Editor's Note
By Jim O'Quinn
It has been more than 11 years, believe it or not, since we lived through the dismay and heartbreak of Matthew Shepard's brutal murder in Laramie, Wyo., and the intense national soul-searching that followed. Has the intervening decade brought with it changes in attitudes, public policy and law that make such offenses—based on identity and precipitated by hatred—less likely to occur and more abhorrent in the common consciousness?
Moisés Kaufman and his collaborators in the Tectonic Theater Project, who dramatized the Shepard case and its aftermath in one of the most widely produced docudramas of our time, returned to the subject—and to the scene of the crime—last year, seeking answers to questions like the one above. Before you embark with Kaufman on the illuminating journey of The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later from gestation to performance, you may want to turn directly to a brief excerpt from the play that appears alongside his article (in the print edition). The scene is an astonishing exchange between interviewer Greg Pierotti and one of Shepard's killers, Aaron McKinney, who is serving two life sentences in a Wyoming prison. McKinney, with apparent candor, talks about the remorse he feels in the wake of his crime—remorse that does not extend to his 21-year-old victim. "Matt Shepard," McKinney still believes, "needed killin'."
Kaufman's account of Tectonic's expansive new theatrical experiment—inspired in part, he says, by the work of the Federal Theatre Project during the 1930s—is one of three feature articles leading off this issue under the heading "Artists in Action." It's no coincidence that these pieces, which examine the creative process and the real-world impact of socially relevant performance projects, echo the "Ideas into Action" theme of TCG's just-completed 2010 National Conference in Chicago.
In preparation for that meeting, TCG executive director Teresa Eyring and her conference team posed a key question to the field: "Which artists are creating ambitious work that responds to the challenges of our times, and what stories are they telling?" Our "Artists in Action" package—which features, in addition to Kaufman's report, first-person accounts of groundbreaking theatrical explorations by playwright/performers Anne Galjour and Jeff Key—is American Theatre's contribution to that conversation.
There's abundant evidence throughout this issue, in fact, of theatre's eagerness to grapple with "challenges of our time"—Guantanamo, the war in Afghanistan and environmental catastrophe in the American South are fodder for new works previewed in the Front & Center section; South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle imbues the life and work of multifaceted artist William Kentridge, in Eileen Blumenthal's vibrant critical assessment of his stage work; and our own field's heated debates about the viability of new plays and those who write them are assayed from various perspectives in a roundelay of responses to Theatre Development Fund's new book Outrageous Fortune.
All told, the artists having their say in these pages are a fearless breed, ready to confront the issues they encounter head-on, unflinchingly, creatively.
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