Frontmezzjunkies reports: Audible Theater to Present 25th Anniversary Reading of Laramie Project

There are plays that you see, and there are plays that change you. And then, there’s The Laramie Project, a work of theatre so human, so painfully true, it becomes part of your bloodstream. It was 1998. A 21-year-old queer man named Matthew Shepard was kidnapped, brutally beaten, and left to die on the outskirts of Laramie, Wyoming, a hate crime that shocked the country and broke open a much-needed national reckoning. What came next was not just grief, but art. A group of artists, writers, and listeners from the Tectonic Theater Project did what theatre does at its best: they went to Laramie, listened deeply, and created a living, breathing document of an American town, and a nation, torn wide open.

Twenty-five years later, The Laramie Project still hauntingly aches with relevance. It continues to remind us who we are, who we have been, and who we could dare to be. And this December, we will have the opportunity to sit with it again, breathe it in, and look at where we are going as a nation. Audible Theater is presenting a 25th anniversary reading of Moisés Kaufman’s groundbreaking play for four nights only, December 4–6, at the Minetta Lane Theatre, one of the sweetest, most intimate, and electric rooms in New York.

Kaufman (2ST/Broadway’s Torch Song), the Tony nominee, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the visionary who helped create this work from over 200 real voices, will once again lead the evening. The cast is still under wraps, but given Kaufman’s reputation and the project’s incredible legacy, we can expect a gathering of actors who will honor the text and the truth with everything they have. The performance will also be recorded live and released as an Audible Original, a gift for those of us who know that the act of witnessing this play doesn’t end in the theatre.

The creative team, comprising David Lander on lights, Brian Ronan on sound, and John Narun on video, suggests that this won’t just be a reading, but a full-bodied experience befitting the legacy of a play that has been performed in classrooms, community centers, on national stages, and around countless kitchen tables.

The first and last time I felt the force of The Laramie Project live, it stayed with me like a book I couldn’t close, like an echo of voices past and present asking all the right, impossible questions. I’m both devastated and grateful that we still need this play, still need to sit in the sorrow and the truth and the love that made it. Because that’s what this piece is, ultimately, even 25 years later: a love letter to community, to bearing witness, to speaking the truth even when it hurts.

December can’t come soon enough.