Enlarge Reading on Oct. 12: Brian O'Shea, Brad Tarr, Sheila Snow Proctor and Brandon DiMatteo

Posted: October 16th, 2009 Aleigh Acerni

The crowd that filled every seat at the Story Slam Charlotte theater on Oct. 12 was expecting a powerful experience—and they weren’t disappointed. The evening began with an introduction via Internet Webcast from Lincoln Center, featuring actor Glenn Close, who opened with the powerful words: “Tonight, we make history.”

Monday was the eleventh anniversary of October 12, 1998, the day Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming, finally succumbed to the injuries he’d received days earlier after being kidnapped, tied to a fence, and brutally beaten. The tragic event spurred conversation worldwide about hate crimes and the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

The reaction of the small community of Laramie, Wyoming, and the eventual trial of Shepard’s murderers were immortalized by members of the Tectonic Theatre Project, who spent months interviewing people in the town.

The resulting play, “The Laramie Project,” was a forceful portrait of a community responding to tragedy amidst rampant homophobia and impossible-to-ignore attention from media across the globe.

The theatre group returned to Laramie last year to once again interview residents of Laramie, in an attempt to examine how the town had changed in the decade after Shepard’s death—and how it’s stayed the same. On Monday night, the Tectonic Theatre Project performed the resulting play, “The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later, An Epilogue” in a live reading on stage at the Lincoln Theatre.

So did 150 other theaters across the world, in a historical simultaneous reading from Tel Aviv to Madrid—to Charlotte.

Many performances benefited the Matthew Shepard Foundation which seeks to “replace hate with understanding, compassion and acceptance through educational, outreach, and advocacy programs.”

The evening unfolded with a moving reading of the play, directed by Jimmy Chrismon, with a cast including John Hartness, Sheila Snow Proctor, Brian O’shea, Kitty Beard, Brad Tarr, Miriam Egbert, Brandon DiMatteo, Maggie Monahan and Andrew Barron.

One of the most striking passages, an interview with one of Shepard’s unapologetic murderers, Aaron McKinney, had an unnerving effect on the audience, but was balanced with a few hopeful moments, including a description of the town’s six-year-old AIDS Walk, and the University of Wyoming’s four-day Shepard Symposium for Social Justice held each spring.

And yet, the audience was left with the knowledge that ten years later, Laramie has no official memorial to Matthew Shepard. The fence where he was beaten has long been torn down, and there’s no marker to commemorate it.

The play reveals that many in Laramie no longer speak of Shepard’s death as a hate crime — rather, they characterize it as a drug-fueled robbery gone wrong, a description that local police vehemently discredit.

The evening was a revealing glimpse at how far Laramie — and the entire world, even — has come in working to combat hate crimes. And how far we still have to go.

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