In October 1998 a young gay man was discovered bound to a fence on the outskirts of Laramie in Wyoming USA, savagely beaten and left to die. Matthew Shepard’s death became an American symbol of intolerance, but for the people of Laramie the event was deeply personal, and it is their voices that are heard in the extraordinary theatre piece – The Laramie Project.
Following it’s sell out success in Perth, the Black Swan Theatre Company took its version of the acclaimed production touring through some of the smaller, regional centers in South West WA – Bunbury, Mandurah, Margaret River and Albany. OUTinPerth checked in with cast member John Robertson as the production toured to get the low down – interspersed between tales of accidental evictions and misadventures in aquatic centers – of course.
On the show, the characters and going bush:
This is a very organic show, we can structure and rehearse but the performances work so much better if you’re actually having a conversation with the audience. Especially the characters I play, one of them Jedediah Shop, so much of what he does feeds of the audience, the same with the Baptist minister, the same with Fred Phelps. In a play that seeks to present an overall perspective of a truly tragic event, you end up being, not just a person who’s doing a different voice, puts on a jacket, you end up being a person speaking to someone else. It preserves an element of realism and it really makes for some intensity that varies from night to night. That quality of the work is always there, it’s just the audience and the interaction that changes.
In terms of the conversation of course, it is very one sided. It’s us talking to them. We’re honour bound to say every word exactly as it was spoken but then in terms of each character we do everything we can to make sure that each characterization is as disparate as possible. I go from being a young teenager to being a 40 year old Baptist minister to being a 60 year old religious fanatic, but we still try to install a sense of humanity into each character, so that people accept here’s a new person on stage, without it being a gimmick.
What it does is it takes it back to, even though we’re eight different people, you’re seeing one body embodying eight different modes of behavior. Which is something I find interesting, you have to cope with those different reactions to you. I mean you as a person, you never change. You try to adopt, as much as possible, the characteristics of the person you’re embodying. I’m a profoundly left wing sort of person. And so it’s intriguing for me, I have some characters who reflect that sort of gentle, non violent type of philosophy, and then there’s extremists like Fred Phelps, that’s quite a big jump for me personally. And I think for the audience who watch me play a whole bunch of people, to watch the characters that I play, to watch a friendly teenager turn into the monster that is Fred Phelps, is something that really does affect an audience. It’s really something for them to consider.
The thing that really worries me is the amount of exposure I’ve managed to have through my life to people like Fred Phelps, who are unfortunately out there and entrenched in the modern culture. Whether you inadvertently seek them out at 5:30 in the morning channel surfing and you see some fool yelling at the camera whilst the number flashes below him on the evangelist program, there are real hate mongers out there. You know just in my travels around Australia, I’ve never left the country, but I’ve met enough people on which to draw on for the character which I find odd, and I find uncomfortable. And also just how disturbingly easy source material to produce a character like Fred Phelps is.
Fred Phelps was the one attacked by Michael Moore on the Awful Truth. It was fantastic what they did to him, the way he was attacked. And I realized, with Fred Phelps it’s like somewhere in there in his thought process, he somehow imagines that what he thinks is fact. He would be one of the closest things to what I would call pure evil that I have ever encountered, this man. He began being an intolerant southern Baptist, but now he’s the only intolerant southern Baptist I can think of who’s even gone against his own country. He hates gay people, he hates black people and he hates America. And he hates America because he believes that the September 11 occurred because America doesn’t hate gays enough, and so he’s turned against the country. And he has a website; God hates Sweden, because he believes Sweden doesn’t do enough against gays. I’m waiting for God Hates John Robertson.com, it’s probably going to come. Seriously, I don’t know how he got the brain power together to program a website.
The places we’re going have conservative country values but at the same time aren’t small enough to be entirely comfy in that sort of homey way. The places we’re going the population is sort of similar to Laramie. Laramie is an isolated place in one of the most isolated states in America but it’s not that much of a backwater, it really is the size of Bunbury. One of those pleasant communities, not quite where everyone knows everyone, but one where you’d recognize faces. And I think that’s what drives this event, what drives how shocking this is.
The thing I was really concerned about was that we’d be sending the message saying this is a show about a town, very much like your town, where this sort of thing could happen – which is sort of very patronizing. Of course the flip side of that is that when the performers come out on stage armed with American accents in an American setting, there’s a tendency to say ‘Oh, this only happens in America, it could never happen here’. But what you’re presenting is a group of beings, of desperate beings and it shatters through that this is only in America and it becomes about just a town, where something terrible happens – a truly human tragedy. You actually come to see how something like this could happen; it’s a breakdown of the tragedy. If you wanted to research this, you’d get the same effect. This show provides something very valuable. It’s something the audience can take away with them. Here’s some points of view, choose the ones you want, go home, think about it. I don’t want to get incredibly wanky about it, like go and deconstruct your views. There will always be a need for the Laramie Project. There’s a reason it’s the second most performed project in America at the moment, because there is a need.
The Bunbury Show
Bunbury was good, it meant we all got over our fear that whilst we were in a small country town we’d all be killed.. I have this rather nasty habit of getting homophobia directed to me. And it’s interesting, I wondered what it would be like down here, and so there was this almost unconscious city slicker thing where I’d keep dropping my voice down an octave when I was talking to everyone, like shop keepers and women and everyone and it was so obvious, I’m dressed in my Japanese jacket and my 666 shirt and I’m like [dons ocker accent] “Yeah how’s it going mate, alright?â€Â
The thing about all of us is that we’re hilariously pampered city kids. Like, the only experience I remember having of Bunbury was Dad driving us past it, like no, no, we’re not stopping there, I can drive another two hours. So we were just kind of playing with our conceptions, like there’d be people on porches, playing banjos. And on the first night in Bunbury, we were at first worried because the audience was very quiet, but they were actually doing that thing that audiences do sometimes, they were listening. And by the second act we’d be getting this beautiful rippling laughter in the lighter moments that would start at the front and then make it way all the way to the back.
The big crowd, about 300 in Bunbury, absolutely charged the energy. Everyone went at it full bore, just in an effort to communicate to the people at the front, at the back and everywhere in between. So people were doing new stuff with their heads, like at PICA, where you’d get maybe 180 people, tops, you’d just stare straight ahead but here it was like, right we’re looking down at those people and now we’re looking up over there, and it was like who shall I direct this too, who will I speak to at this time . . . it was really great.
We even got groupies, these four girls from Australind who stayed behind to tell us they really liked the show, and the in fact the morning after when we went to have breakfast we were getting stopped by all these people who’d seen the show and told us that they’d, liked it and they wanted to tell us how great it was. We made it into the top 10 things to do in Bunbury that week, we were number four. We missed out to the AC/DC tribute night, the Ray Charles tribute night, and the trots. The trots were number three, and we were four.
The Manduarah Show
We had 150 people in Mandurah. Very friendly venue. Maybe one of our cast members even got friendly later, after the show, with one of the audience members. That may or may not have happened.
The Margaret River Show
The audience in Margaret River was really vocal. We had a group of year 12s who were quite moved by the actual piece, and then they wanted to deconstruct it. They wanted to talk about the staging and the lighting, they asked us how we learnt our character and lines, how we were able to produce consistence characterizations with the 60 characters that were played by the 8 actors, that was very interesting.
With the crowd being vocal they were incredibly responsive to the issues raised, and that was very interesting. Because whilst we as actors were out there having a very good time it’s nice to know that the work we’re doing actually does say something, the play is important. This was summed up for me last night, people wept, you know, during scenes were Matthew’s death was described, and this was very interesting, at one stage I was up there, and playing the Baptist minister who when he was interviewed when Matthew Shepard was hospitalized replied to his interviewer with, “I hope that Matthew Shepard, when he was tied to that fence, had a chance to reflect on a moment when someone had spoken the word of the Lord to him, and that before he slipped into a coma he had a chance to reflect on his lifestyle.†He was someone who had no empathy at all for Matthew Shepard; all he saw was that as a gay man Matthew Shepard was damned for all eternity that was it, his entire opinion. And when I delivered that it was very gratifying that a man in the front row actually shouted, very loudly, ‘Sick’. Not at anything else, it was at that moment, that he was like – That is too much. It was good.
That’s one thing done by the Laramie Project, that as a play, as an examination of homophobia it can really provoke an audience. Some people have been known to laugh at the extreme moments like that because they’re uncomfortable, but last night we got people that were just so uncomfortable to the point of vocalizing it. And that really pleased me, laughing is fine, but that only lightens it, a response like that takes it back to the fact that this is a very serious issue.
Something else that was interesting about the venue was that the audience never left the actual theatre space. Tea and cakes were served right within the theatre so people were there, and you could still hear them talking about what they’d seen in the first act, before the intermission. When we come back, in the second act, that’s where we really shift into high gear, we just lay down the context of like, here’s a town, very much like you’re town, and we really lay down the effects of the tragedy. And that’s very interesting watching a group of people become less and less comfortable, until they were, by the end of the play, very, very satisfied.
It was just such an interesting jump from Bunbury to Mandurah to Margaret River. We went from a large venue where we were on a raised stage, and then to a venue where we’re actually lower than the audience, and then once again we were up raised, in a very different place, a place that was actually used as a community meeting hall which I think actually lent a great deal to the performance. You know here we are, talking in a community meeting place to some representatives of the community.
The Albany Show
At the hotel here in Albany I have three beds – one is a double bed, I’m not sure what they think I’m going to do. I have four towels, a bar of soap on each of them, and one roll of toilet paper.
The Albany show was excellent. It was in an incredibly lush, plush looking town hall. It was pretty much the perfect way to cap off a tour, actually, we had two curtain calls, we had this wonderful second ovation, which is a very rare thing, but wonderful. I remember the medical updates got a very interesting reaction, as they were delivered as Matthew nears death. The audience did exactly as it should, listened very seriously and at some stages gasp. And after each one she delivers a message from Matthew’s parents, to the American public, and of course that’s always gut wrenching. The Albany audience were also quite vocal, they laughed at the appropriate points, which was excellent, and something that performers like to hear. This was something I’ve found interesting about this show, how gratifying it has been to hear the noises coming from the audience.
Something I laughed at was after we did the Albany show we all just decided we’d go out, and for the first time on the tour someone called me a poofter. They’d taken exception to my scarf, so I got a kiss on the forehead and called a poofter – it was a very gentle thing.
And the highlight?
I’m so incredibly tempted just to speak about the food. It was so very, very good.
And actually… that’s about all he did speak about.
