Is talking about the fallacy of imitative form totally faux pas still?

I must confess I struggled with The Laramie project. And not just for its emotional content, which I will admit I found rich. Part of my difficulty in truly engaging the work came from being from a small town myself; A problem which I believe highlights many of the potential pitfalls of modern monologue centric works.

The play gets points from me for its staging directions: Kaufman's direction that costumes and props be always visible (XIV) serves to constantly reminds the audience that this is live theater. The title of this blog isn't mere jest, my favorite plays take place in black boxes with minimal work on setting the play in its environment. To me live theater is powerful for reasons other than any sort of transportive quality. No matter how elaborate the setting and stage magic I rarely if ever escape in any way the awareness that I am sitting in a seat in a theater. I find movies to be far more capable of this transportive quality, and lets face it, modern films can outstrip even the highest budget theater productions in terms of fantastic imagery. Thus, I find staging like that described in the staging directions to be more in line with what I imagine to be theater's niche in the modern entertainment environment: hard-hitting, psychologically effecting works made more powerful by the fact that there are real flesh and blood people in front of you going through the actions. (And really what better events to pick for hard-hitting psychological content than the Laramie drama?)

It is where The Laramie Project fails to commit to this meta-theatrical staging that the play begins to break down for me. Despite the staging that acknowledges we the audience are in a playhouse, the content of the play opens with what essentially serves as an establishing shot––residents of Laramie discuss in general and overly teleological terms what it's like to live in Laramie. I will grant that this portion of the play may only seem to be full of parody ("mess out there back east") and cliche ("so much time for reflection") to me because I grew up in small town in the mountains of Idaho, but the cliche seems to dominate even after this establishing shot.

In his introduction Moises Kaufman states that he sees Mathew Shepard's murder as an event which "brings the various ideologies and beliefs prevailing in a culture into sharp focus" (V). Indeed Kaufman seems to succeed almost to a fault with his sharp focus. Characters in Laramie express themselves with almost unending emotional honesty. Many even express their disapproval of homosexuality just weeks after the tragic events. However, ten years down the line there is nothing particularly shocking or even revealing about even these brazen sentiments. We've all heard Fred Phelps by now, or we've all been disgusted (alright, maybe you weren't disgusted but I was disgusted) by the ideology that claims to accept homosexuality but only when it's in the closet. The characters and situations here are no longer new. Their behavior is not novel, nor is the story. We've seen it all before. More importantly than that is that we've also heard it all before, in almost precisely the same language. In short these "prevailing ideologies and beliefs" now no longer seem like interesting material for art, though I will grant that perhaps at the time of the play's initial run these revelations potentially were truly revelatory.

And in this we see what I consider to be a major danger in monologue based works (a danger which some works like The Vagina Monologues avoid nicely, but more on that later), and that is the very serious danger that the fallacy of imitative form will be ignored. The fact that these characters on stage are rarely engaged in plot-based action and instead are allowed to pontificate freely ostensibly gives them a more realistic character. We can see them for their real-world ideologies and beliefs, taken directly from interviews. However, due to the staging, these characters never truly become real for the audience. Inherent to the medium, these characters do not contain the true weight of documentary. This is fiction we are watching, this is imitative form, yet the characters remain almost achingly true, and like many people do in real life, they have aged poorly. I think this work would have benefited from some more traditional action and acknowledgment that it is imitative form and not documentary. Even if the ideologies of the town are no longer shocking, the violence and actions of Aaron James Mckinney and Russell Henderson still are. Had there been action, or at least fiction, in this play, it could have had far longer lasting psychological impact. As it is, the tension between the documentary aspect and the meta-staging aspect of the play seems contradictory, these aspects do not seem to work together to achieve any sort of aesthetic goal.

The Vagina Monologues was constructed in a similar fashion to the Laramie Project with the playwright conducting extensive interviews before sitting down to write the play. Yet whereas in the Laramie Project there is a supposed one to one correlation between interviewees and characters, the Vagina Monologues is based off over two hundred anonymous interviews. Without that supposed one to one correlation between character and real life, Eve Ensler is free to allow the power of fiction to enter the work. In her work we find highly creative and imaginative imagery and symbols such as "The Flood." Despite the fact that Vagina Monologues is older than the Laramie Project, and that I've seen it in production more than twice, reading the monologues still seems fresh to me. The creativity of Ensler's language and characterization keeps this work compelling in a way that the Laramie Project was not. The Vagina Monologues benefited severely from Ensler's treatment of it.