http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment_stage_theat/2009/10/laramie-10-years-later-a-call-to-action.html

Can theater bring about social change?

That's the key question this week with the premiere last night -- at 150 theaters across the country and around the world, including two here in Orlando -- of the Tectonic Theater Company's new play The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later (An Epilogue). If you figure that maybe 15,000 people saw a version of the play last night, and maybe 1,500 more acted in it or worked on it, how much change can those people effect?

Ten Years Later is a call to action, nothing less. It's also fascinating theater, and the performance I saw last night led to the most emotional talk-back session -- a confluence of minds -- that I've ever heard.

(Let me interrupt myself here to say that Mad Cow Theatre is doing another staged reading of Ten Years Later tonight at 7:30. Don't miss it -- and plan to stay for the talk-back. You will be glad you did. Tickets are $10 and are available at madcowtheatre.com. Proceeds go to the Orlando Youth Alliance, a local support group for GLBTQ teens.)

The idea of Ten Years Later goes back to two things -- Tectonic's agenda of  fostering an artistic dialogue with its audiences "on the social, political and human issues that affect us all," and its heritage from the Federal Theatre Project (1935-1939), which had the same goal in mind. 

At Mad Cow last night, director Katrina Ploof talked about the Federal Theatre Project and its director, Hallie Flanagan, who did similar projects producing the same play in multiple cities across the U.S. on the same night:

Hallie Flanagan did it with snail mail, and she really made it happen, and she pissed people off. She set a precedent for theater that could change [things]. She made a lot of noise. She made a lot of people mad. She made a lot of people happy. So we honor her tonight.

With Ten Years Later, Mad Cow and many, many other theaters were exploring what happened in Laramie, Wyoming, 10 years after Matthew Shepard was murdered. And they were also exploring what happened nearly a decade after they produced The Laramie Project -- a "pivotal" experience, as Ploof put it, for many of those involved.

"We really hope this turns into a real conversation," Ploof said of the long evening to come. "Frankly, I think it's worth a little less sleep to do that."

After a 17-minute internet webcast from Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall, where Tectonic was presenting its own reading of the new play and where artistic director Moises Kaufman, Glenn Close and Judy Shepard, Matthew's mother, spoke to the crowd, Mad Cow and the other 149 theaters presented their readings of Ten Years Later. The play originated last year when the same Tectonic members who had interviewed the townspeople of Laramie after Shepard's death returned to see what had changed.

And at Mad Cow, seven of the eight cast members in the theater's 2002 production of The Laramie Project (Kathy Baker Wood, John Connon, Sam Hazell, Sarah Mathews, Chris Prueitt, Rick Stanley and Dawn Wicklow) are back to perform the epilogue. (Leander Suleiman replaces Jacqueline Rivera-Weber, who moved away.)

In Laramie, the connection to Shepard and his murder has not gone away.

"What happened here still feels very present to me," says University of Wyoming professor Beth Loffreda.

"That's what we're famous for," says a guy on the street.

"It happened here," says Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal, "and we have to own that."

And some things, Laramie residents say, have changed. Dave O'Malley, one of the police officers who investigated Shepard's murder, says that he used to be a person who had no use for gays, but that working on the case his heart "turned 180 degrees."

Catherine Connolly, a lesbian professor at the University of Wyoming, was elected to the state legislature and was there to see a largely Republican body defeat Wyoming's version of a Defense of Marriage Act.

And Romaine Patterson, the young woman who organized the "Angel Action" protest against hatemonger Fred Phelps, says the biggest change is that she's "come to understand the power of my own voice."

At the same time, Wyoming is one of many states and the federal government that have yet to approve a hate-crimes bill. (The U.S. House agreed to approve such a bill last Friday.)

The University of Wyoming dithered for years about passing domestic-partner benefits. And a backlash arose around the issue of Matthew Shepard's death -- one in which people chose to believe the murder had been drug-related, or that Laramie's reputation was all the fault of the "eastern media," or that somehow what happened in Laramie had nothing to do with the town itself.

The Tectonic folks manage to get to the bottom of those rumors, and they reach out to Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, Shepard's murderers, who are each serving two consecutive life sentences for the crime. Stephen Belber visited Henderson in prison in Virginia and found a contrite man, apparently a born follower, who expressed remorse for what he had done.

"I was one of those guys who was brought up with values, and I actually believed them," Henderson says. "I just wish I could change what I did."

A Catholic priest, Father Roger Schmidt, advises Tectonic's Greg Pierotti to go talk to McKinney, who was said to have been the ringleader. 

"Do him justice," the priest tells Pierotti.

"Father, how do I do Aaron McKinney justice?" Pierotti asks.

"You get to know him, Greg," the priest says. "You get to know what it's like to be Aaron McKinney."

And at the same Virginia prison where Henderson is kept, Pierotti finds in McKinney the banality of evil -- an unrepentant man who says he still dislikes gays and makes no connection between his actions and their effects.

It's a remarkable scene, and it's followed by another one -- the first appearance of Judy Shepard, Matthew's mother, who has become an activist since her son was killed. 

"I'm angrier now than I was then," she says. "Because it's still happening."

At Mad Cow, and at most or all of the other theaters that performed the Laramie Epilogue last night, the performance was followed by a talk-back -- in this case an extraordinary one (and I suspect that extraordinary quality was repeated in theater after theater). One person after another spoke very personally. Many of them cried.

"Talk-backs are usually so boring," said actor Rick Stanley. "This is like a weep-back."

Two men, one of them near 80, said they had driven more than 200 miles to get to the nearest theater that was presenting the show. A woman spoke about how the show is effective because it's real. Another woman reminded the audience, and the actors, that the reason the new script works is because some things have changed: Progress has been made.

And two teenagers from the Orlando Youth Alliance spoke about how honored and moved they were to see the play and to be a part of the evening. They'll be back tonight, they said, with more of their cohorts. And there was something moving about that.

In a way, those kids and everyone else in the audience seemed like a part of the play. All of us could have been on that stage; all of us could be the people of Laramie.

"They're people just like us," Ploof says. "They're Our Town. And when they talk, what they say is beautiful."