The Laramie Project
at Theatre at UBC:
On the Subject
By Moises Kaufman and Tectonic Theatre Projects
Directed by Nicola Cavendish
Frederic Wood Theatre
Nov. 19-28, 2009
7:30 PM
About Theatre at UBC's Production of The Laramie Project
Renowned Canadian actress, director and playwright Nicola Cavendish directs this play examining the true story of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard. In October 1998 Shepard was kidnapped, severely beaten and left to die, tied to a fence on the outskirts of Laramie Wyoming. Five weeks later, Moisés Kaufman and fellow members of New York City's Tectonic Theatre Project went to Laramie and over the course of a year conducted over 200 interviews with its inhabitants. The resulting play, The Laramie Project, chronicles the life of the town in the year after the murder. It has since become a lightning rod for gay rights and the establishment of hate-crime laws.
“Nothing short of stunning… not to be missed.”
- New York Magazine“A pioneering work and a powerful stage event.”
- Time Magazine
With Moisés Kaufman at the helm, the award-winning Tectonic Theater Project explores the ways in which experimentation with form and structure can inform contemporary drama. Other projects include 33 Variations (dramatizing Ludwig van Beethoven's life), Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and I Am My Own Wife all created from historical and living records of actual events. The Laramie Project has been adapted into a film (starring Peter Fonda, Laura Linney, Christina Ricchi and Steve Buscemi) and the company has recently created and premiered a sequel to the play, The Laramie Project, 10 Years Later.
More at http://tectonictheaterproject.org
We’re thrilled to welcome UBC Theatre alumna Nicola Cavendish to direct this production. A very accomplished actress and playwright her directing credits include The Mousetrap (Arts Club Theatre) and Having Hope at Home (Chemainus Theatre). Cavendish has earned five Jessie Richardson Awards, two Doras, a Gemini, the Montreal Critics Award for Best Actress, and the UBC Alumni Association Award of Distinction. She has worked across Canada, in Seattle, and New York, where she performed on Broadway. Cavendish starred in the National Tour of Michel Tremblay’s acclaimed For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again and she has spent four seasons at the Shaw Festival Theatre. The role of Shirley Valentine has taken Cavendish across Canada in numerous revivals spanning 20 years.
The Laramie Project features a cast of 15 with Theatre at UBC BFA Acting candidates Megs Chenosky, Andy Cohen, Mishelle Cuttler, Eric Freilich, Sarah Goodwill, Claire Hesselgrave, Dave Kaye, Barbara Kozicki, Andrew Lynch, Jameson Parker, Christine Quintana, Ryan Warden, Ben Whipple, Joanna Williams and Tich Wilson. The creative team includes professional artist Jonathon Monro (Sound Design) and Professor Ron Fedoruk (Scenic Design) with BFA Design candidates Zoe Green (Costumes) and Laura McLean (Stage Management).
THE LARAMIE PROJECT: November 18 - 28, 2009
Frederic Wood Theatre, 6354 Crescent Rd., UBC
Mon. - Sat. at 7:30 p.m. | Opening: Thursday Nov. 19 | Run: Nov. 18 - 28, 2009 | Curtain: Mon. - Sat. at 7:30 p.m. | Tickets: $20/$14/$10 | $6 Preview: Sept. 30 | Mondays $5 for all UBC alumni |
Box Office: 604.822.2678 or theatre@interchange.ubc.ca
We welcome our talented alumna, award winning actress and director Nicola Cavendish, to direct this dramatic investigation of events surrounding the Matthew Shepard story.
An Interview with Director Nicola Cavendish
TorontoStage.com “Medium Close-Up” ~ February 2004
Few actors have been able define excellence in their career quite as impressively as Nicola Cavendish.
She’s worked across Canada, Seattle, and New York and has even planted herself for four years at the Shaw Festival. With Two Doras, One Gemini, and five Jessie Richardson Awards under her belt, one would swear the Okanagan Valley native is just warming up.
Nicola Cavendish is back in Toronto this month as Reta Winters in Carol Shield’s Unless adapted by the late author’s daughter Sarah Cassidy.
She’s a stage veteran that has succeeded for all the right reasons throughout her illustrious career. Nicola Cavendish isn’t afraid to give a director what is due for his/her contribution to a production and says there are at least two Canadian actors she’d hop on a plane to see work the stage.
What fascinates you most about the acting craft?
The heart in the material and the power that the stage still has. And the way it can change people’s lives ultimately—what they listen to and what they pay attention to. It’s a tremendous resource.
Is acting an art that anyone can succeed at with training or are there natural traits one must possess to excel in this discipline?
I think it’s a combination of both.
There’s a lot of people who have worked terribly hard and spent a great deal of money on classes and schooling and more schooling and they can’t seem to be able to break into it.
That’s where a something called a divine gift steps up to the plate and becomes almost a vocation.
You see, it takes a bit madness to do what we do. The bottom line is that you have the gull and the temerity and the tenacity to stand in front of 400 people a night and be able to hold their attention and you believe you can.
And I don’t think it’s just about knowing how to deliver a line or knowing where to be or understanding the material inside out and upside down. You have to know about the investment required of your very soul.
Marlon Brando once stated that acting is the expression of a "neurotic impulse." Do you believe this is true?
No, I don’t.
There’s a great arena where one may play out the neurosis of characters but I think if an actor brings there own personal neurosis into the arena—no, I don’t believe that at all. That’s turning theatre into a kind of therapy session where there’s no professional around to really guide the parametres.
Acting is about being utterly vulnerable. Most people can’t be vulnerable in their day-to-day lives.
That’s one of the beauties of theatre. People come in off the street and are rendered by what they’re feeling, what they’re shown, what they’re made to feel. So actors have to be supremely vulnerable in order to invoke vulnerability in an audience. In order to be vulnerable you have to be able to willing to show your most pink underbelly—what you’re most frightened of. You have to be able to exchange your feelings for those of the audience members.
Who is more important to the production, the actor or director?
The director.
With Roy Surette, the director I’m working with now, he invites collaboration from everybody. Actors are not meant to be like pawns or made to feel that they don’t have something good to contribute from their mind, from their own personal experiences, from their history.
Therefore, the director has the power in terms of shaping the material but considers the input. He or she always has the ultimate reign.
But beyond that—the writer.
Tell me about a role that you played where something went horribly wrong on stage but you covered up the best you could.
I did a play a long time ago at Citadel Theatre in Edmonton called Top Girls by Carol Churchill.
And Act II goes to a very real English kitchen drama. There are cupboards, and tables, and counters, all the things that would make a full kitchen.
In this production, on this night, there happened to be a swag line that for some reason managed to escape from the fly floor and was hanging like a soft ‘U’ across the top of the stage just underneath the curtain and nobody noticed it.
The swag line caught the top of the kitchen cupboard unit. And the cupboard, still moving down stage on a truck, kept moving and moving until there was no swag line left.
The tautness actually caused it to flip so that the entire kitchen unit came crashing. With the cupboards falling, the counter falling, the fridge fell over. The entire set collapsed!
The wonderful Citadel Theatre stopped the show and a representative came out to say “Ladies and gentleman, we’re all going to have to take a break for a few minutes. Drinks are on the house!”
Name a stage actor that tops your list of all time favourites.
I’d travel to see Seana McKenna. I’d travel see Brent Carver.
Seana is so intelligent in the delivery of the material. And because she’s so honest. and because she moves me.
Brent has a special light about him. He’s like an imp or some unworldly being that’s on our planet.
What do you feel is the secret is to longevity in this business?
Time off.
This production, in particularly, demands a great deal from all of us but certainly it demands a great deal from me.
I said the other day I said “As soon as I finish this play in September in Victoria, I am booking off for the rest of the year until the following September because I need to.
There is a whole side to being an actor. The other side being the human being that likes to knit, or rock climb, or visit antique shows, or go on holidays. To discover things about yourself that you wouldn’t discover just inside the closed world of the script and a rehearsal room.
It’s about feeding and nurturing the person you are going to die with which is not just the actor.
Reprinted by permission from TorontoStage
See: http://www.torontostage.com/reviews/medCloseCavendish.html
Copyright JAB media 2004
Playwright Moises Kaufman and
The Tectonic Theatre Project
Excerpted from www.lagcc.cuny.edu/laramie/kaufman.htm
Moises Kaufman is the author and director of both the original stage production and the HBO film production of The Laramie Project. The Tectonic Theatre Project is a non-profit theatre company whose mission is to explore different language and forms of theatre. In the two most known of the company’s works, The Laramie Project and Gross Indecency, the Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, Kaufman explores how theatre performances can communicate with audiences in alternate ways.
The theatre of Kaufman and Company is not the proscenium standard of Broadway, where the slice of life presented behind the proscenium arch is to be passively viewed by the audience
The theatre of Kaufman and Company is not the proscenium standard of Broadway, where the slice of life presented behind the proscenium arch is to be passively viewed by the audience. The Tectonic Project challenges the audience to use their imagination to envision the reality that the actors assume on stage. There are no elaborate and realistic sets in a Tectonic production. The actors use only chairs and tables to create a variety of scenic locales. In traditional American theatre one actor is assigned one role and the audience associates that actor with that role throughout the play. In both The Laramie Project and Gross Indecency, the Tectonic actors plays a variety of roles, often changing from one character to another in full view of the audience.
True To Reality: An Interview with Moises Kaufman
by Jose Orozco
www.morphizm.com/recommends/interviews/orozco_moises.html
From his play about Oscar Wilde’s judicial persecution, “Gross Indecency: The Trials of Oscar Wilde,” to his play and subsequent film “THE LARAMIE PROJECT,” which explored the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay student in small town America, to the Tony Award-winning “I Am My Own Wife,” which he directed, Venezuelan writer Moisés Kaufmann tackles universal subjects through the prism of his own experience.
Morphizm: How was your theater company received when you visited Laramie?
Moises Kaufman: By the time we got there, four weeks after Matthew’s death, the media had already been there en masse. And the way the media portrayed Laramie was very biased. They portrayed it as a town full of hillbillies, rednecks, and cowboys. So, of course, a crime of this nature could happen in a town like that, but it wouldn’t happen anywhere else in the country. Well, what we found was rather the opposite. Laramie was special not because it was so different, but because it was so similar to so many other towns in America. And now that the play is being done all around the world, we get letters all the time from people saying, “I live in a small town in the south of France, and my town is exactly like Laramie.” So, yes, we had to put up with the people’s distrust of a New York theater company, and perhaps more damaging, the bruising caused by the media. These people had been interviewed enough. They had seen what came out of answering questions: how text can be taken out of context, how footage is just a point of departure for narratives that reporters want to construct. So it took us the best part of a year -- we were in and out of Laramie for slightly over a year -- to gain their trust and respect. It took that time to get them to open up to us.
Morphizm: The material I read spoke to the crisis provoked by the Shepard murder. How did Laramie residents feel?
MK: In a town of 27,000 people, there’s one degree of separation between people. Everyone knew either Matthew or one of the two perpetrators or someone who knew someone. So it was very, very impactful. I live in New York. If a person is murdered in the block next to mine, I don’t ask: “What did I do to cause this murder? What kind of community am I helping to create?” The people of Laramie were forced to ask that question. And that was why I wanted to be there when they responded to it.
Morphizm: Why make a film version of THE LARAMIE PROJECT?
MK: The play is amongst the most performed plays in America today. So it has reached a very wide audience. And yet, I felt television (especially HBO) would reach an even greater audience. When we did the play there was talk about making a feature film, but I didn’t want to do that. By doing an HBO film, the material would find its way into the cultural bloodstream much more rapidly and efficiently.
Morphizm: Going back to Laramie for the film, what issues did you deal with?
MK: We had to make sure we correctly represented them. It’s very easy to change people’s meanings. We made a rule in our work. That when someone came to see their work, it wouldn’t be enough that they said: “This is what I said,” but they should also say “This is what I meant.” That was our litmus test.
Morphizm: How do you go from theater directing to film directing? Will you continue to split yourself between the theater and film with emphasis on the former?
MK: I want to continue to do both. The directors I respect -- Mike Nichols, Sam Mendes, Stephen Daldry -- are all able to do both. There are a great deal of things to gain by doing both. The important thing is to treat each medium with awe. They are very different, and they do very different things. The question must always be: what can this medium contribute to the story? For Laramie, in the film we were able to show the beauty of the American west on the screen. We could have 64 actors play 64 roles. In the theater, we have the beauty of a small company of actors trying to understand a large community with their only tools: acting. So it’s important to be keenly attuned to the medium in which you are working.
Morphizm: How did the Shepard murder and its after effects represent a watershed historical moment? What other works of yours have been based on such moments?
MK: I am particularly interested in what I call watershed historical moments. These are moments when an event occurs and it brings to the surface all of our belief systems. My first play, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, was based on such an event, what many called the trial of the century. When Oscar Wilde was tried for acts of gross indecency, Victorian society was so shocked that they were forced to speak. The trial transcripts are a record of what they said. In reading those trials, I was able to see not only Oscar’s story, but how the Victorians felt and spoke not only about sexuality, but about class, about education, about religion. The transcripts are a record of the belief system of an entire culture. I am fascinated by that. THE LARAMIE PROJECT is a record of the belief system of our culture. When Matthew Shepard was murdered, the people of Laramie were so shocked that they tried to articulate their thoughts, feelings, and experience in words. Fortunately, we were there to record those words. And what we have now is a document not only about what the town of Laramie thought and felt, but perhaps about what our culture in America thinks and feels.
Morphizm: Being gay and Latino, your work has focused on the former. Why?
MK: I don’t think that is true. I am Venezuelan, I am Jewish, I am gay, I live in New York. I am the sum of all my cultures. I couldn’t write anything that didn’t incorporate all that I am. I retract that. I could, but I wouldn’t be a very good artist. I am not a gay writer. I am not a Latino writer. I am not a Jewish writer. I am a writer whose experience of the world has been tainted by all my experiences of it. Many people have seen Laramie as a work that explores Latino culture. It has been said that Laramie is like so many small towns in Latin America. But I profoundly distrust those labels.
Morphizm: What are the challenges and advantages to basing your works on real events and people?
MK: Truth is more interesting than fiction.
Morphizm: Why’d you decide to direct I Am My Own Wife?
MK: Because it’s a beautiful play. Because the character is superbly interesting. Because Doug Wright is a dear friend.
Morphizm: Did this story move you personally?
MK: As a Jewish man whose parents are European immigrants -- my father came to Venezuela after the war, my mother was born there, but her parents immigrated before the war -- the story of a transvestite who survives two of the most oppressive regimes of the 20th century, the Nazis and the communists, was of obvious interest.
Morphizm: What does the play have to say about Germans in the 20th century? What does it have to say to Americans today? And as for its universal appeal, how might heterosexuals relate to it?
MK: Well, since it’s run on Broadway for almost a year and garnered every major award, one must assume that it has a very broad appeal, unrelated to sexual orientation. That would be like asking if Othello holds any interest for white people. The play is about survival, about heroism, about what it means to compromise, and when is that not an option. In this sense, it’s absolutely universal.
Morphizm: If you were to write a play about being gay in Latin America, or a gay Latin American in the States, what would it look like?
MK: All my plays are about that. Just the way they are about me being an artist living in the 21st century. And an American in wartime.
Morphizm: What do you have planned for 2005?
MK: I’m in pre-production for a film, I’m about to direct Neil Labute’s new play “This Is How It Goes” at the Donmar Warehouse in London, then in the summer, I’ll be directing Wilde’s “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” and in the fall, hopefully a new play of mine. I’m the hardest-working Jewish Latino gay artist in New York.
Born and raised in Chicago, José Orozco works as a freelance reporter in Caracas where he writes about social issues.
