Twenty-six years ago, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson murdered Matthew Shephard in Laramie, Wyoming. On October 6, 1998, they beat him and left him strung to a fence for eighteen hours until someone found him. Six days later, Shepard died at a hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado. McKinney and Henderson were charged with first-degree murder, and the case drew attention to anti-LGBTQ violence and hate crimes. Following Shephard’s murder, Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project went to Laramie to interview individuals about the case, and the resulting interviews became The Laramie Project, a verbatim theater piece that debuted in 2000.

Recently, I had the opportunity to see The Laramie Project for the first time. The director chose to stage the play in the black box, an intimate setting for such a play, and in the round, meaning that I could look across the stage at other audience members and they could look at me as we all looked at the actors on stage. The Laramie Project, staged in this manner, makes the audience active participants in the construction of the narrative and events, bringing us into the action because we are, literally, face-to-face with the performers and some of them even present their lines from the audience itself.

Before the first performance of The Laramie Project, Eric Solomon present “‘Who are We?’ Laramie at 25” as part of the “Lillian E. Smith: 80th Anniversary Exhibition.” In his talk, Solomon spoke about the ways that Smith’s writing and The Laramie Project engage in the construction of meaning, both from a standpoint of the artist and actor and from the audience’s engagement with the works. To highlight this, he presented a slide with a triangle which he labeled the “Interplay Identification Matrix”. At the top, on stage, sits the “We: characters on stage/real life referents.” Here, we see the performers of The Laramie Project as both actors and their real-life referents, mingling the two together in a seamless entity. These two points then extend outward to the audience where we, the audience, sit and engage with the action on stage. Solomon labels this point “The me-in-the-seat-in the house.”

In this formulation, each point serves as a node where reality and memory form. Each has an active role in the creation of these things, working together to form a story and collective memory that we take as reality. In The Journey, Smith writes, “What we need on stage and off stage . . . is people who are real.” The matrix that Solomon provides works towards that, bringing everyone into contact with the “real,” or at least the creation of the “real” that we all engage with when we watch the play performed on stage.

Along with this, The Laramie Project exists not just as a depiction of interviews with people who knew Matthew Shepard and who were impacted by his murder. No, the project exists to use those interviews to interrogate our own existence and reality. The project interrogates us as the audience, calling upon us to question where we land in relation to the myriad topics surrounding Shepard’s murder. Do we stand idly by and condone Shepard’s murder? Do we combat the hate surrounding his murder? Do we try to play it off saying that those who committed the murder are not us? In essence, the play uses Shepard’s murder to tell us about ourselves in the audience, causing us to come face to face with our views.

This confrontation of the self is what Lillian Smith does throughout her own writing. Following Solomon’s talk, someone in the audience commented on Smith’s “bravery” to openly interrogate white supremacy in her 1949 memoir Killers of the Dream. Instead of cowering, she confronted, even when she knew the backlash. I do think Smith was “brave” in this respect, but I would reframe the pronouncement because what we see in Killers of the Dream is Smith coming face-to-face with herself. She tells us from the outset. In the 1961 reissue, she writes, “I wrote it because I had to find out what life in a segregated culture had done to me, one person. I had to put down on paper these experiences so that I could see their meaning for me. I was in dialogue with myself as I wrote, as well as with my hometown and my childhood and history and the future, and the past.”

For me, Smith’s courage doesn’t lie in the confronting of white supremacy even though she knew the backlash that the book would illicit. No, for me, Smith’s courage comes from the reason that she chose to write the memoir in the first, to dive into the depths of herself. She wrote the book to confront her own reflection, a reflection that her readers encountered as well. This self-reflection takes courage, as I have written about countless times. Instead of confronting herself, Smith could have turned on her heels and walked away, like the young camper who tells Smith she knows what is right but she chooses not to do what is right because of the consequences from the society around her. Rather than retreating, Smith engaged. She wrote about her own position within systems of white supremacy. This makes her courageous.

Smith knew the work she had to do, and she did it. She did not offer platitudes or virtual signals. She didn’t change her social media profile image. She worked, on herself, on others, and on society. All of this started with herself and what she saw staring back at her in the mirror. This is what makes Killers of the Dream powerful. We see the author herself dealing with the same issues she lays out for her readers. She implicates herself, not shying away from the dirt covering her very being. She becomes venerable, saying, “I am the same as you. I am working too.” That genuineness, more than publicly virtue signaling, shows courage.

Even though The Laramie Project does not have a singular center like Killers of the Dream, it acts in a similar way, calling upon us to become participants in the work we see. By becoming participants, we confront our own selves and our own reflections, and like Smith, we must choose to either look at our reflections and work or them or we turn and run the other way. The choice is our own. No one but ourselves can make the decision for us. Our decision, thus, tells us about who we are, what we value, and what type of society and story we seek to create.

At the end of The Laramie Project, Father Roger Schmit tells the interviewers from Tectonic Theater Project, “And I will speak with you, I will trust that if you write a play of this, that you say it right. You need to do your best to say it correct.” While Father Schmit is speaking about the interviewees in the project, his comment relates to us as the audience. We could think about the “you” as us in the audience, Schmit telling us to “say it correct,” to not be afraid of what we see staring back at us in the reflective glass. Schmit telling us “trust” ourselves. Until we do those things, we cannot move forward. We cannot achieve the hopes and dreams we envision for ourselves and others. We cannot, ultimately, succeed.