Junior prepares to take the stage

Before each showing of “The Laramie Project”, junior Zahra Budhwani does yoga to calm herself and get into character. She gives herself statements of affirmation and feeds off of positive energy during pre-show cast rituals that help reassure and boost the confidence of each actor. After a few deep breaths and a moment of peace, Zahra is ready to take the stage.

She plays four roles, Catherine Connoly, the first openly gay university faculty member in the University of Wyoming; Zubaida Ula, an Islamic feminist who studies at the university; and two other minor roles, Murdock Cooper and Phil Labrie.

Because all of her characters have particular personalities and backgrounds, Zahra found it somewhat challenging to develop an accurate portrayal of each person.

“All of my characters are really distinct, so I had to do different preparation for each,” she said. For Phil Labrie, he has an Eastern European accent, which I had to spend some time developing.With Catherine Connoly, I had to work a lot on finding the truth in her character and sort of try to honor all the characters and be true to her words.”

However, Zahra did find one of her characters, Zubaida Ula, particularly simple to relate to.

“Zubaida is someone I kind of identify with because I belong to the same religion as her, and I have a lot of the same views as her,” she said.

The characters in the play are actual people who still live today, and many of the cast members, including Zahra, contacted them to gain a greater sense of who these individuals are.

“They have Facebooks, and Twitters, so I contacted a lot of my characters and I had some interaction with them and I did a lot of research,” she said. “I also talked to a lot of women and men in my community who embody those characteristics so that I could sort of imitate that and remain true to their essential characters.”

Although Zahra’s corresponding individual sent an email that she thought was automatic for all questions regarding the play, cast member Maxwell Smitherman (12) successfully contacted his character, Jedadiah Schultz, through Harker alum Zoe Woehrmann (‘15). Schultz is Zoe’s professor at New York University, and with her help, the cast of the production conducted a Skype call with him.

“We talked to him for about half an hour, and he told us a lot about [his response] to the entire thing and that was really interesting that an actual person was actually there,” Zahra said.

After seeing this play for the first time during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Zahra knew that she wanted to take part in the production because of the relevance of the storyline and characters.
“I think this play is different because it addresses a really pertinent issue that is still important today, and there are still a lot of hate crimes against people who are LGBTQA+ and there are still all these injustices that are happening, and it feels really good to tell the story.”