Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Laramie Project (review)

2001; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 53; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tj.2001.0121

1086-332X

Debby Thompson,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Living just south of the Wyoming border, in the city where Matthew Shepard died, I was tremendously moved by the beating and death of the University of Wyoming student. My reactions to its aftermath were more mixed. The national coverage, in spite of the enormous hype, helped reinvigorate gay activism with a sense of meaning and urgency, along with renewed solidarity and pride. But much of the coverage took on a condescending tone, appraising the Western prairies as a cultural wasteland where homophobia and the Christian right's hegemony ruled unchecked. So I had mixed emotions when I heard that playwright Moisés Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Project from New York were coming to Laramie to create an interview-based piece around the Matthew Shepard incident. I was glad that Kaufman was undertaking the work. His impressive structuring of Gross Indecency layers text upon text and places different strands of narrative in tension with each other. I felt that he and his group, if anyone, had the dramaturgical skill to investigate the community in which the incident occurred. I was, nevertheless, a bit anxious about a group swooping into Laramie for a few weeks with New York attitudes about prairie cities as both violently homophobic and full of quaint, folksy people.