PORT ANGELES — To kick off Pride Week on the North Olympic Peninsula, the Port Angeles Community Players Second Stage will perform “The Laramie Project” at 7:30 tonight and Saturday night, and at 2 p.m. Sunday.
The play will be at the Port Angeles Community Playhouse, 1235 E. Lauridsen Blvd. Admission will be by donation at the door.
The drama will be the first Players’ production directed by Janet Lucas.
The play, by Moises Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project, is based on real interviews conducted a year after Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming college student, was brutally beaten, tied to a fence and left for dead on a deserted dirt road near Laramie, Wyo., in 1998.
Press from all over the world descended on Laramie and vigils worldwide were held for Shepard as he clung to life for five days after the beating.
The Laramie Project is one of the most frequently produced and most protested plays of the past 20 years.
“In thoughtful and skillful writing, Moises Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project are careful not to preach,” Lucas said.
“The power of the play is in letting the characters speak for themselves. It is sometimes beautiful and heart-wrenching and other times hard to hear. But necessary.”
This year is the 20th anniversary of Shepard’s death.
The Matthew Shepard Foundation has since been active in “empowering individuals to embrace human dignity and diversity … and to replace hate with understanding, compassion and acceptance,” according to its website at www.matthew shepard.org/.
The Players’ production of The Laramie Project has 21 cast members playing the more than 67 characters written into the play, including townspeople, reporters, Shepard’s family, the perpetrators, university and government officials and the Tectonic Theater Project members.
Several cast members play only one role just because they want to be involved in the project, organizers said.
Information is at www.pacommunityplayers.com/.
Director Janet Lucas, left, and Chris Hamilton are pictured at a rehearsal of The Port Angeles Community Players Second Stage production of “The Laramie Project.”
