An Honorable ‘Project’

The word “honorable” doesn’t hold much adjectival currency these days. Even when it isn’t used dismissively (“honorable failure,” “honorable bore”), it connotes noble aims and good manners, a good-for-you experience without much vitality.

But in a smart, bracing way, “The Laramie Project” restores honor to that word “honorable.”

Now in its Southern California premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse, it is a fine stage docudrama--a meta-docudrama, really, because it’s consciously about the process of the Tectonic Theater Project researching its next project, as well as about the project itself.

It is a portrait of a town where, in 1998, 21-year-old University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was beaten by two other Laramie residents, tied to a fence and left to die. His death became one of those facile symbols the media recycle by rote: the latest garish example of “ordinary” towns breeding hatred. But behind the symbol, what?

Moises Kaufman, Tectonic founder and director of “The Laramie Project,” has said that in doing a play about Laramie, he wanted to address the sense of “absence” he and his Tectonic colleagues felt. Shepard was the subject; Shepard was nowhere to be found. And everywhere.

The New York-based company took a half-dozen trips to Laramie in the wake of the killing. From a reported 200-odd interviews with Laramie residents and visitors--straight, gay, clergy, cops, ranchers, a bartender, a limo driver--came “The Laramie Project.”

It’s the story of a place, as one character says, “defined by an accident,” quickly changing his word choice from “accident” to “crime.”

Shepard, we’re told, was a TV news junkie, big on CNN and MSNBC, fated to become fodder for the very same image-dispensers. Director Kaufman’s three-act play takes its time to reveal the ways different people talk about the same horrendous act.

This is the great strength of the piece. It listens.

Kaufman and company funded the research with profits from Tectonic’s previous show, “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde.” From one angle, “Gross Indeceny” had greater examples of whopping hypocrisy to process. Justice was not served in Wilde’s case. It was in “The Laramie Project,” to the extent that Shepard’s killers were caught and sentenced. (The most fiercely eloquent words on various subjects come from Shepard’s father.)

But “The Laramie Project” has in its net a subtler, live-and-let-live brand of hypocrisy, at once peculiarly American and specific to big-sky country and the rugged individualism ethos.

“It’s even in some of the western literature, you know, live and let live,” says one interview subject, Laramie resident Jonas Slonaker. In other words, “if I don’t tell you I’m a fag, you won’t beat the crap out of me. I mean, what’s so great about that?”

I’m not sure “The Laramie Project” benefits from the inclusion of the company members’ journal entries and the like. To experience the cast’s first trip out to the fence is undeniably powerful, but it crowds our understanding of the incident; it feels like competition or focus-pulling.

Kaufman’s staging features--for the last time, we’re told--the original cast. (The La Jolla Playhouse engagement is a co-presentation of Berkeley Repertory Theatre, where this show recently played.) Like the text, the physical production sometimes goes for that extra poetic flourish where none is needed.

Slow-motion video imagery of lonely Wyoming highways represents needless emphasis. A couple of the actors, notably Andy Paris (who is, however, excellent as Aaron McKinney, one of Shepard’s tormentors), deliver the kind of outsized, audience-grabbing turns that ever-so-slightly play their real-life subjects false. It may be a question of tone and an extra 10% or so, of “delivering” a character or a moment with the wrong kind of slickness.

That said, “The Laramie Project” is 90% compelling and, yes, honorable. The cast of eight inhabits a great variety of roles with confidence and ease. Scenic designer Robert Brill’s abstract evocation of Wyoming is dominated by clumps of wheat, in various lengths, and a rectangular backdrop of cloudy sky, or rather two of them: one in color, one in black-and-white. There’s a fancy rain effect late in the show that, like the video component, felt to me like too much. But these are nits.

Kaufman and his cohorts got the town to talk, even in the wake of the media invasion. It’s an elegantly shaped example of the docu-theatrical genre.

The results can stand with Emily Mann’s “Execution of Justice,” about the murders of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and openly gay city Supervisor Harvey Milk.

The two plays are of a piece, distressingly so. San Francisco and Laramie represent different planets. But the shared solar system remains badly in need of moral repair and, sometimes, the theater can actually help.

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“The Laramie Project,” La Jolla Playhouse, Mandell Weiss Theatre, UC San Diego, La Jolla Village Drive at Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Sept. 2. $19-$42. (858) 550-1010. Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes.

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Stephen Belber: Ensemble

Amanda Gronich: Ensemble

Mercedes Herrero: Ensemble

John McAdams: Ensemble

Andy Paris: Ensemble

Greg Pierrotti: Ensemble

Barbara Pitts: Ensemble

Kelli Simpkins: Ensemble

Written by Moises Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project. Additional staging by Leigh Fondakowski. Scenic design by Robert Brill. Costumes by Moe Schell. Lighting by Betsy Adams. Sound by Matthew Spiro. Video by Martha Swetzoff. Music by Peter Golub. Production stage manager Steven Adler.