The Rivers School Presents: The Laramie Project

The Nonesuch Players will present a different sort of fall play this year when the doors of the Black Box open for their production of Moises Kaufman’s The Laramie Project.Unlike the last two offerings, The Laramie Project is not a comedy. Instead, the play is a series of monologues based on interviews Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project conducted in Laramie, Wyoming following the murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard in 1998.

“I’ve been thinking about The Laramie Project for a long time now, but this year a couple things fell into place which led me to choose it,” said play director Juliet Bailey. “These instances of senseless violence and hate in our country have reached epidemic proportions, particularly after the events in Charleston this summer. I also felt I had the cast for it. This is a very deep, committed group that will really do the subject matter justice.”

Because the play is told in monologue format with more than 60 individual characters, each member of the cast is playing somewhere between two and five different characters. Creating roles for each member of the cast so that they have time to get off stage and into another character was the challenge for Ms. Bailey, but the pieces of this puzzle have come together nicely.

Inhabiting the characters and doing each role justice was the students’ challenge and they have embraced the responsibility of not just conveying the emotions of the people, but also their humanity.

“Jumping from one character to another has been a different experience for us, but everyone has been doing a really good job of getting outside of themselves and embodying another person,” Adrienne Vanderhooft ’16 said.

“In the past our characters have been just that – characters,” added Isabel Sharpe ’16. “But this year, all of these characters are real people. It makes the experience that much more powerful because these people said these words and felt these emotions. It’s a much more ‘real’ experience.”

The cast has been hard at work since the very beginning of the school year and their efforts have yielded a truly unique staging and production of The Laramie Project. That, coupled with the timeliness of the subject matter and importance of its message, are among the reasons why everyone should try to catch one of the four shows.

“It is so much more than just a sad, depressing story,” Isabel said. “The Laramie Project is an amazing look at the generosity and kindness of humans, but also the amount of hatred we are capable of. It’s about more than Matthew Shepard.”

“This play demonstrates that truth is multi-dimensional,” Josh Polanco Calderon ’17 added. “There is more to truth than one specific fact or one specific opinion, and that is something that we, as a society, need to learn and understand.”

The Laramie Project opens Thursday, November 5 at 7:00 p.m. There are also evening performances on Friday, Nov.6 and Saturday, Nov. 7 as well as a Saturday matinee at 2:00 p.m.

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