STONINGTON – A teacher, a writer, an elected official, local business owners, recent college graduates, year-round inhabitants and seasonal residents ranging in age from 18 to 80 made up the 17-member cast of “The Laramie Project.”

The fact that the performers were locals, coupled with the powerful and compelling material garnered from real life, demonstrated just how transforming art can be in our everyday lives.

Tuesday night’s reading of the three-act play was the second production in the Stonington Opera House’s Community Play Reading Series. Carol Estey directed the stage reading of the play about the effect the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard had on the community of Laramie, Wyo.

Estey did not hold auditions for the reading, but sought volunteers from the community. The group rehearsed less than a week before giving one performance.

Shepard was a 21-year-old gay college student at the University of Wyoming when he was beaten, tied to a fence in a remote area outside of town, and left in a snowstorm on Oct. 6, 1998.

He died six days later. The following month, members of a New York City theater company descended on the community of 26,600 and began interviewing townspeople. Moises Kaufman and his troupe of actors from the Tectonic Theater Project returned to Laramie six more times over the next two years, interviewed more than 200 people, and combed through court transcripts before writing the play.

“The Laramie Project” uses a group of actors to portray more than 60 characters – the people who knew Shepard as well as the men who killed him. The production premiered to favorable reviews at the Denver Center Theater Company in February 2000 and was filmed for HBO Films and released on video earlier this year.

Yet, the 50 people who attended the staged reading of “The Laramie Project” Tuesday night said after the play that its message had a greater impact on them, was more powerful then any rendition they had yet seen because it was performed by people they knew. Several said they were more receptive to the play’s message because it was delivered by friends and neighbors.

While Shepard lay in a coma dying, he was transformed from a mild-mannered college student into a martyr for gay rights and a poster child for hate crime legislation. The time was ripe for such a victim.

Yet, watching “The Laramie Project” on a hot summer night in Maine, raised questions about lessons learned from Charlie Howard’s July 1984 murder in downtown Bangor. Like Shepard, Howard was a slight, openly gay man in his early 20s. He drowned after being thrown into the Kendusdeag Stream by three juveniles.

What if Kaufman and his theater company had descended on the Queen City the way it did on Laramie? What insight, if any, would the resulting production have shed on the community? On homophobia? On how we measure and define our humanity in a state whose “live and let live” philosophy is so like Wyoming’s?

Next year, high schools throughout the state will hold diversity days, designed to foster tolerance. Some administrations will risk controversy by inviting homosexuals to speak to students. But those who truly want to get their students thinking should consider producing “The Laramie Project” as the Stonington Opera House did.

If the show stirred emotions and conversation in this seemingly idyllic coastal community, imagine the impact a cast of students, teachers, administrators, parents, grandparents and community leaders could have on high school students.

One of art’s functions in society is to act as a mirror. The reflection may not always be pretty – and it certainly isn’t in “The Laramie Project” – but studying the image is essential if a society is to understand its finest as well as its worst instincts.

Performed as it was in Stonington, the play has the potential and the power to transform the heart and mind of every person who sees it. And, “The Laramie Project” needs to reach a lot of people if there are to be no more killings of the Charlie Howards or Matthew Shepards in the Bangors and Laramies across America.