Two reviews and a gripe

1. The Lara­mie Pro­ject, pro­duced by the Strath­more The­at­rical Arts Group, writ­ten by Moises Kaufman

This ambi­tious play tackles the beat­ing and after­math of Lara­mie, Wyom­ing res­id­ent, Mat­thew Shep­ard in 1998. Anyone who was an adult back then will remem­ber the shock of the news and the rev­el­a­tion of the motives behind it: that Shep­ard was gay. His attack­ers deceived him into think­ing they too were gay, drove him from a bar to a remote area out of town, tied him to a fence and beat him to a pulp. Then they left him for 18 hours in the chilly weather until a passing stranger found him.

I wasn’t sure how this play would tackle such a tale. “Replay­ing” any of the events would just seem tacky. Instead, the writer has clev­erly writ­ten his com­pany into the action: through their diar­ies, we meet the actors of the ori­ginal pro­duc­tion as they visit Lara­mie six times and hear extracts from the more than 200 reviews they con­duc­ted. Slowly, Lara­m­ie’s res­id­ents become real people to us: not just Shep­ard’s friends or the attack­ers, but the wit­nesses and his teach­ers and the cop who atten­ded the scene first and had her own near-tragic out­come from it. And then there are the reg­u­lar towns­folk who are changed by this: Lara­m­ie’s other gay and les­bian res­id­ents, Lara­m­ie’s taxi driver and the guy down the road. The attack­ers girl­friends, their friends, their parents.

It’s a very long play at three hours. It needs to be: it has a lot of ground to cover. If the pro­duc­tion was simply a string of spoken scenes, I can ima­gine it would be dreary and drag. Instead, com­plic­ated light­ing and slides of Lara­mie in the back­ground, myriad cos­tume changes and an excel­lent use of the eight actors to play 50-odd char­ac­ters as we shift from moment to moment in Mat­thew’s story makes it fas­cin­at­ing. The phys­ical work of the actors is unbe­liev­ably good, espe­cially Jeanne Snider, seen in one moment shift­ing in front of our eyes from a New York com­pany member to a teen­aged boy, com­plete with hunched shoulders and snotty nose.

Amaz­ingly, the play is not depress­ing or crush­ing; instead, it presents a whole cloth woven with tra­gedies and tri­umphs. Don’t expect to get away without tears, how­ever. An amaz­ing work. (On till Sat­urday. Go see it. If only to sup­port anthonybax­ter who did the light­ing design.)

2. Bobby, cur­rently screen­ing in cinemas

An impress­ive drama with an incred­ible ensemble cast (is there anyone not in it?), this film covers the day at the Ambas­sador Hotel, Los Angeles, when Sen­ator Bobby Kennedy was shot on the day of the Cali­for­nia primary. Stock foot­age of Kennedy is inter­spersed with the modern film (there is no one ‘play­ing’ Kennedy) and this works for the most part, although there are times, par­tic­u­larly towards the end, where I wished the film-makers had had just a little more money and could have added noise to the modern foot­age to make the spli­cing seamless.

This is one of those films that feels a little like a film that needs to be made right now because no one is remem­ber­ing and because we need this mes­sage to be heard again. It’s also a beau­ti­ful biopic of the little people behind the scenes – although that’s under­cut in the cred­its when we are not told what happened to each of them after that night. I want to know: who are these folks? Who did they go on to become? And I’m wor­ried that they were mostly made up for the bene­fit of the vehicle for Kennedy’s story.

Other than these minor issues, the film is extremely worth­while, well acted and cap­tures a sense of a gen­er­a­tion and indeed a coun­try at a turn­ing point. After this, Amer­ica had Nixon and Water­gate and after Carter, the Greed is Good years of the 80s. This is where hope left the coun­try, per­haps. And maybe it’s just now coming back…

3. Why didn’t anyone tell me Gotan Pro­ject were play­ing Hamer Hall last night? I’ve sort of seen posters aroound but I thought that was for a new album. I’m *sure* I checked those posters and saw that they were only for a new album! Arghhh!