The Laramie Project | Review
March 15th 2001 06:48
Link: www.belvoir.com.au/
Company B Belvoir present
The Laramie Project
by Mois’s Kaufman
and members of TECTONIC THEATER PROJECT
HEAD WRITER Leigh Fondakowski,
ASSOCIATE WRITERS Stephen Belber, Greg Pierotti, Stephen Wangh, CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Amanda Gronich, Sarah Lambert, John McAdams, Maude Mitchell Andy Paris, Barbara Pitts, Kelli Simkins
CAST: Josef Ber, Mitchell Butel, Lynette Curran, Russell Dykstra, Eliza Logan, Tara Morice, Anthony Phelan, Alicia Talbot
Director KATE GAUL
Set Design Brian Thomson Costume Design Jenny Irwin Lighting Design Rory Dempster Composer/Sound Design Garth Paine
Matthew Shepard was bashed and left for dead because he allegedly felt along the leg of a heterosexual as if his intent were to touch the mans balls. Not a man so much as a peer, a young local lad of Laramie, Wyoming, USA. It's all in the Director's Note, by Kate Gaul:
The thinking behind this production is very fine. Company B Belvoir are showing their soulful social consciousness with The Laramie Project and it looks pretty darn well. The ensemble cast do a very good job of reproducing a mass of characters from Laramie, as well as the group of actors and theater workers who are interviewing the people of the place. Lynette Curran and Tara Morice particularly stong together as a mother and cop-daughter, shades of Roseanne. The cast work very well. It's tough going territory on the emotional level. Lots of expressions around denial and fear on many levels.
Laramie certainly seems very much a grand place if you like the great outdoors. Wind-swept high plains, mountain ranges. Distant sparkling lights and dream on, because there's none of this on the stage in this production. It's not a pretty set - it's a rehearsal room full of research. It's all of Laramie removed, like a post modern exhibition of hate and misfortune.
The play itself is a demonstration within a play. It's words. Real speak. Actors being people just explaining what they knew and what they felt. There's a good introduction to Post Exposure Prophylaxis in the course of the evening. A platform on which to place community information of all sorts is a stage, the Project seems to have been a simple process based theatre exercise played out in a complex situation, with the objective of making some points to the broader community.
Much in the way Norman Graham's The Boys (1989) did so well. Before there was the Stephen Sewell screenplay, there was the stage play of The Boys. The play showed murderers at home, in the context of their lives. While Graham's play is all play, The Laramie Project is designer-theatre with educational objectives and shows the people of Laramie who were all pretty closely connected one way or an other in the context of a gay hate crime.
It's powerful, incising stuff. It should get under our skin. Young HIV gay dude bashed and abandoned to a solitary death in Wyoming. Media focuses big time on the story. It is a catalyst for the global village to mobilize around. It's not so long ago, 1998 - and here's the rub, as great as it is, it's not Australian. It's a very fine Australian production about a very important subject and it's crying out to be seen, I hope it is seen... but it's not about an Australian, so it's safe.
We can sit in the dark and laugh at the alien Americans with their funny accents and strange ways and see them as quite unlike who we are because hell, we're Aussies... it's my only despair about the production, it's an imported project from the USA, it's not an Australian play about police murdering a gay man on the banks of the Torrens River in South Australia, or a gay man shot in the heart and mutilated on the coast of New South Wales.
It's the great Saint Matthew Shepard, which is totally fine as long as the powers that be don't discourage a home-grown version, a project about our gay hate crimes. Something we can identify with that doesn't require fine Australian performers to talk with an American twang. As an evening in the theatre there were only two things that annoyed me. The music/sound was some times a little overpowering and the couple of times where dual dialogue was happening, it wasn't very helpful. I'm trying to say turn down the volume I think, the sound is very good through the play, shades of place very well. It's a little hard from time to time to pick out what’s being said through it.
The production over all stands up there with greats like Stolen and Up The Road, memorable Belvoir Street movements towards a greater tolerance in our Australian community.
David Jobling
The Laramie Project
by Mois’s Kaufman
and members of TECTONIC THEATER PROJECT
HEAD WRITER Leigh Fondakowski,
ASSOCIATE WRITERS Stephen Belber, Greg Pierotti, Stephen Wangh, CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Amanda Gronich, Sarah Lambert, John McAdams, Maude Mitchell Andy Paris, Barbara Pitts, Kelli Simkins
CAST: Josef Ber, Mitchell Butel, Lynette Curran, Russell Dykstra, Eliza Logan, Tara Morice, Anthony Phelan, Alicia Talbot
Director KATE GAUL
Set Design Brian Thomson Costume Design Jenny Irwin Lighting Design Rory Dempster Composer/Sound Design Garth Paine
...this sea of gay friendly straight faces (MardiGras) conceals the shocking reality of gay straight relations in Australia. A reality in which countless gay men and lesbians continue to be murdered, raped, bashed and vilified simply because they are different.... The majority of Australians feel anxious about homosexuality... So pervasive is our national homophobia it has forced gay hate crime into the closet and while hidden from general view the abuse and violence escalate - from OUTING GAY HATE SBS TELEVISION 13 February 2001.
The thinking behind this production is very fine. Company B Belvoir are showing their soulful social consciousness with The Laramie Project and it looks pretty darn well. The ensemble cast do a very good job of reproducing a mass of characters from Laramie, as well as the group of actors and theater workers who are interviewing the people of the place. Lynette Curran and Tara Morice particularly stong together as a mother and cop-daughter, shades of Roseanne. The cast work very well. It's tough going territory on the emotional level. Lots of expressions around denial and fear on many levels.
Laramie certainly seems very much a grand place if you like the great outdoors. Wind-swept high plains, mountain ranges. Distant sparkling lights and dream on, because there's none of this on the stage in this production. It's not a pretty set - it's a rehearsal room full of research. It's all of Laramie removed, like a post modern exhibition of hate and misfortune.
The play itself is a demonstration within a play. It's words. Real speak. Actors being people just explaining what they knew and what they felt. There's a good introduction to Post Exposure Prophylaxis in the course of the evening. A platform on which to place community information of all sorts is a stage, the Project seems to have been a simple process based theatre exercise played out in a complex situation, with the objective of making some points to the broader community.
Much in the way Norman Graham's The Boys (1989) did so well. Before there was the Stephen Sewell screenplay, there was the stage play of The Boys. The play showed murderers at home, in the context of their lives. While Graham's play is all play, The Laramie Project is designer-theatre with educational objectives and shows the people of Laramie who were all pretty closely connected one way or an other in the context of a gay hate crime.
It's powerful, incising stuff. It should get under our skin. Young HIV gay dude bashed and abandoned to a solitary death in Wyoming. Media focuses big time on the story. It is a catalyst for the global village to mobilize around. It's not so long ago, 1998 - and here's the rub, as great as it is, it's not Australian. It's a very fine Australian production about a very important subject and it's crying out to be seen, I hope it is seen... but it's not about an Australian, so it's safe.
We can sit in the dark and laugh at the alien Americans with their funny accents and strange ways and see them as quite unlike who we are because hell, we're Aussies... it's my only despair about the production, it's an imported project from the USA, it's not an Australian play about police murdering a gay man on the banks of the Torrens River in South Australia, or a gay man shot in the heart and mutilated on the coast of New South Wales.
It's the great Saint Matthew Shepard, which is totally fine as long as the powers that be don't discourage a home-grown version, a project about our gay hate crimes. Something we can identify with that doesn't require fine Australian performers to talk with an American twang. As an evening in the theatre there were only two things that annoyed me. The music/sound was some times a little overpowering and the couple of times where dual dialogue was happening, it wasn't very helpful. I'm trying to say turn down the volume I think, the sound is very good through the play, shades of place very well. It's a little hard from time to time to pick out what’s being said through it.
The production over all stands up there with greats like Stolen and Up The Road, memorable Belvoir Street movements towards a greater tolerance in our Australian community.
David Jobling
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