shepard – a 21-year-old student who lived in Laramie, Wyoming – was beaten up and left to die because he was gay, playwright Moisés Kaufman felt compelled to dig deeper. The result, two years later, became one of the most important works for the stage of the last 20 years.
“The idea of ‘The Laramie Project’ originated in my desire to learn more about why Matthew Shepard was murdered,” Kaufman has written, “about what happened that night, about the town of Laramie. The idea of listening to the citizens talk really interested me. How is Laramie different from the rest of the country, and how is it similar?”
Kaufman and nine members of his company, the Tectonic Theater Project, ventured to Laramie from New York several times over the next year-and-a-half. They interviewed upwards of 200 people between late 1998 and early 2000, with “The Laramie Project” opening in Denver in February of 2000. It has been performed hundreds of times since, all across the nation, and now it’s opening tomorrow, Feb. 27, at El Camino College. The director, Jerry Prell, an adjunct professor at the school, spoke at length about the importance of “The Laramie Project” and why it continues to be a vital story that needs to be seen and discussed and remembered.
Everyone needs to know
“Our goal with the show,” Prell says, “in dealing with these issues of hate and prejudices, is to do what theater does at its best, which is to challenge the audience in some sense, but also to initiate dialogue, to raise the human spirit, to educate, and to get people to think about their own beliefs and thought systems.”
Perhaps we tend to stereotype what we don’t like?
“Well, it’s usually something we don’t understand,” Prell replies. Hatred for others isn’t inborn, he points out; people pick up their biases and prejudices from those around them.
“Here we are floating around on this [planet],” Prell continues, “and we have no other place to go but here. The way we communicate in the world – we hope that we’re building roads of better understanding between each other versus this continued idea of disliking people for their differences.”
But are we really becoming more tolerant? Prell mentions several recent examples of what may well be hate crimes, including the murders in North Carolina of three Muslim college students.
“As long as these types of incidents continue it’s critical that we keep performing ‘The Laramie Project.’”
To educate and to initiate dialogue, as Prell says, is a neverending task, an ongoing challenge, because new generations are always emerging.
“You talk to college students and they have no idea who Matthew Shepard was, and they have no idea what ‘The Laramie Project’ was about.
“So, doing this on a college campus is important. Young people are still developing their ideas about who they are and what they believe, and I think this gives them an amazing opportunity to participate in a bit of theater that perhaps can change the way they’re feeling, or [they can] talk to their friends about how their friends are behaving, and create some kind of catalyst for change.
“I also want to say about the production,” Prell adds, “because some people may come and say, ‘Oh, my god, if this play is going to be so serious and depressing’ – It’s really an uplifting story.” And Prell emphasizes this by mentioning the uplifting message spoken by Doc O’Connor (a limousine driver and entrepreneur) at the end of the second act: “The whole thing, you see, the whole thing, ropes around hope, H-O-P-E.”
Prell then points out that of the five states that still have not passed hate crime legislation, Wyoming is one of them.
The larger fabric
Jerry Prell’s own foray into show business, as it were, began at the age of six when he performed magic tricks for a five-year-old. He was paid one dollar.
For Prell, a sense of magic also adheres to theater, because it’s all about creating believable illusions and entire worlds that seem to emerge out of thin air. What captured his interest as a performer, he says, was “that process of creating a human canvas, creating a living, breathing character or person from the one-dimension of the written page, because plays are written to be performed, not read. And that idea, of bringing those characters to life, to me is very magical, and that here we are – especially with ‘The Laramie Project’ – recreating these actual words, and recreating these events live on stage in a magical way in the style of this journalistic theater.
“For me,” Prell continues, “it’s the magic of the theater, what theater can do, how we can transform people and their way of thinking, how we can elicit responses from them. When I teach acting, the first thing (I tell my students) is that acting is storytelling: What is that story that you’re conveying? What is your character’s story? In this case, with ‘The Laramie Project,’ what is the story of this town and the people? – people who are either intimately involved or just involved in being a resident of this town, and how it affected them.”
Playwright Moisés Kaufman, it should be noted, is the author of “Gross Indecencies,” about the trials and subsequent sentencing of Oscar Wilde. Kaufman went to the actual transcripts for the case and utilized them in his play – an approach that clearly bore fruit when it came to conceiving and writing “The Laramie Project.”
There are some 70 characters in Kaufman’s work, some of them with only one spoken line. We may ask, One line? Why is it even there?
“It’s in there,” Prell says, “because it creates this fabric, this collage of thought and feeling. So, having a line here gives resonance to and supports something that’s going on in that moment.”
Matthew Shepard remembered
Before the audience walks into the auditorium they’ll be greeted – or confronted – by a display of information about Matthew Shepard and what befell him one night in Laramie.
“Traditionally what happens in the lobby of the theater,” Prell says, “is they post photos from the production. But because of the historical significance of (this work and what inspired it) I want people who were maybe unfamiliar with who Matthew Shepard was, and what happened in Laramie, to have an opportunity to understand that this was a real event, that the show is portraying real people, and that it’s set in their words.
“So, instead of the traditional production photos in the lobby we’re going to have actual historical material from that time. And we’ll have a 10-minute loop of information about Matthew Shepard, about the incident, and actual broadcast media from 1998, and then the trial itself.
“I’m hoping,” Prell says, “that some people will take a look at that when they come in and then” – during one of the two short breaks – “go back out into the lobby and take another look.
“So that kind of leads you into the auditorium space where we’re going to have this 14-minute film loop, which really introduces the audience to our sad history of hate in America, and focusing not only on hate crimes due to sexual orientation, but hate crimes due to religious beliefs, political beliefs, places of origin – in other words due to immigration – and anything that has to do with hating one person because of who they are.”
The Laramie Project, directed by Jerry Prell, is being performed at 8 p.m. this Friday and Saturday, Feb. 27 and 28, as well as Friday and Saturday, March 6 and 7, plus 3 p.m. on Sunday, March 8, in the Campus Theater at El Camino College, 16007 Crenshaw Blvd. at Redondo Beach Blvd., Torrance. After each of the Saturday performances there will be a 30-minute audience talkback. Tickets, $15. Onsite parking is $3. Call (310) 329-5345 or go to centerforthearts.org.
