Review - The Laramie Project - 10 Years Later (Arts Centre Melbourne for Red Stitch)

I was lucky enough to see the very last performance of The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later for 2012 so this will be a short review given there are no more performances. It is a shame it only ran for 10 days - it's a piece of work that deserves to run for at least a good 4 weeks. After it's 2011 Australian debut at Red Stitch Theatre, this 10 year anniversary look at the reactions to events that shocked the town of Laramie was brought back to a larger venue for the 2012 re-run at Melbourne Arts Centre's Fairfax Studio but still under the production of Red Stitch. Having not seen the original play I had no idea what to expect and was slightly worried I wouldn't be able to follow the action very well as a consequence. But minutes into the play I realised this would not be a problem with the structure of the play allowing for some back story and every character introduced clearly. The cast of 9 actors, who individually rotate through handfuls of characters over the 90 minutes, were most impressive at demonstrating the vast and various viewpoints from town members affected by the death of Matthew Shepard in 1998. Of particular note for me were Kate Cole's retired police woman who found Shepard at the gruesome scene and Hester Van Der Vyver's University Psychologist. Cole was brilliant as the straight talking police woman who seemed to pinpoint a lot of the towns problems when she suggested people in a community tend to blame others as a coping mechanism rather than look at themselves while Van Der Vyver's was able to get across just how exasperated and frustrated people can become at the slow progress of social change. It was fascinating to see how one town can have such differing and divisive views on the same event and how it just goes to show there is never really "one" voice in a community. It is probably more accurate to say there are "pockets" of voices as evidenced by an "out" university lecturer who said he knows what parts of Laramie to "stay in" and what parts to "stay out of". It seems that 10 years after this tragic event - much has changed - and much has not. It is as much a story about how a town defines itself as it is about humans struggling to cope with despair and guilt on an individual level. The two best scenes were towards the end when we hear from the two men convicted of Shepard's murder - Russell Henderson (played brilliantly by Paul Ashcroft) and Aaron McKinney (chillingly played by Brett Ludeman) - and knowing the dialogue comes straight from over 10 hours of interviews the original theatre company had with them makes it all the more powerful. The two scenes - and reactions - of both men were so different, with Henderson genuinely remorseful about his actions that night whilst McKinney was more concerned about letting his father down than anything else. I was so inspired by this piece that I have been doing some reading on the history of this story online and will even rent the film version of the original project made by HBO. The Laramie Project is a powerful piece of theatre because it's based on real life and sadly, not the imagination of a playwright. Visit http://theatrevirgin.blogspot.com.au/ for the latest Melbourne Theatre Reviews.