The Two Freds

I just got back from a screening of HBO's screen adaptation of The Laramie Project, with a talkback with a member of the Tectonic Theater Project who participated in the collaborative creation of The Laramie Project and who is involved in current work with a ten-year follow-up

I need to try, for once, to be brief, because I want to post this now, but I also have lots of other places to be and things to do. So...things bouncing around in my head:

The beginning of the ordeal for Matthew Shephard began on my tenth birthday (exactly). This past October being the ten-year marker therefore coincided with my twentieth birthday. We cannot separate history and seemingly distant events from our lives. It's rarely as distant as it first seems. Lee(?) talked about this with us in the talkback, saying she's always blown away when people say they were five or eight, nine or ten when the "incident" (as it was referred to in the movie/script) occurred, that the events and the concerns wrapped up in The Laramie Project still have such draw for people, that it still profoundly affects people (which seems completely as it should be).

The audience discussed with Lee how theater in general, with a certain toolbox of methodologies, and The Laramie Project in particular, might change the dialogue, might change the culture, might "change history" (as in, redirect certain sets of events from moving in one direction and steer them in a more positive one -- which of course gets us into a tricky muddle of determinism I probably shouldn't discuss, other than to say that in my Theories of Knowledge & Reality course, we pretty much settled on it as a stalwart of a concept, near-to-impossible to contradict--because, after all, events only end up in one string--and therefore more than a little troublesome!). As far as changing the cultural capacity for intense, inexplicable, and (...) hatred in America, I definitely think that The Laramie Project has done a great deal to shape and structure the dialogue. I cannot believe I have not seen the production in some form up until now, but its themes and the material it covers were far from foreign for me. To increase the exposure of this film to wider audiences of conscience could, I hope, influence the directions the people of America take in eradicating that capacity for such boundless hatred. But I think of people I've met and people who are portrayed in the film, and I become doubtful, cynical, angry, outraged. The question is, can they be reached? Can another boy or girl becoming like one of the perpetrators be avoided? Can new ideas and a fuller conscience reach them?

More to come, in the form of edits and added material to this post, on Fred Phelps, Fred Williams (the speech given by Matthew Shephard's father; shooting; forgiveness--that other conversation; Omaha foster care; drive through Nebraska; themes; communication- community), and the future...