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Introduction and Author’s Note

• Research for The Laramie Project, Moisés Kaufman's internationally successful play, began one month after a horrific crime occurred in the city of Laramie, Wyoming.

• Members of Kaufman's theatrical group, Tectonic Theater Project, volunteered to travel with their director from New York City to the wide-open ranges of the West in order to gather in-person interviews from Laramie's populace.

• The idea was to capture the emotions, reflections, and reactions of the people who were most closely related to the crime—the brutal beating and subsequent death of a young college student.

• Kaufman's objective was to explore the issues of homosexuality, religion, class, economics, education, and non-traditional lifestyles through the residents' raw responses to the incident.

• In 1998, Matthew Shepard, a twenty-one-year-old gay student registered at the University of Wyoming, was tied to a cattle fence, beaten about the head, robbed, and left to die...

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