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GREENSBORO — Just weeks after a student received anti-gay letters, Guilford College performed “The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later, An Epilogue” on Monday to commemorate the 11th anniversary of the death of Matthew Shepard.

The 21-year-old gay college student was severely beaten, tied to a fence and left to die near Laramie, Wyo., on Oct. 6, 1998. He died six days later.

Guilford College was one of almost 150 sites in 14 countries and all 50 states to premiere the play simultaneously.

The epilogue focuses on the murder’s effects on Laramie residents a decade after Shepard’s fatal beating. The New York-based Tectonic Theater Project actors traveled to the town to conduct interviews in 1998 and 2008. From those interviews, the actors wrote the original play, “The Laramie Project,” and the epilogue.

Eleven student actors from Guilford College played 35 characters, including one of Shepard’s convicted killers, Russell Henderson, and former Laramie police detectives.

The characters agreed that the town had been profoundly affected but couldn’t measure or articulate the change.

Before actors performed the play in their respective cities, Shepard’s mother, Judy Shepard, spoke to all the audiences by a live webcast from New York’s Lincoln Center.

She said Laramie isn’t further behind or ahead of any place, but it has a different perspective.

So do the viewers of the first play, she said.

“I firmly believe that they see the world transformed from one of tunnel vision to one that accepts everyone, not just members of the gay and lesbian community,” Judy Shepard said. “But it’s an eye-opening experience about the world.”

Jack Zerbe, the college’s theater studies department chairman, said the acting company didn’t give the school the rights to perform the play until four weeks ago.

That’s when a Guilford College student received death threats in anti-gay letters.

On Sept. 23, nearly 400 people gathered on the lawn of a Guilford College residence hall to support the lesbian and gay community and to denounce the letters.

Zerbe said performing the play would benefit the community because it discusses how the world has reacted to Shepard’s beating and has altered its views on homosexuality.

“That [the letters] happened shows us how little the world has changed,” he said. “That the vigil had 500 people shows how much it has changed.”
 

Contact Dioni L. Wise at 373-7090 or dioni.wise@news-record.com