Entertainment

‘Laramie’ lengthy but worthwhile ‘Project’

The 1998 attack on Matthew Shepard was so brutal, it shocked the nation. After meeting him at a bar one October night, two men took the openly gay University of Wyoming student to a remote area outside of Laramie, beat him up and left him tied to a fence. Found unconscious, Shepard died six days later.

The attackers’ motive? Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson didn’t like gay people. Shepard instantly became the poster boy of hate crimes.

Soon after his death, the New York-based Tectonic Theater Project made the first of several trips to Wyoming, conducting the 200 interviews that formed the basis for 2000’s “The Laramie Project,” a critical and popular hit that became the standard-bearer for docu-theater. Now it’s being revived at BAM with most of the original cast, paired with the NY premiere of its 2009 epilogue, “The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later.”

Co-directed by Moisés Kaufman (“The Heiress”) and Leigh Fondakowski, the two shows, which can be seen separately or as a five-hour marathon, follow the same format.

Against Robert Brill’s stark set — tables and chairs, wooden slats and tall prairie grass in the background — the actors play both themselves and the people they interviewed. In one short scene after another, we see the Shepard case through the eyes of Laramie locals such as lesbian professor Cathy Connolly (Barbara Pitts), theater student Jedadiah Schultz (Andy Paris), Shepard’s friend Romaine Patterson (Libby King) and deputy Reggie Fluty (Mercedes Herrero).

At times you get the impression that the self-satisfied New Yorkers looked at the Laramie people like exotic creatures. But it’s also hard to understate the original show’s impact. The crime itself was horrible, of course, but we also hear about the toughness of everyday life for gays and lesbians in a brawny Western state.

“Ten Years Later” favors large issues, like a local Defense of Marriage amendment and the rumor that the case was motivated by drugs rather than hate. It wasn’t.

Of the individual follow-ups, the most notable are the ones with the imprisoned Henderson (Paris) and McKinney (Greg Pierotti) — the scenes are striking because they’re so ordinary. Henderson is a meek follower, McKinney sports a new swastika tattoo. Their blank banality doesn’t make their crime any less awful, just more incomprehensible.