Should that stop me making work about those things when they tend to be
Posted in General on 13. Oct, 2010
Should that stop me making work about those things when they tend to be the most interesting?” When Cathy Marston first gave up a permanent company job she was prepared to wait tables for the chance to make dance Now her creative career is rolling But she is not about to sit back on her heels. “I have ideas all the time,” she says, disarmingly, “but the ideas are still bigger than the opportunities I have to use them.”‘Hamlet’: Crescent Theatre, Birmingham (0121 643 5858), Wednesday; tours to 10 May; Queen Elizabeth Hall, London SE1 (020 7960 4242), 30 April & 1 May. ‘Facing Viv’, part of English National Ballet’s triple bill ‘Tour de Force’: Sadler’s Wells, London EC1 (020 7863 8000), 8 April. Marston’s commission for the organ festival, Mixtures: Westminster Abbey, London SW1 (0870 842 2211), 13 May. Small-town USA, the early hours of 7 October 1998.
Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay student at the University of Wyoming, was found beaten, pistol-whipped and left for dead after being lashed to a fence in the hills outside Laramie, the victim of a fatal hate crime by two men of his own age. He died five days later, another statistic of America’s violent society. But, alone among the dozens of killings that happened that night, this was a murder that troubled a nation’s conscience
Small-town USA, the early hours of 7 October 1998. He discussed the story with members of his theatre company and one month later they went to Laramie to interview 200 townspeople – family, friends, co-students, teachers, police officers and church ministers – about the murder.They recorded more than 400 hours of tape and Kaufman edited them down to 90 minutes.
The result, The Laramie Project, is a play with 79 characters played by eight actors who tell the story of how this heinous crime affected a tight-knit community. It played off-Broadway, stunned audiences at the Edinburgh Fringe last year and is now about to open in London.Its director for the off-West End production, at the Cochrane Theatre, is Linda Ames Key, a high-school drama teacher from New York. She worked with Kaufman as he developed The Laramie Project and was determined to have her Greenwich Academy students in Connecticut perform the play. “This story was so incredible, so powerfully told,” she says. “I knew straightaway that I wanted to do this with young people.” After initial doubts by some colleagues and parents in the Waspish commuter town of Greenwich, it was performed to enthusiastic audiences and has inspired more than 400 other high schools, so far, to follow suit.Key’s London production is by the original Greenwich Academy cast that won a Fringe First at Edinburgh last year (they are now all university students, several at Harvard) She says their age has a huge impact on the audience.
“This play feels even more powerful when there are youths of 19 or 20 playing the murderers, because you realise how awful it is to have a young person commit such a crime.” While some are studying drama, few cast members know if their future is in the theatre But Key says their lack of drama-school training is a bonus. “There is an intensity and purity to their performances and not a huge amount of actors’ tricks, so you really hear what they are saying.”I ask Key why Shepard’s story had such an impact. “There were groups that were looking for a galvanising event to have hate-crime legislation go through and this was it,” she says. “Matthew was a poster boy – he was the perfect child to show a picture of.