This is Don’s last post, uploaded by Jules. Some time has passed since we closed Laramie, but somehow I still don’t feel like I’ve let it go. I know all of my posts have been about how Laramie went completely against everything that I normally expect from a show, and I’m afraid that this post […]
Student Posts
All Together Now
Ah deadlines, deadlines, how many a fair evening hath fled before thee? But if variety is the spice of life, deadlines must be the cookfire, because they sure make everything burn just a little bit quicker. Not only must I share my reflections on an intensely personal and introspective theater experience, but I must do […]
Funneling System
Jenny After a long and VERY successful run of the show, I’ve had time to realize what I’ll miss most about running The Laramie Project. This experience for me has been unique. I’ve never had to sit through a full show in the dark, on a headset, listening to actors in one ear and to […]
One Last Look
I tried to starting gathering my thoughts about a week ago. Yet somehow I still find myself unable to verbalize everything I want to say about what these last few months have meant to me. For a while that bugged me and I kept putting it off in the hope that I would somehow discover […]
What’s more to say?
I’m honestly not sure what to say in this final post before I bid farewell to Laramie. In a practical sense, my part of Laramie was over and done a while ago, and became final once I had packed everything back into the prop cabinet. The curtain closed. The set was struck. The end. I […]
Thank You For Making Me A Better Me!
And it has finally come down to this. The shows are all over. The set was destroyed. We cried our last tears and laughed our final laughs. We have said our goodbyes. The Laramie Project Spring 2011 is over for all intents and purposes. But the moments and experiences I shared will all of you […]
I’m Not Saying Goodbye
Cameron McCallie As I was closing down Brody late Saturday night after the final reading of Dead White Men, Jacob’s words from the end of our final class happened to slip into my head: “There’s always a home in theater”. I looked around at the now bare stage and was inundated with memories from my […]
And I am eternally grateful…
Those last few runs of the show were completely surreal. Sitting there while watching a scene, my mind would often wonder back to the classroom where we first blocked that moment. A time when I couldn’t fathom what the space would look like or how it would all come together. Then, there I sat under […]
My Parents
So Jedadiah’s back. A couple weeks ago, Jeff approached me about doing a show at Manbites next fall. Last weekend, we had a read-through at Manbites so Jeff and Ed could hear it aloud and decide whether or not they wanted to include it in the upcoming season. And yesterday, Jeff offered me the role […]
Two posts in one OR A farewell
Kimi Laramie speaks, OR The conversation I wish we’d had I wish my roommate came to see Laramie. She’s a wonderful person, funny and sweet; we’ve been friends since freshman year. She’s also a Christian and I am not, which has led to many fascinating conversations this past year, usually with both of us on […]
A Poetic(?) Farewell
For my last blog post, I want to share three poems that I wrote during the dress rehearsals of the show—and I don’t mean, “during the general time period in which we had dress rehearsals,”—I mean DURING the dress rehearsals themselves. While many of you were busy going through scenes in act one, I was […]
Thanks. For filling me up.
I’ve been keeping myself from writing this blog entry because it’s my last Laramie assignment and it puts a level of finality that I’m only just letting myself feel. I cried every night of this show, and in most rehearsals. Instead of boring y’all with my emotions (they are many) about this show, I thought […]
“I looked in my rearview mirror to take one last look at the town”
When I signed up for Laramie, I had no idea just how much thought would be put into this play. I mean, I imagined there would be all of the usual things, but I was very overwhelmed by the amount of research that went into this. To me, Laramie was just a play. Yes, as […]
Now, you take care. I love you honey.
I am about to graduate. Wow. It’s been a little over a week since The Laramie Project closed. I had the staged reading of Dead White Men, my senior distinction project, the weekend after Laramie closed so now I am done with theater at Duke. It’s been a wonderful ride and now it’s over. It […]
Laramie Love
It’s now the aftermath of the show, and I don’t know where I stand. I got caught up in this huge whirlwind of a show that grew into more than myself or any of the actors. We carried the burden/honor of Matthew Shepard’s story, sharing it with around eighty people a night for two weeks. […]
Audience Participation
One of the major design elements for our production of The Laramie Project was stadium seating, the audience sat on two sides of the playing space and, never fully in darkness, watched each other as they watched the show. I believe the concept came from an AIDS play that Jeff saw in the 1980’s in […]
Moment: Aftermath
People keep asking me how I’m feeling now that Laramie is over. I was expecting to feel somewhat liberated, what with several hours of each day suddenly cleared and available. I had been excited to get back to “real life,” nebulously defined as a life in which I could sit down to eat dinner and […]
Owning a Story
Jeff tells us so often that we must own this story. I typically took this to mean that we should be confident in our knowledge of the play and our ability to perform it. It was encouragement. I took new meaning from it when I had the pleasure of meeting a former student of the […]
Moment: The Close-up
By Julian Spector Moment: Medical Update Matthew Shepard was admitted in critical condition approximately nine-fifteen P.M., October seventh… I watch Cameron’s bespectacled face swim in a sea of darkness, glaring fluorescent lights still leaving his eyes in shadow. The image shines brightly in the dim theater, luring my eyes like one of those deep-sea fish. […]
Forgetting Laramie
I think it’s pretty safe to say none of us knew what were getting ourselves into when we first auditioned for the Laramie project. What I find sort of interesting is that, I don’t think I’ve felt as close to the Aaron Kreifels monologue since the first time I read it at the audition, until […]
Figuring out Doc and Galloway
I play three main characters in The Laramie Project: Stephen Belber, Doc O’Connor, and Matt Galloway. Differentiating between the three and discovering their separate and unique identities has been the major challenge of the show for me. At first I found the characters to be quite shallow, both in terms of the fact we know […]
Thank you Matthew
I sit here with a full head and an empty page, unsure of what I want to say here; unsure of how brave and honest I want to be in this posting. The Laramie Project has come so far in the past month that it hardly resembles the play it once was. As Jeff tells […]
“…but they are honest and they’re truthful”
It’s incredible how many times you can watch a show and still learn something new each time. We’ve read and rehearsed this show and unbelievable amount of times—and yet, I notice something new almost every run. A couple things I’ve noticed in the past few rehearsals: Rebecca Hilliker’s line—“You know, I really love my students […]
It’s weird, man.
This is Don’s post — uploaded by Jules. For the longest time, I didn’t let myself get personally involved in any of the shows I stage-managed. Laramie changed that. Let’s back up a little. I’m confident in what I do. I would never describe myself as a “great” stage-manager, or really anything other than a […]
The Tech-ing Project
Moment: An Introduction NARRATOR: From April 1, 2011 to April 3, 2011, the Laramie Project Company at Duke University ran tech for its upcoming production. The following comes from interviews with Manny Hidalgo, an assistant stage manager for the show. MANNY HIDALGO: Well, what Laramie was like during tech…. well, I’d never seen anything like […]