Summer 2004

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Moisés Kaufman Visits SUNY Geneseo

by Mary E. McCrank

Moisés Kaufman, the award-winning writer/director of "The Laramie Project," visited the College in April to deliver a talk and conduct a workshop for theater students.

Kaufman’s visit was part of the College’s weeklong celebration of diversity and timed to coincide with the School of Performing Arts’ presentation of Kaufman’s play. Kaufman, who wrote the play – about a small town grappling with the murder of Matthew Shepard – is currently directing the Broadway play "I Am My Own Wife," which won a Pulitzer Prize for drama the week Kaufman visited Geneseo.

Kaufman and members of the New York City-based Tectonic Theatre Project wrote about how townsfolk in Laramie, Wyo., coped after the 1998 death of Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student who was beaten and killed over his sexual orientation. Two men from Laramie beat him and left him for dead. A mountain biker found Shepard the next day, and days later he died in the hospital surrounded by his family.

The founder and artistic director of the Tectonic Theatre Project, Kaufman has championed a form of theater that breaks away from the traditional model. He took his theater troupe to Laramie to transform the tragedy into a play. They scripted the play based on interviews with residents and excerpts from the trial in an effort to examine the community as it struggled over the prejudice and violence that led to Shepard’s death.

"The Laramie Project" opened in March 2000 at The Denver Theater Center and moved to New York in May 2000. In November 2000, Kaufman took his company to Laramie to perform the play, which won the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Play. It also was adapted into an HBO film by recreating the troupe’s efforts. The film was selected as the opening night premiere at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival.

Kaufman is the biggest name in theater to visit Geneseo since "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" author Edward Albee visited in 1993, said Melanie N. Blood, associate professor and assistant director in the College’s School of Performing Arts. In addition, "The Laramie Project" currently is the second-most performed play on college campuses across the country, said Blood, who directed Geneseo’s production of the play.

Kaufman also has won numerous awards for "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde," which he wrote and directed. The play ran for more than 600 performances Off-Broadway and was produced in more than 40 cities in America and dozens of cities abroad. In June 1999, Kaufman was named Artist of the Year by Venezuela’s Casa del Artista, a national award voted on by artists from a wide variety of fields.

Greg Stoneberg, chair of the Student Association’s Contemporary Forum, spearheaded a fund-raising campaign to bring Kaufman to the campus, and worked with Blood. Kaufman’s visit was made possible in part by a grant from Creating Diversity Through Community, an initiative by Vice President for Student and Campus Life Robert A. Bonfiglio, and a half-dozen other campus organizations, including the Pride Alliance, who supported the event with grants and publicity.

Kaufman spoke in the Wadsworth Auditorium April 7 and spent the evening with students and SUNY Geneseo representatives, including dinner at The Big Tree Inn. The next morning, he conducted the workshop for Blood’s students and cast members of the play.

"Theater has its own nobility," Kaufman said at the start of the intense workshop.

"In America, 90 percent of the work is made under a very specific model," Kaufman told the students. He said most productions allow for two weeks of rehearsals and one week for tech.

Kaufman likes to use what he describes on his Web site as "watershed historical moments – times when all the ideas, beliefs and ideologies that are the pillars of a certain culture at a certain time surface around a specific event. When this happens, the event itself operates as a lightning rod that allows us to see clearly for a brief time, what ideas that society is made of."

Tectonic – which means "relating to the art and science of structure" – uses "theater moment" work when it can. Kaufman found much success when he used this model in "Gross Indecency" and "The Laramie Project."
"Moment work is a way of writing performance instead of writing text," he told the students and professors. "It begins to give you other possibilities."

Moment work is "a way to create and analyze theater" and allows theater folk "to construct plays in a very kind of postmodern way," he said.
"It’s about the integrity of the moment," he said.

Kaufman taught the students about moment work – where there are no acts or scenes, but rather moment skits. And then he had them perform some.

The students tied their shoes, yawned and stretched, tap danced, and took off hats. One swung her keys, another put on his sweatshirt’s hood and ran, some played hide-and-seek, and one student even took off another student’s shoe and threw it.

"It begins where you are," Kaufman said, encouraging the students to transform their theatrical space.

In the 1970s, American theater began to "debunk the supremacy of the text," he said. Good writers know how to use actors, as Eugene O’Neill did decades earlier in "Long Days Journey into Night."

While text dictated plays in the past, Tectonic took a new approach to the post-murder scene in Laramie. After hearing the news, the theater troupe hopped on a plane, using proceeds from "Gross Indecency."

"A young boy had died…this was an event that occurred in life," he said. The tragedy struck a cord with Kaufman, who is gay and grew up as a minority Jew in predominantly Catholic Venezuela.

"We knew we wanted to be there right away," Kaufman said. "It was a shrine. Something sacred had happened there. I don’t mean the beating, but the sacred thing was that he was there for all those hours and found."
The troupe began its first round of interviews with the townsfolk. In all, including subsequent trips, they interviewed 64 people, totaling 400 hours of tape-recorded conversations.

"These people were opening their hearts and minds with us," he said. ‘They were telling us things they weren’t even telling their lovers or loved ones."

Each three-hour interview would yield 10-30 minutes of gold, he said, but it all couldn’t be used. The tough part, Kaufman said, was whittling these interviews down into a 2 1/2-hour play. Cutting scenes or characters completely upset members of the troupe, including Kaufman. "I had to make a room in which mourning was possible," he said, describing how personally connected the crew felt to the people and the play.

Writing the play in this fashion, using real people’s thoughts, was difficult and raised a lot of ethical questions, he said. But this style of playwriting is what made the story real.

"You have to profoundly believe that these people have a devastating need to tell their truth," Kaufman said.

"When we started using moment work, (it was a) way to really allow the beauty of each of those lines of discourse to have their nobility," Kaufman said.

Being in touch with the truth of a character is the "fuel" for a play, he said. The play hit so close to home that Shepard’s mother, Judy Shepard, told him, "This is beautiful, but I could never see this."

Kaufman has become close with Judy Shepard, who co-founded the Matthew Shepard Foundation with her husband Dennis in 1998. Judy Shepard travels the nation to raise awareness of the issues involving discrimination and diversity.

Kaufman told the students he has become politically involved, too, and has traveled to Washington, D.C., to lobby for hate-crime legislation.
Kaufman’s visit helped the Geneseo cast better prepare for its production of the play.

"He definitely revitalized the cast," said Jhon Spring, a graduating senior who played three roles in the play and majored in music composition and anthropology, with a minor in business. "It becomes more real. He brings it to us."

Melissa Lauricella of Spencerport, who will be entering her senior year in the fall, agreed.

"I just got an insight into a phrase," said the theater performer and history major who had three roles in the play.

"It’s just rare to be exposed to someone like this," she said, adding Kaufman’s visit made her think she may want to work with an innovative theater company such as Tectonic someday. "It’s theater," she said. "It’s supposed to be innovative."

Senior Ben Strickland (seated) and junior Alex Sovronsky (standing) perform a "moment" sketch, a method Moisés Kaufman taught the students during the workshop he conducted April 8.

Moisés Kaufman demonstrates to the students how "moment" work can include the simple act of reading a magazine.

Moisés Kaufman talks to students during Professor Melanie Blood’s theatre class.

Moisés Kaufman autographs a copy of a playbook for Laramie cast member and junior Heather Wilhelm. Junior Mike Revenaugh, sophomore Dan Pivovar and senior Jason Beideck wait their turn.

Moisés Kaufman, center second row, and Professor Melanie Blood, right first row, pose with students in Blood’s class and the Laramie cast.

Photos by Ron Pretzer