Gender Bending in "The Laramie Project"

For those not in the know, The Laramie Project is a play written by Moises Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project about a homosexual boy named Matthew Shepard who was chained to a fence and beaten to death by two other teenagers in Laramie, Wyoming. This was an event that actually happened. The play is not so much a dramatization of events as it is a collection of interviews divided into short scenes and performed by an ensemble cast. Each cast member takes on a character or characters from Laramie and recounts their experience of the events that took place in 1996.


I recently saw California State Universiry, Fullerton's production of Laramie and I was surprised and blown away by what they did with the production. For me, the main thing about the play is that there cannot be a whole lot of "acting" going on. It would be a disservice to the people of the town and take away from the power of the events that happen. The actors must simply state the facts, recount their experiences, and really live within their characters to the best of their ability. This is an incredibly difficult play to do justice to, since there isn't really an arc and there isn't much character development- in my opinion the play is a comment on society and our homophobic tendencies and man's intrinsically violent nature.

All this being said- the thing that really stuck out to me was the amount of gender swapping going on within the cast and the characters being played. Men played women, women played men, one man even played a lesbian mama who told it like it is. At first this really turned me off and pulled me out of the play- how can these actors say they are honestly portraying these real men and women if they aren't even playing the right genders?- but after a while I stopped and thought about it. I realized the director was making a comment and a powerful one at that.


Maybe this is a little heavy-handed. As a society, what if we looked past gender, sexual orientation, age and race? Would there be hate? I venture to say maybe not. We live in a global society. My generation is the first fully wired generation. If someone told me "Hey Cameron, it's wrong to tie gay people to a fence and beat them to death," I would have said, "No shit" and kept on walking. The fact  of the matter is, this play was premiered in the year 2000. This wasn't something that happened 100 years ago that we can shake our heads at. 1996. That's the year that Matthew was killed.

As our Feminafesto-writing friend Anne Waldman would say: "I propose a utopian creative field where we are defined by our energy, not our gender." This has beautiful implications. Not just for a creative field, but a straight up utopia. Wouldn't that be nice? I breathe easier just thinking about it.

I wrote this mainly to say how impressed I was that the gender-swapping by the cast really worked on a deeper level than I would have expected from a college production. The actors did justice to the play and told the story that needed to be told. That's really the goal of drama isn't it?