Disclaimer: This is going to be a more serious post.
Last year, midway through second semester, there was a murder in the town that I am from.
My first reaction was, "This doesn't happen here." I mean, it is a small town in Vermont, in a rural place. Everyone knows everyone, I live on a dirt road, off of another dirt road, my town itself doesn't even have a high school, nor is it on most maps, and so towns blend together - my official town is different from where the murder happened, but that town is where my friends are, where I drove to school, is actually only 7-10 minutes away by car.
But as soon as I began saying, "That doesn't happen here", it becomes obvious that that is a fallacy of logic - it happened here, so it must be a place where those things happen.
Which you don't want to think about. Because whenever I think of the area of Vermont that I am from, I think of the people, the kindness, the trees, the lakes, the sky, the stars - not the ugly parts of the place. Not the drugs, or the hate, or the violence.
This murder was, and is, really difficult for me to process and understand - partially because I was not with my community when it happened - as I kept getting sporadic updates from Facebook and Google searches, there was no one to be scared with. No one to mourn with. No one here knew this woman, who was my physics teacher, who always had a kind word, was always willing to explain, who had us make boats out of cardboard and duct tape, catapults out of mousetraps. Who had a two-year-old son who witnessed the killing - I was isolated away from my community, from the community that was desperately trying to cope, heal, understand, and remember the positive - work off of the idea that "Love Wins".
As a person who believes that theater matters, and can help heal, this event and my reaction to it held an undercurrent in my artistic conversations, and, in what later turns out to be an important connection, my school was putting on a production of The Laramie Project, a documentary theater piece written around a hate crime in Laramie, Wyoming. The play suddenly took on so many new meanings having to do with the aftermath of a crime in a community, the ideas of violence, the elusive possibility of healing, and also the ideas of outsiders, the media, and how they add violence, scrutiny, to situations.
So when this summer, I had a conversation with a professor about maybe directing a production, or a staged reading, of a show in Abu Dhabi in the fall, Laramie jumped to mind.
And so I am working to use theater as a tool for knowledge, healing, and understanding, while also stumbling into the world of directing, and finding my path in theater - because of a tragic event, and this passage:
"And it was so good to be with people who felt like shit. I kept feeling like I don't deserve to feel this bad, you know? And someone got up there and said, "C'mon, guys, let's show the world that Laramie is not this kind of a town." but it is that kind of a town. If it wasn't this kind of a town, why did this happen here? I mean, you know what I mean, like -- that's a lie. Because it happened here. so how could it not be a town where this kind of thing happens? Like, that's just totally -- like, looking at an Escher painting and getting all confused, like, it's just totally like circular logic like how can you even say that? And we have to mourn this and we have to be sad that we live in a town, a state, a country where shit like this happens. And I'm not going to step away from that and say, "We need to show the world this didn't happen." I mean, these are people trying to distance themselves from this crime. And we need to own this crime. I feel. Everyone needs to own it. We are like this. We ARE like this. WE are LIKE this." - Tectonic Theater Project, The Laramie Project
<3
Last year, midway through second semester, there was a murder in the town that I am from.
My first reaction was, "This doesn't happen here." I mean, it is a small town in Vermont, in a rural place. Everyone knows everyone, I live on a dirt road, off of another dirt road, my town itself doesn't even have a high school, nor is it on most maps, and so towns blend together - my official town is different from where the murder happened, but that town is where my friends are, where I drove to school, is actually only 7-10 minutes away by car.
But as soon as I began saying, "That doesn't happen here", it becomes obvious that that is a fallacy of logic - it happened here, so it must be a place where those things happen.
Which you don't want to think about. Because whenever I think of the area of Vermont that I am from, I think of the people, the kindness, the trees, the lakes, the sky, the stars - not the ugly parts of the place. Not the drugs, or the hate, or the violence.
This murder was, and is, really difficult for me to process and understand - partially because I was not with my community when it happened - as I kept getting sporadic updates from Facebook and Google searches, there was no one to be scared with. No one to mourn with. No one here knew this woman, who was my physics teacher, who always had a kind word, was always willing to explain, who had us make boats out of cardboard and duct tape, catapults out of mousetraps. Who had a two-year-old son who witnessed the killing - I was isolated away from my community, from the community that was desperately trying to cope, heal, understand, and remember the positive - work off of the idea that "Love Wins".
As a person who believes that theater matters, and can help heal, this event and my reaction to it held an undercurrent in my artistic conversations, and, in what later turns out to be an important connection, my school was putting on a production of The Laramie Project, a documentary theater piece written around a hate crime in Laramie, Wyoming. The play suddenly took on so many new meanings having to do with the aftermath of a crime in a community, the ideas of violence, the elusive possibility of healing, and also the ideas of outsiders, the media, and how they add violence, scrutiny, to situations.
So when this summer, I had a conversation with a professor about maybe directing a production, or a staged reading, of a show in Abu Dhabi in the fall, Laramie jumped to mind.
And so I am working to use theater as a tool for knowledge, healing, and understanding, while also stumbling into the world of directing, and finding my path in theater - because of a tragic event, and this passage:
"And it was so good to be with people who felt like shit. I kept feeling like I don't deserve to feel this bad, you know? And someone got up there and said, "C'mon, guys, let's show the world that Laramie is not this kind of a town." but it is that kind of a town. If it wasn't this kind of a town, why did this happen here? I mean, you know what I mean, like -- that's a lie. Because it happened here. so how could it not be a town where this kind of thing happens? Like, that's just totally -- like, looking at an Escher painting and getting all confused, like, it's just totally like circular logic like how can you even say that? And we have to mourn this and we have to be sad that we live in a town, a state, a country where shit like this happens. And I'm not going to step away from that and say, "We need to show the world this didn't happen." I mean, these are people trying to distance themselves from this crime. And we need to own this crime. I feel. Everyone needs to own it. We are like this. We ARE like this. WE are LIKE this." - Tectonic Theater Project, The Laramie Project
<3
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