It was bound to come – the nonfiction, documentary play. It had been waiting in the wings for years and years.
Sure, Shakespeare’s histories were loosely based on “Holinshed’s Chronicles” and Bernard Shaw sensibly adapted parts of “St. Joan” from court transcripts.
Following Shaw’s example, court transcripts have been used occasionally. In fact, I recall that Eric Bentley’s fascinating play “Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been?” was based on the Joseph McCarthy hearings.
While no one has particularly dwelled on it, I feel that “The Laramie Project,” now at the Union Square Theater, is a new and firm step toward the documentary as a valid and even common theatrical form.
To be honest, I wasn’t looking forward that much to this study – by Moises Kaufman’s Tectonic Theater Project – of the senseless murder of a gay college student named Matthew Shepard in the small town of Laramie, Wyo. It was a cruel bias crime prompted, if not motivated, by Shepard’s homosexuality.
Unlike most people, I had not been impressed by Kaufman’s earlier documentary-style play on Oscar Wilde, “Gross Indecency,” which seemed overblown and underedited.
Also, I suspected that this new play was going to largely be gay agitprop, dripping with political correctness and festooned with manipulative invitations for straight guilt, and possibly making political capital out of an horrific tragedy.
Yet what has emerged is a theatrically enthralling investigation into the background of the crime, and the waves of its aftershock.
Kaufman sent his actors to Laramie, where they conducted some 200 interviews – from these and the journals the actors kept during their visits, Kaufman has fashioned his text.
What emerges is a small town, much like any other, one actually priding itself on what it perceives as its live-and-let-live tolerance, and the puzzle of a crime that shocked even its most intolerant inhabitants.
The play offers no real explanation for the murder – or whether it was a random act, or one springing from the community’s darker, if hidden, face of prejudice.
The story of the killing and the subsequent trials of the killers is spelled out, yet also raised are the problems of assessing guilt and the deeper problem of conjecturing how far these impulses of hate are germane to the American psyche, or, for that matter, the human psyche.
It only remains to be said that this totally fascinating docudrama is beautifully acted and carefully staged. Indeed, this is not to be missed by anyone interested in the theater or even the human condition.
*
A couple of brief notes on other diversions and wrong-turnings.
“Enter the Guardsman,” at the Dimson Theater, turned out to be a pretty literal musical version of the old Ferenc Molnar play, sometimes remembered as the only movie the Lunts ever made.
The Molnar play is a fun look at backstage romance and deception, but this tepid musicalization made nothing of it, and the polished principal actors – Robert Cuccioli, Marla Schaffel and Mark Jacoby – would have been better in the original non-musical mufti version.
So, what do you call a number of Footes – Feete?
“When They Speak of Rita,” at Primary Stages, is a middle-American kitchen-sink drama, written by Daisy B. Foote. Directed by her octogenarian father, the distinguished Horton Foote, the play’s principal role is touchingly taken by Daisy’s elder sister, Hallie Foote.
It is a play precisely in her playwright father’s tradition. (Note: I avoided saying Footesteps; well, almost avoided.) I found this story of a woman who wished for as much as she deserved but more than she could accomplish very sweet, economical and truthful.