‘Show them what’s wrong’

Maureen thanked the audience for coming. None of the shows sold out, like the recent run of “Grease” had. (Groan. “Grease” again.) But she said the success of shows like that mean they can do shows like this. The message is important, she said, even almost 19 years later.

“All art impacts, but the immediacy and the intimacy of theater has an even more visceral power to it,” Maureen said. “For actors and the audience, this one is important because, as we have seen recently, every bit of progress can be erased by hate.”

After one show, a young man, in the same age range as the actors, raised his hand. He said he knew what Matthew must have felt. He’s scared sometimes that people hate him, even though they don’t know him — and don’t seem to want to.

“I feel like a misfit,” he said.

Maureen told him, “All of us” — her outstretched arm encompassing the actors, the director and stage managers, herself — “know what that’s like. The trick is to find the other misfits.” She hugged him and invited him to sit with the teenagers onstage.

“Find your tribe, and you can find — if not always protection — at least a community of people who will stand up for and with you,” she told him. Actors on eies ther side put their arms around him.

At another show, a woman asked how difficult was it for Sawyer and actor Keegan Luther to play characters that they must have hated. Keegan played nine roles, including one of the playwrights, Shepard’s father, a detective, the CEO of the hospital where Shepard was treated and — the character the woman was referring to — the Rev. Fred Phelps.

Phelps, who founded the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, and his followers picketed Shepard’s funeral, carrying signs that read, “God hates fags.” In the play, Keegan carried the same sign and shouted the same words.

“You try to do justice for the people who have experienced this,” Keegan said. A 19-year-old film student at Arizona State University, he has been in 23 productions. This was the most meaningful. His mother is a prosecutor and victimsrights advocate.

Sawyer told the audience that both he and Keegan were uncomfortable saying the word “fag.”

“It’s a word you never want to get comfortable with,” Sawyer said. “But I had to, for the sake of exposing the truth that gross- me out about it in the first place.”

So backstage, he said the word hundreds of times, until he could say it like any other word.

Because, he said, it is one thing for people to know that something happened, or even read about it.

“There are people who believe that truth is mutable,” he said. “In order for people to feel like there’s something wrong, I think you need to show them what’s wrong. They need to hear it.”

No matter how hard it is to say.

Last week, Sawyer started rehearsal for “Peter and the Starcatcher,” a play based on a book by Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry about the origins of Peter Pan. He plays Black Stache, who later takes the name Captain Hook.

He’s another bad guy, but a different kind. The kind who’s gone when the curtain falls. THE GREAT WALL