A decade later they went back. What they discovered - people who were revising the story, turning it from a hate crime into something more like a robbery - is part of their follow-up docudrama, The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, now touring seven U.S. cities. Tectonic is performing both plays as part of that tour; they'll be presented here by Annenberg Center at the University of Pennsylvania's Zellerbach Theater, beginning Thursday.
The troupe for both plays (known collectively as The Laramie Residency) includes several members of the original cast - Tectonic founder, director, and writer Moisés Kaufman among them. On Thursday they'll perform The Laramie Project and on Friday, The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later. On Saturday, they'll present the original play in the afternoon, the full-length epilogue in the evening.
"The big surprise for all of us was how much the narrative had been reconstructed by a lot of the community," said Greg Pierotti, among the researchers and writers on both plays, and an actor in the original and in the update. "It really was being told as a drug deal gone bad or a robbery, rather than as a hate crime."
This was more of an unexpected development for the other interviewers than for Pierotti, who has kept in touch with some of the people he first interviewed for, then wrote into, the play.
"I've been quite in touch," he said, "so I knew some of the things that we were going to encounter. Still, though, the impact hit me once we started talking with people for the project. I was pretty shocked."
