THE LARAMIE PROJECT by the Orange Theatre Company in Amsterdam
A town’s testimony echoes its pulse into the present
Queer stories in theatre often arrive with a weight that feels pre-loaded, a kind of expectation that suffering will take centre stage before anything else can. I walked into KIT Live theatre carrying that awareness, hoping this adaptation of The Laramie Project wouldn’t flatten the complexity of Matthew Shepard’s story into the familiar choreography of trauma. I wasn’t afraid of intensity; I was afraid of reduction, of watching a community’s grief turned into the same narrative loop we’ve all memorised of harm and outrage.
But there was also a pull. Verbatim theatre, where every line is lifted from real interviews, can either collapse under its sincerity or grow brutally honest. I came in wanting to see whether they’d honour that rawness, or whether the distance to 1998 Wyoming, would soften the edges.
The play unfolds through interviews with Laramie residents after Matthew Shepard’s murder. It snaps on with a light shift, a music cue, and suddenly we’re mid-sentence. No build-up, no warning. The world shifted and we were inside it before we could argue for orientation. Dozens of voices, one after another, different ages, different politics, different versions of the same town.
Superb performers like Celene Cornelia and Shiro Mungai carved themselves into the room, treating the pace like voltage, using the audience’s heed as fuel for their craft. What stood out across the board was their refusal to sanctify or simplify anyone they embodied. Even the most familiar archetypes were portrayed with enough texture to gesture toward the world beyond Laramie.
The staging created a sense of accumulation rather than spectacle. Details were layered rather than spotlighted, gathered until the space felt weighted with what the town had said, done, and denied. The structure lets the audience hold certainty and uncertainty at the same time; we know the crime, but we’re still searching for the forces that allowed it to happen. It’s a subtle and deliberate tension.
The political temperature of the piece is handled with a steady, unsentimental intelligence. Queerness is not turned into the familiar theatre of suffering. Shepard’s story is present, but the play’s politics move beyond the crime. The small-town logic becomes becomes a microcosm for the wider social fabric.
We walked in knowing what happened to Matthew Shepard, and left witnessing the slow, steady exposure of the world built around it. This adaptation lets the politics echo towards the present instead of embalming them in 1998. The cast holds the weight without collapsing under it. Finally, murder is not the origin of a crime but the outcome of hate. It’s a play about Matthew, yes, but also about the structures that allow hate to permeate a life until it ends.
If there’s a story worth witnessing again, it’s this one. Jay Mansilla, 14th November 2025