Editor: Keith Davis Writers: Shana Gulko '00, Dave Maley Publisher: Office of Public Information Volume 22, No.15   April 10, 2000

Director of Play about Shepard Murder to Speak Playwright and director Moisés Kaufman will appear at Ithaca College on Tuesday, April 11, to discuss his new play, The Laramie Project. The play is based on the murder of Matthew Shepard, the gay college student who was beaten to death in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998. Kaufman’s presentation, "The Laramie Project: Creating a Play about Homophobia, Grief, and Ending the Hate," will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Emerson Suites, Phillips Hall. The event is free and open to the public. Kaufman’s hit play Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde won the 1996–97 Joe A. Callaway Award for excellence in direction, given by the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers. Kaufman, the founder and artistic art director of New York City’s Tectonic Theater Project, traveled with the members of that group to Laramie to interview the townspeople in the wake of the Shepard murder. The actors, writers, and designers conducted some 200 interviews with people who had known Shepard, who was lured from a local bar by two men posing as homosexuals. After driving Shepard to a secluded spot, the men tied him to a fence post, pistol-whipped him, and left him to die. In addition to the interviews, the members of the theater project attended the trial of one of the defendants, spending the better part of a year following the story. Then they gathered together to share what they had learned, and the result was The Laramie Project. Directed by Kaufman, the play made its world premiere at the Denver Center Theater in February. It is now touring the United States. "The theater company was very sensitive to the people of Laramie in trying to find some truth. The people I saw portrayed in the play tonight whom I know personally were portrayed very honestly," said Harry Woods, a University of Wyoming employee who was in the audience when the play opened in Denver and is himself a character in the drama. "After the murder, Laramie changed in a way that gay and lesbian people felt," added Zackie Salmon, a lesbian resident of Laramie who is also a character in the play. "I would have never felt this comfortable being who I am on that campus or in that community, but after the Matthew Shepard incident, there was a push for understanding." Kaufman, a native of Venezuela, has been living in New York City since 1987. Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, which he wrote and directed, was the third most performed play in the United States in the 1998–99 season. In addition to the Callaway award for excellence, the play has been honored with the Lucille Lortel Award for best off-Broadway show and the Outer Critics Circle Award for best play. For more information call associate professor Jeff Claus at 274-1342.

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