Students at Sumner High School in East Sullivan recently crowded into the gym for a performance of “The Laramie Project,” an in-the-round production of a play about the brutal killing of a gay student in Laramie, Wyo. Most of them watched and listened with rapt attention.

A New York theater group sent interviewers to Laramie to record reactions of teachers, fellow students, city officials, clergy, police officers, other residents, the bartender where the incident began, and the teenage boys who beat up Matthew Shepard and tied him to a fence to die. They put the interviews together in an off-Broadway play.

An Ellsworth troupe showed it first to a general audience and now has taken it on the road to area high schools including also Orono, George Stevens Academy, Ellsworth, Mount Desert Island, Belfast and Dover-Foxcroft. Other performances will be at the University of Maine at Machias and at the attorney general’s civil rights conference in Augusta on April 15.

A group of Sumner High students said afterward that a minority resented the performance and either stayed away or whispered in some mild disruptions during the show. But they said most students welcomed the show as a vital demonstration of where homophobia can lead. They said epithets like “fag” and “queer” are frequently heard in their school. They said that the show suggested that such an incident could occur even in a place like East Sullivan.

The students scoffed at the reported inability of other schools to fit performances into their schedules. They said Sumner did it, by shortening classes that day. “The Laramie Project” would have had special meaning for Bangor students, where some will remember the 1984 incident in which three juveniles threw Charlie Howard, a gay man, into the Kenduskeag Stream, where he drowned.