Institute History
Description
On October 6, 1998, a young university student went to a bar in Laramie, Wyoming. He met two other young men and left the bar with them. He was found 18 hours later in a coma, having been severely beaten and tied to a fence. His name was Matthew Shepard. This crime captured the nation's imagination. In the year that followed, the people of the town of Laramie (pop. 26,000) were forced to ask the question, "How could this happen here?"
On November 14, 1998, a month after the beating, the members of a New York theater company, Tectonic Theater Project, arrived in Laramie and over the course of the next year conducted interviews with the people of the town.
The Laramie Project uses verbatim transcripts of these interviews to chronicle the life of the town of Laramie over the course of the year following the attack, from the moment Matthew Shepard went to the bar to the perpetrators' trials. It examines the shock the town feels upon learning of the attack, the descent of the media and the repercussions of that invasion. It looks at the week during which Matthew was in the hospital; the dialogues that took place in public areas as well as in private spaces. As the world watches, the townspeople search for answers and try to come to terms with this event. It is a portrait of ordinary folks facing extraordinary circumstances—America at the end of the millennium.