Week #11 : 'The Laramie Project' by Moises Kaufman and the Tectonic Theatre Project

“If you would have asked me before, I would have told you, Laramie is a beautiful town, secluded enough that you can have your own identity … A own with a strong sense of community – everyone knows everyone … A town with a personality that most larger cities are stripped of.  Now, after Matthew, I would say that Laramie is a town defined by an accident, a crime.  We’ve become Waco, we’ve become Jasper.  We’re a noun, a definition, a sign.  We may be able to get rid of that … but it will sure take a while.”  - JEBADIAH SCHULTZ

Matthew Shepard was kidnapped, beaten within an inch of his life, tied to a pole in the middle of a field and left to die by two boys – Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney. 

The reasoning for this crime – Matthew was gay. 

The Laramie Project was written by Moises Kaufman and the Members of the ‘Tectonic Theatre Project’.  It explores the hate/homosexual crime of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming in 1998.  8 Actors portray 67 Characters in this ruthless re-telling of the true crime that shocked not only a small town, but the entirety of the USA. 

Over a year and a half and six visits in 1998 and 1999, the members of the ‘Tectonic Theatre Project’ conducted over 200 interviews with people closely related to the crime and those who were living in Laramie at the time – whether they were long term residents or students at the University of Wyoming who knew Shepard. 

This allows an overall breakdown of the events leading up to the kidnapping and subsequent murder, the crime itself and the aftermath that was bought down onto the town and its inhabitants.

Broken down into ‘moments’ not scenes, Kaufman explains the reasoning behind this:

“When writing this play, we used a technique I developed called ‘moment work’.  It is a method to create and analyse theatre from a structuralist (or tectonic) perspective.  For that reason, there are no ‘scenes’ in this play only ‘moments’.  A ‘moment’ does not mean a change of locale, or an entrance or exit of actors or characters.  It is simply a unit of theatrical time, which is then juxtaposed with other units to convey meaning.”

All of the moments in the script allude to the content that will be delivered on the stage.  Moments such as:

·        Journal Entries (of the Tectonic Theatre Project)

·        Alison and Marge

·        The Word

·        The Essential Facts

·        E-mail

·        Medical Update

Allow the audience to easily grasp the situation and the types of ‘characters’ that are going to be on stage.  (I use ‘characters’ in this form as they are all real life people, recalling real life events) 

You could break down the events in the script even further and give sections ‘Chapters’ of meanings.  (I learnt this from Director Leticia Caceres as a good way to conduct rehearsals – You and the cast section out the script into these chapters and give them a simple title so everyone is on the same page when you are rehearsing a specific section and not have to use archaic phrases eg: “Today were going to work on pages 20-34.”  Instead you can create much more meaning into the phrase “Today we are going to be working on the Vigils.”)

The chapters that I have created for this play are as follows (This will give you a good breakdown of the structure of the play, which is very important to the flow of the production):

1.      Laramie

2.     Personality

3.     Religion

4.     Crime

5.     Realisation

6.     Deposition

7.     News reports

8.     Definitive Recognition and Repercussion

9.     Vigils

10.    Contrast

11.    Death

12.    Funeral

13.    Court (Henderson)

14.   After

15.   Court (McKinney)

16.   Statement

17.   Epilogue

Since each actor has to portray 6 to 12 ‘characters’ (and in the original staged production, portraying themselves in some instances) each character has to change on stage.  It is therefore specified in the script that the characters need only define themselves by a hat, shirt, a pair of glasses.  All costume items can either be left onstage so actors can remain onstage for the entirety of the production.

In a similar vein, the set needs only be quite minimal.  A couple of chairs, a table or two and the use of technology; is all you need to carry on a successful production.  It is one of those strong liturgical plays where the actors and dialogue completely speak for themselves.

“So how could it not be a town where this kind of thing happens?  Like, that’s just totally – like, it’s just totally like circular logic, like how can you even say that?  And we have to mourn this and we have to be sad that we live in a town, a state, a country where shit like this happens.  I mean, these are people trying to distance themselves from this crime.  And we need to own this crime.  I feel.  Everyone needs to own it.  We are like this.  We ARE like this.  WE are LIKE this.” – ZUBAIDA ULA

You can find out more about the show from the following websites:

http://www.laramieproject.org/

http://www.tectonictheaterproject.org/The_Laramie_Project.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1qiTmF0p4A

http://www.matthewshepard.org/our-works/lp-support

Next Week: 'Philadelphia, Here I Come!' by Brian Friel

Week #4 : 'Die Hamletmaschine' by Heiner Muller

For a 9 page script, Die HamletMaschine (or in English - Hamletmachine) certainly packs a massive punch.  A visual feast as well as a thought provoking experience.

Written by German Heiner Muller in 1977, Die Hamletmaschine is a short 5 scene play script that is loosely based on the lengthy text  - Shakespeare's Hamlet, but more on the bare components that make up the tragic tale.  The images are striking and are a great hook for the audience.  For instance:

"Grief gave way to joy, joy into munching, on the empty coffin the murder mounted the widow SHOULD I HELP YOU UP UNCLE OPEN THE LEGS OF MAMA."

"One should sew the wenches shut, a world without mothers."

It is a post-modern script that is open to varying different interpretations.  Some versions focus on the consumerism and the references to such (Coca Cola, "I go though the street malls faces, with the scars of the shopping blitz").  Some performances have focuses entirely on the images and neglected the script.  Some the entire focus is the references to East Germany Communism and and the influential role of intellectuals during that time.  In 1992 a university recreated the text set in meat factory setting with Ophelia hanging on meat hooks...  
There is no right or wrong way to perform this script.  You devise your performance from how the script speaks to you and your actors.  
It has been performed as a radio drama which included a soundtrack by Einstürzende Neubauten.  
Listen to it!  And listen to it LOUD!! I dare you!!!!!


From the opening scene (FAMILY ALBUM) we are introduced to the character Hamlet and are instantly aware of his internal monologue and the links and allusions to the original Shakespearean text.
However, the audience are also immediately aware that the actor playing Hamlet is looking onto himself as a character.  The very first line - "I was Hamlet"  to where he describes himself as an actor "Horatio Polonius.  I knew that you're an actor.  I'm one too, I play Hamlet."

In Scene 4 - PEST IN BUDA BATTLE OF GREENLAND, again we see Hamlet refer to himself as an actor playing a role "I am not Hamlet.  I play no role anymore.  My words have nothing more to say to me.... My drama is cancelled.  Behind me the scenery is being taken down."

In opposition is Ophelia's first line in the second scene (THE EUROPE OF THE WOMAN)- "I am Ophelia".  Muller describes her as having a clock as a heart.  Immediately the audience connects with Ophelia and knows that her time is coming to an end.  The contrast is that 'Hamlet' can look from the inside out and in again, whereas 'Ophelia' looks from the outside in.  She describes her end "I dig the clock which was my heart out of my breast."

In the 5th and final scene - WILDSTRAINING/IN THE FEARSOME ARMAMENTS/MILLENIA Ophelia is onstage alone in the deep sea strapped into a wheelchair with body parts floating past (again a direct link to the original text), she laments that she is not Elektra with her heart of darkness and under a sun of torture.  In this she speaks about burying the revolution and that all will know the truth soon.


Muller has also used capital letters and spacing that doesn't form to the rules of grammar in order to create these visual images.  For instance Scene 3 is nearly entirely all imagery where 'Hamlet' is dresses up as a woman by 'Ophelia' and voices are heard from the coffin. However Scene 1 and 4 are very aural based where 'Hamlet' is speaking directly to the audience as to the dealings within the script and his interpretation of his life and what he believes to be true - or not.

If you haven't had the chance to read the script, I highly recommend that you do.  You can download it here.  I really have only just scrapped the surface of the text in this post. Remember it's only 9 pages long..... but you will be engrossed with it for hours!

Next Week : 'Crave' by Sarah Kane

Week #3 : 'Six Characters in Search of an Author' by Luigi Pirandello

"We have this illusion of being one person for all, of having a personality that is unique to all our acts. But it isn't true. We perceive this when, tragically perhaps, in something we do, we are as it were, suspended, caught up in the air on a kind of hook. Then we perceive that all of us was not in tha act, and that it would be an atrocious injustice to judge us by that action alone, as if all our existence were summed up in that one deed." (The Father)

'Six Characters in Search of an Author' is an absurdist play based on metatheatrical ideas. Six characters walk into a rehearsal in progress asking for an author to complete their story. The characters know what is to happen to them, but they need to play it out in order or it to be complete. The director/producer becomes enamoured with their story and is determined to replay their scenes with the actors of his company.

A paradox in the making? Complete nonsense? Prophetic and life destroying? 

Let us ask the character of the FATHER:

"...if we have no other reality beyond the illusion, you too must not count overmuch on your reality as you feel it today, since, like that of yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow."

Confused yet? You're not far off the context of this play. As you start to read, Pirandello lulls you into a false sense of security: The characters story seems to be quite straight forward, the comedy of the actors watching this tragic (and in parts tragically awful) story that embodies traits of Mills and Boons formulaic writing.  Yet it is far from that as we delve deeper into the characters narrative, it becomes more of a 'game' for the Director and acting troupe, but so much more of a life for the Characters. 

The prose is beautifully written in two differing forms - Naturalistic and often comedically colloquial for the troupe of actors and poetical and prophetic for the characters. This alludes to the starkly different natures that Pirandello has specifically created for the audience to disassociate the two halves of diametrically opposed 'reality and make believe'.

Pericles Lewis at Yale University discusses that 'Pirandello’s work plays with the central tension in the modern theater between the desire to create a perfect illusion of extra-theatrical reality on the stage and the contrary impulse to celebrate the very illusoriness of all theater. Modern drama calls attention to the fact that theater is both a representational art, like painting or writing, and a performing art, like dance or music.  The actors on stage are at the same time real people and representatives of fictional characters. One of the startling elements of Pirandello’s play is the separation (which he emphasized in his stage directions) between the “characters” and the “actors.” As the theorist Bert States has written,

"we tend generally to undervalue the elementary fact that theater—unlike fiction, painting, sculpture and film—is really a language whose words consist to an unusual degree of things that are what they seem to be…. Or, as [the playwright] Peter Handke puts it, in the theater light is brightness pretending to be other brightness, a chair is a chair pretending to be another chair,”

and, of course, a person is a person pretending to be another person.'

FATHER (jumping up suddenly): Illusion? I would ask you not to speak of illusion! I would beg you not to use that word. For us it has a particularly cruel ring!
PRODUCER (astonished): For heaven’s sake, why?
FATHER: Oh, yes, cruel, cruel! You really ought to understand.
PRODUCER: What are we supposed to say? Illusion is our stock-in-trade [...]
FATHER: I entirely understand [...] As artists [...], you have to create a perfect illusion of reality.
PRODUCER: That’s right.
FATHER: But what if you stop to consider that we, the six of us (he gestures briefly to indicate the six characters) have no other reality; that we don’t exist outside this illusion!

In 1921 it was greeted with great hostility (and inciting riots in the theatre) in Italy when it was first produced, but soon became heralded as a great piece of Modernist theatre when it was performed in 1923 in Paris, helping to forge the way ahead for Beckett and Ionesco's Theatre of the Absurd.

This play, being in the public domain, has been adapted for the stage many a time. The most recent in Australia or the 2010 Sydney Festival. The team at 'Headlong Theatre' used a docu-drama premise for the very beginning of the play and coupled it with the use of video and white noise to disrupt the flow of the character and actor interaction to establish a sense of authenticity of the falsehood of the situation but also fragmentation of the plot devices.

This play would certainly be a challenging script to adapt for any producer/director/actor, but it would also bring great joy in the triumph of gaining the right mix of contemporary and ancient theatre practices.

Next Week: Hamletmachine by Heiner Muller