The Laramie Project: 25th Anniversary Production
In October 1998, Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay college student, was beaten and left tied to a fence outside Laramie, Wyoming. He died days later. Members of Tectonic Theater Project traveled to the town and interviewed more than 200 people, and their words became The Laramie Project, a portrait of a community forced to look at itself.
Second Chance Players performed The Laramie Project: 25th Anniversary Production across two weekends in November 2025 at Horizon Unitarian Universalist Church in Carrollton, Texas.
By Moisés Kaufman and the Members of Tectonic Theater Project
Synopsis
This powerful play tells the story of a small Wyoming town in the year after one of the most notorious hate crimes in American history.
When Matthew Shepard dies in October 1998, Laramie is suddenly overrun with TV trucks and reporters. Locals who always thought of their town as a live-and-let-live kind of place are now hearing it called something else on the evening news. A bartender remembers the last people to see Matthew alive. A police officer who answered the call waits to find out what her own exposure at the scene will cost her. A priest dares his neighbors to admit their part in it. At the funeral, Matthew's friends answer a group of hateful protesters with a wall of angel wings. And at the trial, his father makes a choice no one in the courtroom saw coming.
Built from real interviews and played by a small cast taking on dozens of roles, The Laramie Project is a portrait of ordinary people trying to make sense of something terrible, 25 years later. Second Chance Players was proud to bring this story to North Texas audiences.
