Five weeks after Matthew Shepard was kidnapped, beaten and left to dietied to a fence post on the outskirts of Laramie, Wyo., in October 1998Moisés Kaufman led members of his Tectonic Theater Project to the rural Wyoming community and the team conducted 200 interviews with residents over the course of the next year. From these interviews they wrote the play The Laramie Project, a deeply moving account of the life of the townspeople in the year after the murder. The Laramie Project is among the most sought-after and performed plays in small-town community theaters today.
In December 2010, commemorating the fifth anniversary of Brokeback Mountain, the Autry National Center in Los Angeles presented Beyond Brokeback: A Staged Reading with Music. I adapted the play from the book, Beyond Brokeback: The Impact of a Film, written by Members of the Ultimate Brokeback Forum, which received over 500,000 posts to its website in the first year after the release of the film. Pitching it as an "oral history of the rural western gay experience," Beyond Brokeback is now traveling through western communities in Wyoming, Montana and Nevada and making its Chicago debut on Nov. 13 at the historic Auditorium Theater.
In September of this year, at a Broadway star-studded, one-night-only staged reading of Dustin Lance Black's new play '8,' composed of transcripts, plaintiff interviews and courtroom observations from the 2010 Proposition 8 same-sex marriage trial in San Francisco, the Oscar winning screenwriter was quoted in the Hollywood Reporter saying: "To me, this is an educational outreach tool. It's important that people know the arguments on both sides as this case makes its way to the Supreme Court." The Superior Court trial in San Francisco was blacked out to television cameras by order of the judge. Black is now offering free licensing to prospective producers and theater companies to help get the story out.
A case can be made that gay oral histories as plays and staged readings are gaining in popularity because they are cost effective to produce in these lean economic times. For Beyond Brokeback, all that is required are a piano and six directors arranged in the semi-circle. The Laramie Project can be simply staged if necessary, and although I haven't read it, Mr. Black's '8'which presently has more than 25 charactershas a version with 12 characters being written for smaller community productions.
Without the benefit of dazzling costumes and stage design, the written word necessarily becomes the star of the oral history staged reading. After multiple performances of Beyond Brokeback in four states, I may not be able to control all the variables of one-rehearsal performances with cast members that I've never met, but the veracity of the words of real people who wrote them always calms me down. Although I can't speak for Mr. Kaufman and Mr. Black, in the case of Beyond Brokeback, which I culled and cobbled together from thousands of voices into six, not one word of my own is added in the script. The emotional power of the words from writers with screen-names like PaintedShoes, and EnnisinIdaho, confided to the forum website from the privacy of their computer stations, made augmenting the dialogue unncessary.
I recently received a note from KittyHawk, the principal editor of Beyond Brokeback. She thanked me for breathing new life into the book by finding an alternative way to make the stories immediate and more accessible. When in Laramie last April for the reading of Beyond Brokeback at the Shepard Symposium on Social Justice, performed by the Department of Theatre and Dance of the University of Wyoming, attending was Wyoming State Representative Cathy Connelly, one of the original characters in The Laramie Project. Also attending was the President of the Wyoming Historical Society.
Jeff Krauss, the mayor of Bozeman, Mont., participated in the reading at the Bozeman Public Library in October, interpreting the part of the Ultimate Brokeback Forum narrator. The library has asked if they can produce Beyond Brokeback again next year. I said, 'you bet.'
Real people read the real words of real people, with six chairs on an empty stage or in a semi-circle on the tiled floor of a community recreation room.
What a concept!