Passion Play Ellsworth production confronts impact of hate crimes

The last time Charlie Alexander worked on a play with his father, he was 6 and played a pirate. Now, the 23-year-old is directing his dad, Dr. Charles Alexander Sr., and the material is a far cry from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance.”

The recent Skidmore College graduate chose to make his hometown directorial debut with “The Laramie Project” in Ellsworth. The play is about the effect the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard had on the residents of Laramie, Wyo., four years ago.

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 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 in Denver in February 2000, was filmed by HBO Films and released on video earlier this year. In August, members of the Deer Isle community ranging in age from 18 to 80 did a staged reading of the uncut three-act play at the Stonington Opera House.

“I was the lighting designer for the show in college,” said the younger Alexander during a rehearsal break. “I talked to Mom and Dad about the show, and they felt that we had to do it in this area. There were 28 hate crimes in Maine in 2000. Thirteen of those were due to sexual orientation. I think it’s a fairly poignant topic.”

Dr. Alexander’s reasons for encouraging his son to do the show were a bit more personal. He’d seen the kind of hate that killed Shepard before. Dr. Alexander, 55, knew Charlie Howard, the gay man who drowned after being thrown into the Kenduskeag Stream by three juveniles in downtown Bangor in July 1984.

“I was immediately struck by the similarities between Laramie and Bangor demographically,” said Dr. Alexander. “The bigotry surrounding that tragedy hasn’t disappeared. Even now, people hear that bridge referred to as ‘the chuck-a-homo bridge.’ Maine has a pretty good civil rights [hate crimes] law, but we still don’t include sexual orientation in the Maine Human Rights Act.”

While the play is intended to have an emotional impact on its audience, the other eight members of Alexander’s cast already have been jarred just reading and rehearsing the production. James Pendergist of Ellsworth said that not only did the script disturb him, it changed how he thinks about homosexuals.

“My whole attitude has really changed since doing this,” said the 57-year-old insurance agent. “I don’t tell gay jokes any more. And I don’t want to tell them ever again. One of my characters is a priest. He says that what they did to Matthew is violence, but every time we call each other names, that’s a seed of violence, and it really is. I have to admit, I’ve been telling these types of jokes for years. We need to accept people for what they are, not what we think they should be. I’ll never get engaged in that kind of ridicule again. This play’s had too much of an effect on me.”

Director Alexander has kept the play’s most dramatic moments, such as Shepard’s father’s statement at the sentencing of one of his son’s killers. But, he cut more than an hour out of “The Laramie Project,” and is staging the production in a unique way designed to make the audience feel like residents of the Wyoming town rather than an audience sitting in Ellsworth.

He enlisted the help of Dru Colbert’s installation art class at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. In the on-campus studio, students created 10 projects of varying materials inspired by the play. They range from a poster juxtaposing the slogans of hatemongers who protested the Shepard trial with the words of Chinese philosopher and poet Lao Tse to a cedar-topped, coffin-shaped box lined with scenes evoking the Wyoming landscape where Shepard was left to die.

The artwork and several black wooden boxes are the only sets used for the show, staged in the round. The effect Alexander is hoping for is to give the audience visual stimuli in addition to the play’s powerful words. He said that he wants it to feel like the play is being performed in an art gallery.

The Alexanders received a grant from the Maine Humanities Council to stage “The Laramie Project” in Ellsworth. This winter, Charlie Alexander plans to work on cutting the script to under an hour so it can be taken on the road and performed in Maine high schools.

Ellsworth actor Ben Layman wants to be a part of that. The 27-year-old, who grew up in Harrington, said that teenagers are at the most open stage in their lives because they are gathering information about themselves and the world. The debate the play can spark about homosexuality, the death penalty, and what it means to be a moral person is one high school students are ripe for, he said.

“The message of this play is so important, it’s huge,” said Layman. “It’s about what hate does to our minds and souls. But, it’s not just about hate crimes, it’s about how we treat each other as human beings.”

“The Laramie Project” will be performed at the White Birches on Route 1 in Ellsworth at 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday and at 2 p.m. Sunday. The doors will open 90 minutes before each show. For ticket information, call 667-0355.