An impressive, gender-bending cast salute Matthew Shepard’s memory in The Laramie Project, Moises Kaufman’s powerful examination of the aftermath of the gay Wyoming university student’s murder, though the Hollywood Fringe Festival look it is given at the Group Rep does the play no favors.

Following the brutal killing in October of 1998, playwright Kaufman and several of his fellow Tectonic Theater Project members traveled from New York City to the town of Laramie in search of answers.

Who could have committed such a barbaric act and why? How did the residents of Laramie react to Shepard’s murder? How did they feel about the attention it focused on their city of 28,000?

The result of Kaufman and his team’s eighteen-month research was the play now being staged in North Hollywood, one that has its eleven-member cast portraying over sixty characters, from the Tectonic actors who traveled to Laramie to friends of the victim to local residents to out-of-town visitors to the confessed killers themselves.

Among those brought to vivid life on at The Group Rep are the bartender who witnessed Matt leaving the drinking establishment with his killers, the teenager who discovered him tied to a fence, the policewoman who was first on the scene of the crime, and the ER doctor who treated the gravely injured young man.

We are also introduced to several Laramie preachers with decidedly different takes on homosexuality, the University of Wyoming president and its theater department chair, a UW drama major who begins to question his parents’ teachings on “the gay lifestyle,” gay and lesbian locals who defy Red State cliches, and most horrifyingly, the infamously hate-speaking Reverent Fred Phelps.

Finally, we meet Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson themselves, barely in their twenties when they met Matt at a Laramie bar and drove away with him in a robbery scheme that soon turned into cold blooded murder.

All of this adds up to one powerful, tear-inducing, gut-punching piece of theater that elucidates, provokes thoughts, and moves hearts in equal measure, and one that gives a cast abundant opportunities to shine in multiple roles each, though its nearly three-hour running time may challenge audiences members grown happily accustomed to ninety-minute-no-intermission fare over The Laramie Project’s three-acts-one-intermission format.

Director Kathleen Delaney has elicited uniformly topnotch performances from Landon Beatty, Paul Cady, Roslyn Cohn, Julie Davis, Marc Antonio Pritchett. Stephen Rockwell, Jackie Shearn, Margaret Rose Staedler, Cathy Diane Tomlin, Amelia Vargas and Kay Vermeil.

Shearn proves particularly impressive as two very different young men (the affable barkeep Matt Galloway and a scarily real Aaron McKinney) and a female Muslim student, with Beatty, Cohn, and Rockwell making especially strong impressions as well. (Rockwell’s pre-sentencing monolog as Matthew’s father Dennis Shepard is a stunner).

Costume design master Michael Mullen gives each actor a number of character-differentiating accessories, Pritchett provides an effectively atmospheric sound design, Tor Brown’s lighting design is as intricate as it is striking, and the gradual, post-by-post construction of the fence where Matthew Shepard spent eighteen hours bruised and battered is an inspired directorial touch.

 Still, despite all these plusses, I found myself distracted and disappointed by the kind of bare-bones scenic design (by Mareli Mitchel-Shields) that I’d expect to find in a workshop or Fringe offering, a bare stage backed by a large, white screen that only occasionally gets filled with one stock image or another, a pair designs that simply don’t stand comparison to what I’ve been seeing in other membership theater offerings around town.

The Laramie Project is produced by Bill Fitzhugh and Danica Waitley. Tessa Grace is assistant director and Tomlin is assistant to the director. John Ledley is stage manager. Nora Feldman is publicist.

Design and running-time complaints aside, impressive performances make the Group Rep’s The Laramie Project a story that still bears retelling twenty-three years after the violent end to the most promising of young lives.

The Group Rep, Lonny Chapman Theatre, 10900 Burbank Boulevard, North Hollywood.
www.thegrouprep.com

–Steven Stanley
May 5, 2023
Photos: Doug Engalla

Tags: Los Angeles Theater Review, Moisés Kaufman, The Group Rep