John Clancy likes to be first. His first theater experience in Maine was 1992, the first year of Mark Torres’ tenure as artistic director at Penobscot Theatre Company in Bangor. He comically played an unruly journalist in “The Front Page” and an abusive husband in “Charity’s Children,” starring opposite his real-life wife, Nancy Walsh. Now, in the first season for new PTC artistic director Scott Levy, Clancy is back.

And he’s still in first place: He’ll be the first theater artist to direct “The Laramie Project” for the company. The show runs Nov. 2-14 at the Bangor Opera House. The theater received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to host post-show discussions after each performance.

“It was meaningful to be a part of Mark’s first season,” said Clancy, who is 42 and lives in New York City. “And when Levy wound up here, I wanted to come up because he’s a friend and colleague.”

Clancy and Walsh are probably best known in the larger theater world for co-founding in 1997 the New York International Fringe Festival. Their own company, Clancy Productions, has garnered international acclaim and will open five off-off-Broadway shows in NYC in 2006.

“At the first Fringe Festival, John was someone I looked up to as a theater artist,” said Levy. “Being able to work with him here is a dream. The ability to bring him back home to Bangor is great.”

Levy knows, too, that “Laramie,” about the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student in Wyoming, requires a deft directorial touch. It also has particular resonance in Bangor, where, 21 years ago, three teens attacked Charles Howard, a 23-year-old gay man, and hurled him into the Kenduskeag River, where he drowned.

Also significant to the show’s timing, on Nov. 8, Maine voters will decide whether to repeal the state’s new gay-rights law.

“Because of the current situation and what happened in Bangor – and because the events in Laramie actually happened – the director and actors have a higher responsibility with this piece,” said Clancy. “These are real people, and there are people who miss Charlie Howard every day. So you have to get it right.”

“The Laramie Project” is based on interviews done by playwright and director Moises Kaufman and members of his Tectonic Theater Project. The group made six visits to Laramie in the year after Shepard’s death and conducted more than 200 interviews with townspeople. The script, a collage based on the visits, has been called “‘Our Town’ with a question mark.”

“Every piece of art has the potential to heal, to shock, to wound,” said Clancy. “Our job is to give life to the voices in the play and to give these voices to the audience. At the end of the night, they’ll see that these people are us, that Laramie is our town, too.”

– By Alicia Anstead

Tickets for “The Laramie Project” are available at the Penobscot Theatre box office or by calling 942-3333 or e-mailing boxoffice@penobscottheatre.org. Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.