In one of the most well-staged and dramatically engaging moments in the play, a Baptist minister (Margaret Maurer) repeats with evangelical fervour, “The word is either sufficient or it is not.” As a play compiled from interviews with people from Laramie, Wyoming, in the wake of a homophobic murder, The Laramie Project proves that the spoken word is more than sufficient to express and explore such a powerful subject. 

This play is the first that I have seen in Cambridge to have made me cry. It is profoundly moving. Composed of a beautiful blend of different voices and accounts of both Matthew Shepard, the young man who was beaten, tortured, and left tied to a fence post to die, and the events that surrounded the attack, this production weaves these together into an intricate tissue of subjective experiences. All accounts are delivered with studied precision by the cast, who switch between characters with ease. Such shifts could be confusing, but the actors’ constant flagging of their roles through their speech and mannerisms make these changes clear. The actors’ positioning in relation to each other punctuates their speeches in sequences that often move into dance, providing much needed movement and momentum. Props, too, are used to good effect: chairs swiftly becomes the inside of a bar; a string of barbed wire and two posts the fence that Matthew was tied to. Such simple transformations help create a tone that is neither upbeat nor unbearably sombre, but starkly real. 

What is real, or rather, what is true, is something that this play grapples with - if it can even be called a play. I hesitated over referring to the people portrayed as ‘characters’: although their accounts are mediated by the performers, there is something misleading about treating this as if it were identical to any other, wholly fictionalised, performance. While this is not a production that is visually dazzling, nor one that takes your breath away, it is instead a production that shines a light on “the magnitude with which people hate”, and love. When I saw The Laramie Project the Corpus Playroom was probably only around half full, which meant that occasionally jokes fell flat and the production lacked the feeling of a strong connection with the audience as a whole. I truly hope that these minor flaws will be remedied when The Laramie Project receives the attention that it deserves.