The Laramie Project Literary Elements

Tragic play

English

The action takes place in the year 1999 when a theater company from New York visited Laramie. Their purpose was to create a play based on the life of Matthew, a homosexual student killed in Laramie and also to conduct interviews with the people who once knew Matt or other people living in the town.

The Laramie Project is a play but it is peculiar in the sense that the play is composed of interviews taken by the theater members of the people living in Laramie. Because of this, the play is presented from a large number of different point of views, depending on the person who is interviewed.

Tragic, depressing, hesitant

The protagonist is Matthew and the antagonists are Aaron and Russell, the two men that killed him.

The major conflict is between the gay community in Laramie represented by Matthew and the extremely religious and also homophobic groups in Laramie. The two crash eventually and the one who suffers is Matthew, who is killed by two men approximately the same age as he is.

The story reaches its climax when Matt is discovered tied to a fence and left there to die.

The sign that the theater members saw when they first entered town of Laramie claiming that ‘’Hate was not a Laramie value’’ foreshadowed the idea that the town had serious problems with hate.

When Aaron’s girlfriend claimed that Matt hit on Aaron was an understatement as the bartenders later claimed.

The characters point out that from the beginning, Matt was interested in politics and wanted to militate for the rights of the gay community. While it is not clearly stated, it is alluded that Matt was interested in politics because he wanted to make a change and because he was frustrated with the way the gay community was treated by those from the outside.

The most important imagery in the play is the one that appears towards the end of the first Act. Then, Aaron, the boy who discovered Matthew’s body, describes him as being almost like a scarecrow. In fact, Aaron was reluctant to approach Matt because he could not believe that he was actually a human being. This shows just how much homophobia and hate in general can dehumanize a person and how negatively it influences a person’s life.

In Laramie there were many religious groups that practiced their faith and that claimed to be the true religion. Paradoxically, the area was made more dangerous and more unsafe for the gay community because of the presence of these religious groups that instigated hate and that pushed their members to hate gays even more.

The narrator draws a parallel between Matthew and other gay men and lesbian women he interviewed when his company went to Laramie. In comparison with Matt, the men and women interviewed were less eager to express openly their sexuality and sexual orientation and because of this they remained safe. In comparison, Matthew suffered because he exposed himself in a deeply religious area and in the end he had to suffer and pay the ultimate price for being true to himself and for trying to help other people who may find themselves in the same situation as him.

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