Jedadiah Schultz: Looking Back at The Laramie Project
About the author:
“It’s hard to talk about Laramie now, to tell you what Laramie is, for us.” These are the first words spoken by the character Jedadiah Schultz in The Laramie Project, the remarkable theatrical record of the murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, on October 12, 1998. Less than a month after this shocking hate crime, playwright Moises Kaufman and a team from the Tectonic Theater Project interviewed dozens of citizens of Laramie, including Schultz, a University of Wyoming theater student who vividly told of auditioning for a scholarship with a scene from Angels in America over his parents’ disapproval. Ten years later, Schultz is a Yale Drama School grad and New York-based actor who has worked off-Broadway (Bhutan) and regionally, including playing himself and others in a Salt Lake City production of The Laramie Project. On October 12, he’ll be at Alice Tully Hall for The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later, an epilogue focusing on the long-terms effect of Shepard’s murder. The event will include the participation of more than 120 theaters in every state and seven foreign countries. A decade after he first shared his story, Schultz agreed to reflect on how The Laramie Project changed his life.
On November 14, 1998, members of Tectonic Theater Project traveled to Laramie, Wyoming, and conducted interviews with the people of the town. Those interviews resulted in the creation of Tectonic Theater Company’s play The Laramie Project. Inside this play are real people, sharing their stories and perceptions about Laramie shortly after it became infamous for a hate crime. The brutal murder of Matthew Shepard was a devastating moment for my hometown. My name is Jedadiah Schultz. I am one of the people who was interviewed over those many months, and I subsequently became a character in the play.
At the time of the first interview I was a 19-year-old freshman theater major at the University of Wyoming. About a month into the school year, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, two men I had known since junior high, killed Matthew because he was gay. This crime and the national spotlight it brought to Laramie shocked our community. Ten years later, Laramie is still very much defined by the crime. Likewise, because The Laramie Project has received so much attention and been produced so often, the play has, at times, seemed to define me.
I am now an actor in New York City, surrounded by people familiar with the show, and am often recognized or even introduced as “the real guy from The Laramie Project.” For me, these moments conjure up mixed emotions. Admittedly, I sometimes like the attention, but I don’t want this one moment—this particular tragedy and the ensuing play about it—to become the focus of my identity and relationships.
I frequently think about Matthew and how he was taken from this world in a brutal, tragic and horrific manner. And I think about how his death has thrown both Laramie and me into a strange spotlight. The Laramie Project forever immortalized not only Matthew Shepard, but an entire town and many of the real people living there. It is a strange and sad experience on so many levels.
Ten years later I find myself reflecting on the continued impact The Laramie Project has both on Laramie and on my life. My feelings are complicated. Why would a person or town want to be wholly defined by one moment, be it a crime or a play? In my experience, they don’t. Don’t get me wrong: I think it is crucial that Laramie owns what happened there. The murder happened in our town and we, as a community, need to remember and search out our own culpability.
I believe thatcollective homophobia—that was, and still is, common in America—fueled the hate that motivated Aaron McKinney as he attacked Matthew. And we must acknowledge our own guilt as bystanders willing to ignore the hate still frequently directed at gays, just as Russell Henderson stood by that night and allowed this young man to be beaten and left for dead. But at the same time I would also ask—and this is incredibly tricky when intense emotions are involved—that we acknowledge Matthew Shepard’s story is only one of many stories in Laramie, Wyoming. A city, like a person, contains beauty and ugliness and is ultimately much, much more than a single tragic moment in time.
The beauty of The Laramie Project is that it gives us a chance to hear directly from real individuals who experienced this moment firsthand. The play asks the same questions of the audience that Tectonic asked of me in the interviews: “Why do you believe what you believe?” Theater at its best doesn’t tell us what to believe; it asks us why we believe it. It raises questions and moves us in new and hopefully positive directions. It creates conversations, begins a process of introspection and can even heal. The Laramie Project has done that for so many, and I look forward to being at the reading of the epilogue at Alice Tully Hall, together with 120 other theaters across the nation and around the world, Ten years later, the questions are still being asked.