Photo by Rob Laughter on Unsplash
By Miles De Rosa, Staff Writer
The Laramie Project is a documentary style play written about the tragic murder of Mathew Sheppard, a gay college student who lived in Laramie, Wyo. After his death, members of the Tectonic Theatre project went to Laramie to collect interview accounts of what happened and the trial that followed. They took snippets from these interviews and crafted them into a play.
It is a progressive piece of theatre that utilizes a testimonial style with each member of the ensemble cast portraying multiple people in the town.
When performed on stage, the blocking is simple—often set up with each member of the cast sitting in a chair and standing when they have to speak or exiting and entering at strategic times. The set is usually minimal. That being said, it is also very slow paced in nature, and due to its subject matter, exceptionally emotional in parts.
All of this makes it a conflicting choice for Susquehanna’s first Zoom play of the semester. The lack of intricate blocking or set made for a natural transition to the Zoom format. Speaker boxes would pop on and off the screen when members of the ensemble cast needed to speak, and the actors were able to move rather seamlessly from scene to scene. But watching theatre live and with an audience is part of what allows it to display such a fantastic range of emotion. With all of the actors performing from different rooms, and the audience themselves watching from different rooms, some of this emotional depth was lost. This coupled with the slow pacing made this production drag in parts in the first and final acts. This though, is of no fault of the actors. Given that the Laramie Project uses such a broad cast (12 actors for over 60 characters), each actor is given the opportunity to stretch their personal limits and experiment with different roles and voices. This cast was certainly up to the task. Each member handled their roles extremely well, especially given the tough subject matter. Even without the safety net of other actors on stage or audience response, they were able to communicate the emotional strain this event took on the people of Laramie.
This lack of a safety net though clearly did affect some performers. If you forget your line on stage a fellow actor can que you, or you can buy yourself time by interacting with the audience. In a Zoom setting, this chemistry with the other actors is lost and there is no audience to fall back on. One actor lost her lines in one scene and it was quite clear. As opposed to letting them flounder, they quickly moved onto the next scene.
Even with the occasional mistakes, the reason to see this play was the cast. There was truly not a weak link. There were many performers who deserve recognition for their work on this project, but the play was really held down by performances from juniors Tyler Shadle and Jack Sullivan and first-year Max Wigoda. Each actor handled multiple roles and carried some of the most recurring characters throughout the play. Sophomore Meredith Felix and junior Brittany Runk also provided some comic or moral relief at varying points throughout the show in a variety of more minor roles.
There were also some technical and otherwise pandemic-related difficulties that slowed down the show. On opening night, the play started nearly 20 minutes late due to technical difficulties and at the end of the first intermission, a fire alarm went off in Seibert Hall, forcing Shadle from the room he was performing in. This was the second of the two 20-minute delays.
Unfortunately, this is something both the actors and the audience will have to adjust to in this new era of theatre. The pandemic is not slowing down, and although vaccines will help, it will probably be a long while before we pack several hundred people together into a theatre. Watching these actors adjust to this setting, finding a balance between the energy of stage acting and the subtlety of screen acting, is interesting in and of itself. It is quite uplifting to watch a crew of actors figure out how to effectively do what they do, despite any technological or otherwise pandemic-related roadblocks. I hope more people will attend these performances in the future. Despite the technical insufficiencies of trying to replicate a theatre experience on Zoom, it’s worth it.
