This is Jedediah Schultz (Rough)

So this is going to be the final piece of my Laramie Triptych. It's been long gestating, probably too long, and this is almost an emergency C-section to just, Get it out! An old joke, but appropriate. A beginning and an end, the ouroboros. Sorry about the unexpected, unnatural blooming of my style tonight, but I just read the poem from Nabokov's Pale Fire. I don't pretend to approach the old boy on any level of talent or intellect or raw sex appeal, but he is infectious.

As an another of my innumerable asides, read Pale Fire. It's incredible. At least, from the first quarter, I assume that it will be, and the first quarter is the poem that is central to the work, the rest is just commentary. Can you imagine that? Writing a book that is primarily commentary on itself? Of course, the commentary is often unrelated, as I understand, and weaves a narrative that only builds fantastically off of the poem, but that is still amazing. It's as though the first act of Hamlet was all there was, and 'To be or not to Be' was just commentary. If the Bible was like that, no one would have heard of the Messiah outside the absurd ramblings of some academicians who pulled the wild tale of an eternal savior out of the good old story of the House of Israel up until the first Babylonian Captivity. The only Babylonian Captivity, excuse me, the second one merely a theory attempting to relate the true history of the old Semites to the sorry case of modern society.

I am rambling. I will come back later, when I am less full of words and muse at you about how strange it must be to have been in the first production of the Laramie Project. To have to stand on stage and taking the character a person you have met, spoken to, befriended, saying words that you heard them say, that might be nestled in a tape recorder in your filing cabinet back home. And then, as though that were not enough to untangle your neurons, you have to turn around and act yourself. It's weird.

Well, coming back to this the next day, I feel as though that little summary said everything I wanted to say. But I will say some more. Did you think I wouldn't.

The premise of the Laramie project is that all of the characters are based on real people, and everything they said is real, and edited as faithfully as possible. I say they are based on real people, because in the end, they are no more real than any other dramatic character. A role in a play is nothing more than the words that comprise it. They may suggest a past and a future, hint at relationships and lives that we never see on stage, but they are fundamentally just a small series of words, and they can't encompass the fantastically complicated totality that is a human being. This makes acting Laramie somewhat easier for companies who don't know the people involved; as long as they are being faithful to the script, they are being as faithful as possible to the people of Laramie.

If you had met the people of Laramie, it would be different. In their first performance, the Tectonics must have faced the dilemma of fidelity. I wonder if they decided to attempt to mimic the people as accurately as possible, or if they prepared their characters as though they had never eaten dinner with them. My guess is that they tried to divorce their performance as much as possible from their experience, or there would be notes in the script - Doc O'Connor tends to breath heavily through his nose, Reggie Fluty has this obnoxious laugh - to help future performances achieve the same thing. That they don't do that implies a different goal for the play, a goal that somewhat contradicts the idea of "telling it true". The only thing the characters of the Laramie Project share with their inspirations are their words, and in that sense they are a bit like Pierre Menard's Don Quixote. The emphasis is therefore placed on those words, and not on the people themselves.

In this way, the Laramie Project asserts the primacy of theater over direct retelling as a way of explaining the world. Despite being about real people, it is a construct, a story. (Sorry I am inarticulate; it's half past twelve, the only time I can drive myself to write) All of the talk of telling it true and accurately representing the town is a bunch of baloney. You are not seeing Wyoming, you are seeing a college theater group's interpretation of Wyoming. Yet somehow, you forget that. You believe that Aaron Kriefels and Jedediah Schultz really are the same person, and that Wyomingites have no accent. And it's still all true. Despite the rampant falsehoods, you are struck, moved. If they had all tried to pull bad accents, or exactly imitated Rulon Stacy's stutter, you would not. I think it's because the words are powerful, and you can't help but react to them. When the actors bring their own lives and feelings to the characters, the words become realer and more human than if they were acting "accurately" for each character. How's that for a paradox?

This next point was supposed to be the one that was mind-boggling, but as I stumbled into that discussion, I realized how crazy it was, and the obvious difficulties of this one sort of fade away. I was wondering how one acts oneself on stage. I am sure there is a character-building process, a way of presenting yourself that is different from simply choosing not to act for the scenes you are in. After all, Greg Pierroti is a character as much as the Dennis Shepherd, and if he went up on stage and simply acted like he was himself hanging out, the dramatic coherency of the play would be ruined. He surely had to learn to portray himself as he appeared when he was giving interviews, but that is simple, I would think. But still, I can't fathom the eeriness of being in the crowd on the first night and seeing your close friends introduced by a narrator as themselves, as though they were playing themselves. I wouldn't be surprised if they had an entirely different experience of the show, one that was more personal, but at the same time much more focused on the form and ironies of the play, rather than its surface message.

Tune in next time, when I stop talking about the Laramie Project, and talk about philosopher! Also, I should be brief, but who knows.