The cast of this year’s fall play, “The Laramie Project”, has begun preparation through activities that cultivate the understanding of the play’s themes as well as expose the cast to different acting techniques.

The cast will be interviewing members of their community and recording their responses. The cast will later use these responses as monologues and will perform these monologues for the rest of the cast.

“The Laramie Project” centers in the town of Laramie, Wyoming in 1998, the year a 21 year-old homosexual man was murdered by two citizens.

Auditions took place in the week of Aug. 31 and two casts were selected. Juniors and seniors in the main cast as well as a swing cast comprised of sophomores and freshman.

In the first week of rehearsal, the shows director and acting teacher at The Harker Upper School, Jeffrey Draper made a list with the cast of all the themes the cast believed were included in “The Laramie Project.” This list of themes included words such as forgiveness, love, acceptance and community.

After these themes were selected, the cast wrote questions surrounding the themes and voted on which questions should be used in their interviews. All cast members use the same questions.

Marina Newman (11) was one of the students whose question was selected to be one of the six questions all the students would use for the interviews.

“The questions that we picked as a group to do, a lot of them have to do with what happened in Laramie, the murder of Matthew Shepherd,” said Marina. “The question I proposed had to do with why people do terrible things, and that’s an issue a lot of the characters have to deal with when someone from that community committed this gruesome, heinous crime against Matthew.”

The six questions that will be asked are: what is something you will always believe, tell me about someone important that you lost, who or what makes you happiest and why, can you ever truly forgive someone, what do you regret and why do you think people do terrible things.

This project requires the actors to interview anyone who they may encounter. This means interviews can come from almost any source, whether it be a family member or a complete stranger.

“It’s a little bit scary in a way, because you’re going out into the community and asking fairly deep questions,” said Rishabh Chandra (12), “It’s also a very interesting challenge, and a fun challenge because you get to go out there and you get to learn things about people just in your community.”

Using the material from these interviews, the students will imitate three of the interviewees responses to the questions in monologue form and perform it for the cast.

“In a month we’re going to come back and hear the best of these characters. We are going to see these characters come to life,” Draper said “What normally happens is as the different people that are speaking talk, their words echo off of each other. The addition of then is greater than the sum of their parts. It’s really exponential the meaning of what they say.”
No cameras will be used for the interviews. The cast will use their phones to record just the audio from the interview.

The fall play is almost entirely monologues, which are transcribed interviews of real people living in Laramie at the time of the murder; so the actors are required to embody real people as opposed to create characters.

“You have to give respect to that person by portraying them in the most realistic way possible,” said Marina.

Draper recently did this activity last summer with another group of acting students.

“It’s almost magical. It’s different depending on each group of students,” said Draper.

Draper was inspired to begin doing this activity with young actors when he encountered Anna Deavere Smith’s work as a playwright and actress.

The fall play will be performed in the Blackford theater on Oct. 29, 30 and 31.