Teen actors tackle tough truths in play about hate

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This article was published 20/03/2021 (2024 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s a play that has provoked protest rallies in some of the places where it has been performed.

And it is coming up on Manitoba Theatre for Young People’s slate of online productions next weekend.

The Laramie Project, written by Moisés Kaufman and members of New York’s Tectonic Theater Project, is a verbatim stage play set in the town of Laramie, Wyo., in the aftermath of the savage 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man who was tortured and killed because of his sexual orientation.

It’s a provocative choice. Although the play, written two years after the murder, has been performed in high schools and community theatres, it has also met with protests, including pickets by members of the Westboro Baptist Church, a designated hate group whose membership cruelly showed up at Shepard’s funeral with signs bearing messages such as “Matt burns in hell” and “God hates fags.”

A play about hate crime is sadly relevant, says director Erin McGrath, who brought the work to MTYP’s Young Company, 12 young actors between the ages of 14 and 19.

Originally from New Brunswick and schooled in Toronto, McGrath is an actor who, since having a son, has deliberately tried to stay closer to home in her career choices after working all over Canada. Moving to directing was a natural fit, especially since she feels passionately about working with young actors, which is how she found herself at MTYP’s Young Company.

“(MTYP) asked me to bring them a list of shows I might want to direct,” McGrath says. “This one was certainly very high on the list for me and MTYP has been very supportive about that choice.”

The material can be tough, not just because of the brutality of the crime itself, but the raw emotion in the people affected by it.

“I certainly feel very strongly about the importance of it being done, specifically being done by this age demographic,” McGrath says. “Sometimes we like to bubble our youth. But this group, they are so smart and so articulate and so politically minded… and so much more progressive than so many of the adults I know.

“One of the students said to me the show has opened the door up in terms of having having conversations with the adults in her life about LGBTQ rights, conversations they never would’ve had with their family or teachers at school or people they saw as authority figures,” she says.

“Another student lives in a small town and is gay and told me, ‘I’ve always felt really invisible and I haven’t felt there was an adult or a place where I could actually have these conversations.’”

The director says in addition to the positive response from the students, there hasn’t been any negative feedback from parents.

Though Matthew Shepard’s death occured before these young actors were even born, McGrath says the circumstances still feel meaningful to them.

Confirming that assessment is Claire Hill, 17, a Winnipeg actor who says, beyond differences in time and geography, she finds the show entirely relevant.

“I think a lot of the characters in it are really relatable,” she says. “All the characters are real people. And I know a lot of people like the characters in it.

“I think there’s a lot of truth and honesty in what they have to say, and sometimes it’s really positive things and sometimes it’s hard things to hear.”

Hill relates to the way the play explores the struggles faced by queer youth. “I’ve seen a lot of homophobia, in my middle school particularly,” she ways. “I learned ‘queer’ as a swear word at first, and now I identify as that.”

The actor agrees that it’s important not to shy away from these topics with a younger audience. “I think there’s a lot of that perspective asking: Can young people handle this? And I think that we really need to break free from that,” she says. “Young people are seeing a lot more than we like to think.

“We need to stop censoring things for young people. We’re not going to see it in a safe environment if we don’t learn about it through education.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing