Moisés Kaufman, co-founder and artistic director of the New York-based Tectonic Theater Project and co-author of the nationally famous play ’The Laramie Project,” lectured at the CFA Cinema on Thursday, Feb. 7. Invited by an inter-departmental consortium headed by the Theater Department, Kaufman captivated a small audience in the intimate space of the cinema.
Intensely charismatic and at ease from the first words of his speech, Kaufman began with what he saw as the fundamental problem affecting today’s American theater: its dependence on 19th century forms and modes of representation. As a potent visual aid, Kaufman projected a massive image of Georges-Pierre Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” onto the screen behind him. He mentioned the novelty of Seurat’s approach to light and his depiction of the working and middle classes together, both groundbreaking in the early 20th century. Theater, Kaufman argued, needs a similar formal re-structuring based in the current era, and it is to this end that he and his associates created “The Laramie Project.”
The play consists of the collected interviews of Laramie, Wyoming residents in the wake of the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard. “The Laramie Project” is, to Kaufman, far more than just “documentary theater,” an oft-misused label applied to it. In turns shocking, humorous, and touching, the excerpts Kaufman read maintained a constant pitch of objectivity and compassion in their treatment of the source material, chronicling the community’s struggle with the murder. When a Laramie Baptist minister expressed his hope that Shepard, a gay man, had time to “reflect on his lifestyle” while being tortured by his murderers, Kaufman—himself gay—said he had to restrain his sorrow and disgust to preserve the integrity of the interview, incorporating it into a work of art which strives constantly towards a positive end.
Eighty-nine percent of Laramie residents polled favored the death penalty for Shepard’s killers—two local men they either knew themselves or knew an acquaintance of. Over and over again, Laramie residents insisted that, “we’re not the kind of town where this happens.” But, as one 19-year-old resident perceptively observed, that is precisely the kind of town they were. The point of “The Laramie Project,” beyond its departure from 19th century realism, is to examine and counteract this urge—to understand rather than to kill. Kaufman and members of Tectonic recorded over 400 hours of interviews not simply to expose the crime—which had already attracted nationwide media attention—but to investigate the conditions that provoke such hatred and result in the murder of innocents like Shepard.
Kaufman and his company then reviewed this material in an experimentally reductive fashion, noting what worked and discarding what did not. In the end, they reduced those 400 hours of material to two. This process concentrated not only on producing a dramatic catharsis, but crafting a piece with the sensitivity needed to leave the people of Laramie feeling honored to have spoken.
Speaking about the small audience base for contemporary theater when compared to other mediums, such as television, Kaufman proclaimed that one could not judge a work of art on how many people it reaches, only on its level of discourse and technique. Yet, all apologist statements aside, “The Laramie Project” is the second most produced play in the United States. Over 600,000 people have acted in productions whose locations range from high schools to professional stages. Kaufman and Tectonic’s spectacular success is a heartening reminder of the enduring power of, in Kaufman’s own words, “a high level of discourse and a high level of technique” in American art. At the play’s premiere, held in a community center in Laramie, an astonished audience watched Kaufman’s troupe portray them as characters; nearly all were moved to tears.
Kaufman laughingly attested to his occasional feelings of inadequacy: “Everyone working in the arts has some days where we’re quitting the business.” Whatever his occasional misgivings, Kaufman’s candor about his artistic process and the possibilities of contemporary theater proved inspiring to those in attendance that evening.
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