Banned play’s author heartened by students
VANCOUVER The New York City playwright who wrote The Laramie Projectwent to a Vancouver school Tuesday and applauded a group of drama students who are preparing to stage his controversial play about homophobia.
“Break a leg,” an ebullient Moises Kaufman told about 30 students at Lord Byng secondary, who selected the play for their annual production — in sharp contrast to last year’s My Fair Lady.
And in sharp contrast also to the decision by Surrey school officials
to cancel a production of Project earlier this year.
Kaufman, sitting on an auditorium stage with the students, said he felt “ enraged and depressed” about the Surrey decision and he asked the Lord Byng students what they felt about it.
Grade 12 student Ryan Lidstone said Surrey school officials who cancelled the play “ did what they felt they had to do and what we are doing here — presenting this play — is what we felt we had to do.”
Kaufman’s play chronicles the reaction of the town of Laramie to the brutal 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man who lived in the small Wyoming college town. The play, put on by hundreds of U.S. high schools and universities, is a series of staged interviews with residents of Laramie.
Lidstone, 17, told Kaufman: “Personally, when I look at your play, I don’t see it as an anti-homophobia play. I see it as an anti-hate play.
“ And to me that is much more important, because I think hate is the greatest embodiment of fear and the lowest point of expression and that is unacceptable in any society.”
His fellow students applauded in agreement and Kaufman told them: “I think you have a writer in your midst.”
Kaufman, a 42- year-old gay man originally from Venezuela, said: “The thing that is shocking about Laramie is not that it is different from every other town. It’s that it is so similar.”
The debate over homosexuality in the play reflects the broader debate in the U.S. over social values, he added.
“ In America right now we live in a country divided, where a lot of people are saying: What about civil rights? And a lot of people saying that homosexuals are the worst thing that has happened to civilization in the last 2,000 years.
“ And I think that somewhere in between that war is where the Laramie Project occurs.”
While discrimination against homosexuals has become increasingly politically incorrect, Kaufman said, “in a lot of high schools the worst thing you can say is, ‘that’s so gay, or you’re so gay.’ ”
Lord Byng principal Darlene Braeder said the students chose the play instead of more conventional fare because “for them it represented something real.”
dward@png.canwest.com The Laramie