It deserves the sky. Five days later, he did. For a year and a half after Shephard's death, Kaufman and company conducted more than 200 interviews with Laramie townspeople, which they then transcribed, edited, and compiled into The Laramie Project, perhaps the most compelling work of theatrical journalism the American theatre has ever seen. In Laramie, everybody knows everybody else. If we don't know you, we know somebody you know.
People here are one degree removed, so to speak.
The play offers an instant sense of place, beginning, one imagines, as the interviews themselves began, with the residents relaying how they came to live in Laramie and, more importantly, what living in Laramie means. And that's what The Laramie Project is, the profile of a town defined by a murder, whose identity was left as broken and unrecognizable as Shephard himself, a town strung up for all the world to judge, a town slowly dying. There were no weak links opening night. No one dropped the ball, which, given the play's breathless pacing, seemed nothing short of miraculous. With machine-gun momentum, the action of The Laramie Project is at once exhausting and exhilarating.