Our Town, Laramie, and Wellsboro.... the history of small towns...

Kasey Cox

This past week marked eight years since the terrorist attacks our nation woke up to on September 11, 2001. Once again, I hear the words of a Tony Hoagland poem in my mind. This amazing poem, "The Change", is in Hoagland’s latest collection entitled, What Narcissism Means to Me. In it, Hoagland, as an aging white man, deals with the discomfort “his world” feels at watching a powerful, loud, darkly black-skinned young woman trounce her small, white-skinned opponent at the U.S. Open, which he openly confesses to making an analogy of a new era bumping up against the old. When our old ideas, our old stereotypes, our old comfortable categories, melt and crack before our eyes, it is difficult for us, no matter how “accepting” we believe we are. My favorite lines, the ones that give me shivers every time I read them: "There are moments when history/passes you so close/you can smell its breath,/You can reach your hand out/and touch it on its flank...."

Who among us, especially those who lived through Sept. 11th, doesn’t know what that moment feels like? I feel the same breath of history running through the pages of the play The Laramie Project. This play was a collaborative work between Moises Kaufman, the Tectonic Theater Project, and hundreds of people in Laramie, Wyoming, who agreed to be interviewed in the wake of the brutal beating and subsequent death of Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student, in October 1998.

Indeed, in his introduction to the play, Kaufman explains:

"There are moments in history when a particular event brings the various ideologies and beliefs prevailing in a culture into sharp focus. At these junctures, the event becomes a lightning rod of sorts, attracting and distilling the essence of these philosophies and convictions. By paying careful attention in moments like this to people’s words, one is able to hear the way these prevailing ideas affect not only individual lives but the culture at large.... The brutal murder of Matthew Shepard was ... [an] event of this kind. In its immediate aftermath, the nation launched into a dialogue that brought to the surface how we think and talk about homosexuality, sexual politics, education, class, violence, privileges and rights, and the difference between tolerance and acceptance.....”

The work of the Tectonic Theater Project, in conducting over 200 interviews in Laramie, was just as much anthropology as it was theater. I think of Temple Grandin, amazing woman, internationally-known writer, designer of cattle-handling machinery used all around the world, who is an extremely high-functioning person with Aspergers'. Her work has helped many understand better the way people with autism spectrum see the world. Grandin explains her perspective, living among people with “normal” brains, as feeling like an anthropologist from Mars. She feels she is an alien, a foreigner, and that she is constantly studying human beings to see how they act and why, so she might better blend in.

In many ways, as I work through The Laramie Project with my fellow amateur actors and anthropologists, I believe this play allows us to step outside our own era, our own culture, in this same way, for a little while, to observe ourselves. What do we believe? Why? How do we act toward one another? How do we decide on those actions? And then, once we have observed ourselves, as an anthropologist from Mars, then maybe we can step inside to examine ourselves, to see that we relate to the people in this story, as we see ourselves there. As one young woman from Laramie said at the time of the vigils held for Matthew Shepard, “And we have to mourn that... we live in a town, a state, a country where ... this happens.... people [are] trying to distance themselves from this crime. And we need to own this crime, I feel. Everyone needs to own this. We are like this. We ARE like this. WE are LIKE this.”

Plays such as The Laramie Project or Our Town or The Crucible can be, and often are, read in English class. Ultimately, though, theater is meant to be experienced, watched, and participated in. I invite everyone to read this work, and then come experience it with us as Hamilton-Gibson gives all of us a chance to “reach out our hands and touch history on its flanks”, and meditate on our lives in this small town, in this era.


Hobo knows every day life is always full of drama. If this article seemed like shameless promotion of an event in town, that’s because it is. Hobo has no problem with shameless self-promotion, obviously. If you’ve got something good, then tell people about it! He does it every week in his blog, at http://frommyshelf.blogspot.com. If you’ve got things to promote, email Hobo at frommyshelf@epix.net to ask for his help.