On Oct. 6, 1998, two Laramie men, Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, offered 21-year-old Matthew Shepard, openly gay, a ride home from a bar called the Fireside Lounge. They drove him outside of town, beat him with fists, pistol-whipped him, tied him to a shake fence and left him to die. Six days later, after languishing in a coma, that's exactly what he did. Fred Phelps, the "spiritual" leader of Westboro Baptist Church, picketed the funeral, with signs that included such slogans as "Fag Matt in Hell." The killers claimed they were motivated to commit their vicious crimes by "gay panic," a violent homophobic response to an alleged attempt at physical contact. Their girlfriends claimed they pretended to be gay in order to rob Shepard, whose family was well-off. The jury believed the latter story. Henderson and McKinney each received two consecutive life sentences.
Make no mistake about it, The Laramie Project, compiled from interviews conducted by Moisés Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Project, wears its rainbow-striped politics on its sleeve. (So do I.) And in Tacoma, dubbed "America's gayest city" by The Advocate, any production of the play preaches to the Gay Men's Chorus. It's performed all the time, by gay-friendly theater folks around the country, so how does Tacoma Little Theatre's production stack up?
THE LARAMIE PROJECT, 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, through June 23, Tacoma Little Theatre, 201 N. I St., Tacoma, $9.50, 253.272.2281