85 pages • 2 hours read
Moises KaufmanThe Laramie Project
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Symbols & Motifs
“Live and let live”
This phrase is used by Marge Murray to describe Laramie’s attitude towards LGBT people. In the wake of Matthew Shepard’s death, it takes on a terrible irony and is used throughout the play as a way to expose and challenge the homophobia that exists in Laramie. Marge’s use of the phrases suggests that, in Laramie, straight people lead lives that rarely intersect with those of their gay neighbors; they are happy to let gay people “live” if they do not have to confront the fact of their existence. However, as she continues with her explanation, it becomes clear that if this status quo is disrupted, violence will result. That violence found expression in the attack on Matthew Shepard in October 1998.
Jonas Slonaker challenges the value of “live and let live” when he points to the violent consequences the phrase obscures. As a gay person, you have to “live” a certain way—that is, as a straight person—if you are to be allowed to live without fear. Such a life, without freedom of expression or desire, is the only way to ensure one’s safety. Thus, this phrase is less the expression of a laissez faire attitude to LGBT people than it is a veiled threat that works to keep them in their place.
Angels in America
Tony Kushner’s play, Angels in America, which deals with issues of LGBT identity and AIDS in 1980s America, is referred to several times throughout the play. It provided the scene which earned Jedadiah Schultz a scholarship to study theatre at the University of Wyoming and is the play Rebecca Hilliker chooses to stage the year after Matthew’s death. The recurrent references to this other dramatic text prompt the audience to consider the role of the theatre and its ability to intervene in moments of social and cultural crisis. In this way, it offers a precedent for the Tectonic Theatre Project’s own work. Furthermore, by consciously drawing the audience’s attention to theatre, references to Angels in America ask the audience to reflect on what is being attempted in The Laramie Project itself.
Strangers
Several people interviewed by the theatre company express their hope that whoever attacked Matthew Shepard was a stranger. This hope reflects their desire to distance themselves from the horror of the attack and the hatred that motivated it. It marks the sense of disbelief that anything like this could happen in Laramie and a refusal to recognize the ways in which their own community is capable of such violence.
This desire to project blame elsewhere might also have motivated the media attention that became fixed on Laramie in the aftermath of the attack. The rest of America, in an attempt to reassure itself that such a thing couldn’t happen in their town, focused on Laramie as an exceptional place, where terrible things could happen.
HIV/AIDS
The fact that Matthew was HIV+ is a relatively minor part of this story. We know nothing about how the disease affected his life. Its significance in the play stems from the fact that Reggie Fluty, the first responder, was exposed to the virus as a result of her attempts to save Matthew’s life. The lack of attention given to Matthew’s HIV status might be due, in part, to a reluctance to reduce this young man’s story to the narrative of AIDS that had dominated discourse about LGBT people since the 1980s. However, Reggie’s exposure to the disease offers an effective symbol for the harm caused by McKinney and Henderson, not only to Matthew, but to their entire community.
