The Laramie Project and the Vagina Monologues

One of my favorite things about the way Moises Kaufmanns’ play The Laramie Project was written was the narrator. On the first page, I was unsure about the narrator explaining to the audience about what the Tectonic Theatre Project was doing. I had felt it seemed unnecessary when throughout the course of the play; we were probably going to figure it out through the plot. However, I think that giving a little bit of explanation at the beginning did a few things. Firstly, it inserted a layer of realism into a theatrical event. What in my mind was unique about this play as a contrast to many others I had seen was that it was an actual historical event. I’ve seen plays that are based on events but take great dramatic license. Other than the narrator and some of the staging, this play didn’t seem to take that sort of license plot wise. In my opinion, the strict, interview style of writing—where one person would talk and then the narrator, and then another person—made the events in the play that much more potent. We know that it actually happened, and so we feel the events even more despite the fact that it never takes place as a part of the plot. The style of writing almost makes it more like a newscast than an actual play.
However, other aspects of the writing which were purely theatrical made for a wonderful reading experience. I loved the fact that there was a narrator throughout the entire thing. It gave the feeling that someone was guiding you through the description of the heroic events. One of the things I also love about theatre, and things that this play uses, was the fact that sometimes the narrator molded into characters. In theatre, different from movies, you have the ability to change characters onstage, providing the audience with a clear representation of who is playing whom. With the narrator changing into other characters, you know that obviously the narrator must be a part of the project, and although he is guiding you through the traumatic events following the Matthew Shepherd murder, he is also just as much a part of the actual action. I also loved the episodic way of writing where characters would change often. It gave it a news quality feel and allowed me to picture how you would stage that. Personally, a cool staging I think would be only four or five actors with all members in black, where lights would go on and off onto who was talking. You could have a tape of all of the court voices in the background at the end. I also loved the way the play got a bit more fluid with longer scenes as we got closer to the end. The way Kaufman wrote the characters, making sure to include the “ums” “uhs” and repetition when discussing the “thing”(aka being gay) made for a realism that I don’t think is often found in theatre. Overall, I think the writing was some of the best I’d ever read, and I would love to see this play performed.
I felt a little bit differently about the vagina monologues, although I don’t know why. It was odd to me that, despite the fact that it was written the same way in that the dialogue was episodic with breaks in between each character, the dialogue felt more contrived. It seemed like they were trying to be controversial, and it felt more theatrical then natural. You didn’t feel like the things they were talking about were things that anyone would actually ever say in real life, so it distanced you from reality to which you could appreciated the message it was trying to make, but didn’t actually think that it was something they would talk about on a news broadcast. I appreciated its political message of being comfortable with who you are, but I don’t know if I necessarily liked it as much as The Laramie Project.