32 / 124
T
,
a young gay man was tied to a fence
in rural Wyoming and beaten. His injuries ultimately proved
fatal.
¶
When I heard those news reports in the fall of
,
I shuddered at the brutality and shared in the pain of a nation
struggling to understand such a heinous act. Two decades later,
the legacy of Matthew Shepard continues to resonate.
Moving Pictures
Inside
Considering
Matthew Shepard
In the summer of
, I was surprised by a phone call
from Rod Caspers, a dear friend from our days together at the
University of Texas–Austin Drama Department. He asked if I
would be interested in directing a new choral musical work, an
oratorio,
Considering Matthew Shepard
, slated for broadcast on
PBS and a subsequent live tour. Rod knew I’d been producing
and directing large-scale symphony concerts and other stage
works around the country for almost years, and he thought
I might be right for this assignment. I accepted on the spot,
grateful to be invited to play a role in keeping Matthew’s story
alive. His haunting life story had previously been told on stage
and screen in
e Laramie Project
, but as I came to discover,
for many, Matthew’s story had started to fade into history.
We started pre-production in the weeks before the
presidential election—a time when many Americans might
have thought that hate crimes were becoming a relic of the
past. As subsequent events have shown, however, such is not
RAVINIA MAGAZINE | SEPTEMBER 3, 2018 – MAY 11, 2019
30