March 3, 2019, Sunday - The Laramie Project: A Reading and Conversation at the Guthrie

Time: 7p - 10p

Location: Guthrie, 818 S 2nd Street

The Laramie Project: A Reading and Conversation

This Happening is free and open to the public. Reservations are required.

The Laramie Project: A Reading and Conversation
featuring RECLAIM
directed by LEIGH FONDAKOWSKI

In response to the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998, a group of theater artists traveled to Laramie, Wyoming, and conducted hundreds of interviews about the hate crime. Drawing from their research, personal journal entries and news reports, they created The Laramie Project — an innovative, dialogue-driven theater piece that has been performed across the country and around the world since its 2002 debut. Directed by the play’s head writer Leigh Fondakowski and featuring staff, clients and community members of RECLAIM, this special evening of reading and conversation will look at how Shepard’s death and The Laramie Project have impacted queer culture and youth for the past two decades.

ABOUT RECLAIM
RECLAIM is a Twin Cities-based organization that increases access to mental health support so queer and trans youth ages 12–26 may reclaim their lives from oppression in all its forms. They provide therapy to over 65 youth each week, 80 percent of whom are trans or gender-nonconforming; develop practitioners with an emphasis on changing the landscape of access to care in our region through training people of color and Indigenous therapists in gender-competent care; and partner with the community through outreach, education and the intersection of gender and racial justice. Learn more at www.reclaim.care.

ABOUT THE LARAMIE PROJECT
The Laramie Project, by Moisés Kaufman and members of Tectonic Theater Project, premiered at The Ricketson Theatre in February 2002 with the Denver Center Theatre Company and was then performed at the Union Square Theatre in New York City before a November 2002 performance in Laramie, Wyoming. The play was created by a group of theater artists who traveled to Laramie after the murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998 and drew on hundreds of interviews conducted with residents of the town, company members’ own journal entries and published news reports to tell the story. In 2008, Tectonic Theater Project went back to Laramie and developed The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later.

ABOUT LEIGH FONDAKOWSKI
Leigh Fondakowski is the head writer of The Laramie Project, a member of Tectonic Theatre Project, an Emmy-nominated co-screenwriter for HBO’s adaptation of The Laramie Project and a co-writer of The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later. Her play The People’s Temple was performed under her direction at the Guthrie Theater, American Theater Company and Berkeley Repertory Theatre. She is a 2007 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group Theatre Residency Program for Playwrights and a 2009 MacDowell Colony fellow. She was an Imagine Fund fellow and guest lecturer in 2010 at the University of Minnesota where she completed her play, Casa Cushman, about the 19th-century American actress Charlotte Cushman.

ABOUT HAPPENINGS
As part of the Level Nine Series, the Guthrie is committed to offering Happenings, periodic community gatherings in response to local and national current events, creating a forum in which citizens can grapple with today's biggest topics and questions.