1. The Laramie Project, produced by the Strathmore Theatrical Arts Group, written by Moises Kaufman
This ambitious play tackles the beating and aftermath of Laramie, Wyoming resident, Matthew Shepard in 1998. Anyone who was an adult back then will remember the shock of the news and the revelation of the motives behind it: that Shepard was gay. His attackers deceived him into thinking they too were gay, drove him from a bar to a remote area out of town, tied him to a fence and beat him to a pulp. Then they left him for 18 hours in the chilly weather until a passing stranger found him.
I wasn’t sure how this play would tackle such a tale. “Replaying” any of the events would just seem tacky. Instead, the writer has cleverly written his company into the action: through their diaries, we meet the actors of the original production as they visit Laramie six times and hear extracts from the more than 200 reviews they conducted. Slowly, Laramie’s residents become real people to us: not just Shepard’s friends or the attackers, but the witnesses and his teachers and the cop who attended the scene first and had her own near-tragic outcome from it. And then there are the regular townsfolk who are changed by this: Laramie’s other gay and lesbian residents, Laramie’s taxi driver and the guy down the road. The attackers girlfriends, their friends, their parents.
It’s a very long play at three hours. It needs to be: it has a lot of ground to cover. If the production was simply a string of spoken scenes, I can imagine it would be dreary and drag. Instead, complicated lighting and slides of Laramie in the background, myriad costume changes and an excellent use of the eight actors to play 50-odd characters as we shift from moment to moment in Matthew’s story makes it fascinating. The physical work of the actors is unbelievably good, especially Jeanne Snider, seen in one moment shifting in front of our eyes from a New York company member to a teenaged boy, complete with hunched shoulders and snotty nose.
Amazingly, the play is not depressing or crushing; instead, it presents a whole cloth woven with tragedies and triumphs. Don’t expect to get away without tears, however. An amazing work. (On till Saturday. Go see it. If only to support anthonybaxter who did the lighting design.)
2. Bobby, currently screening in cinemas
An impressive drama with an incredible ensemble cast (is there anyone not in it?), this film covers the day at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, when Senator Bobby Kennedy was shot on the day of the California primary. Stock footage of Kennedy is interspersed with the modern film (there is no one ‘playing’ Kennedy) and this works for the most part, although there are times, particularly towards the end, where I wished the film-makers had had just a little more money and could have added noise to the modern footage to make the splicing seamless.
This is one of those films that feels a little like a film that needs to be made right now because no one is remembering and because we need this message to be heard again. It’s also a beautiful biopic of the little people behind the scenes — although that’s undercut in the credits when we are not told what happened to each of them after that night. I want to know: who are these folks? Who did they go on to become? And I’m worried that they were mostly made up for the benefit of the vehicle for Kennedy’s story.
Other than these minor issues, the film is extremely worthwhile, well acted and captures a sense of a generation and indeed a country at a turning point. After this, America had Nixon and Watergate and after Carter, the Greed is Good years of the 80s. This is where hope left the country, perhaps. And maybe it’s just now coming back…
3. Why didn’t anyone tell me Gotan Project were playing Hamer Hall last night? I’ve sort of seen posters aroound but I thought that was for a new album. I’m *sure* I checked those posters and saw that they were only for a new album! Arghhh!