BHS thespians will stage update on ‘Laramie Project’

BLOOMFIELD, NJ — The Bloomfield High School Thespian Society will present its fall production beginning tonight and running through Saturday, Nov. 16 to 18. The show is “The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later.” It will be staged at Westminster Arts Center on the Bloomfield College campus.
“The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later,” is about a murder that made sensational national headlines but over time has become a twice-told tale.

The first telling was a play produced in 2000 called “The Laramie Project.” It was written by Moises Kaufman and members of his theater company who interviewed Laramie, Wyo. citizens and law-enforcement officers about the October 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard. Shepard, 21, was allegedly kidnapped and taken to the outskirts of Laramie where he was beaten to death because he was gay.

The second telling of the tale, the current BHS production being directed by theater arts teacher Brandon Doemling, was originally produced in 2008. Again conducting interviews with many of the same people that spawned “The Laramie Project,” Kaufman and his colleagues uncovered a another interpretation of the murder, one fueled by drugs and not hatred of gays.

BHS is one of 63 high schools in 23 states staging the retelling. Doemling said he was contacted by Gloucester County Technical Institute which initiated its “Laramie Project Project.” This is an attempt to have as many venues as possible offer the newer play so that the murder of Shepard is not forgotten or lost in a revisionist history. Doemling said each school is dedicating its production to a victim of a hate crime. The BHS show is dedicated to Oscar Aracena-Montero, 26, who died with 48 other people in a mass killing that occurred June 2016, in Orlando, Fla. The site of this incident was a gay nightclub named The Pulse. Doemling said he directed the BHS production of “The Laramie Project” in 2016.

“When I started looking at plays for this year, I had heard about this show and thought it would be interesting to revisit,” he said after a recent rehearsal at the high school.

Doemling has cast 17 students to play about 50 roles. He said the original production had eight performers and that in “The Laramie Project,” Shepard’s two killers were not portrayed but in the newer play they are. Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson were convicted for the murder of Shepard.

“It’s kind of interesting, their perspective,” Doemling said.
Returning to Laramie, Doemling said Kaufman discovered that people were saying that Shepard’s death was attributable to a drug deal gone bad. Doemling also mentioned that the TV news program “20/20” investigated the murder and came away saying it was not a hate crime.
“But some people said they got it wrong,” said Doemling, who sees the revisionist version as an attempt by Laramie to disconnect its name from a hate crime.

“The people who wrote the play are sticking to their guns, that it was a hate crime,” he said. “But it gets gray.”
Doemling said Shepard’s killers, at their trial, used Shepard’s sexuality as a defense, that he had “come on” to them. “Aaron McKinney bragged how he had killed the gay,” he said. “But he changed his story.”

But Doemling said why Shepard was killed does not matter. In the newer play, he said there is a character who remembers Shepard as Matt, a friend. But this friend goes on to say there is another Shepard: Matthew Shepard, the event.
“There are people who believe it was a hate crime and I’m one of them,” Doemling said. “And there are people who would rather have their community known as having a drug problem as opposed to being homophobic.”

The BHS production of “The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later” will have an epilogue written by Doemling and delivered by Gemma Eshelman, Katherine Heyman, Sophie Bell and Soula Garcia, who speak of other hate crime incidents.

“A lot of kids aren’t aware of the event,” he said of the Shepard murder. “The epilogue was written to highlight that these things are still happening.”

Another interesting perspective provided by the BHS production is the set itself. It is essentially a fence. Shepard was found near death tied to a fence. TV monitors have been attached to the BHS fence to provide the audience with images of the truth according to the media.
Curtain time for all three performances is 7 p.m. An admission fee will be charged.