When WSU's Festival Playhouse season was announced last year, it was late but celebrated for its risk taking. While two shows, Lost in Yonkers and Carousel were decidedly safe productions the other three were commercial risks.
Parade, a musical about the false murder accusation of a Brooklyn Jew in Atlanta, and his subsequent demise by mob lyncing, is not the kind of production that makes audiences flock to the box office. The Winter's Tale is a wonderful Shakespeare play that is unknown to all but theatrical artists and fans of the bard.
The play between these two, The Laramie Project, is a well reviewed and respected play portraying the town of Laramie, Wyoming's response to the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student.
Despite this progressive and fresh season the theatre department experienced a drop of approximately five hundred series subscriptions or about a 16% drop. A telephone survey of former subscribers was conducted and a limited number people did not resubscribe because of “The Fag Play”, The Laramie Project. The most likely reason for the fall off in subscriptions is not because of just The Laramie Project, but because of it, Parade, The Winter's Tale, and the late announcement of the season schedule.
Then silently over the summer and early fall the theatre department went panhandling to local Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Trangendered (GLBT) organizations, requiting monetary assistance with The Laramie Project. PFlag Dayton (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) provided $500.00; other organizations provided various amounts.
The troubling matter is that the Anti-defamation League, an organization dedicated to fighting Anti-Semitism and Bigotry, was not asked to support Parade, in which a Jewish man is wrongly persecuted. But, because of the apparent second-class treatment of homoattracted people and their stories, they have been asked to pay for a pre-professional theatre department's mistake in its season selection. This is akin to a major movie studio producing a movie with firearms prominently featured and then asking National Rifle Organization to pay for the studio's losses.
The theatre department should owe up to their commercial mistake and return the funds received from the GLBT organizations. Instead of compensating for the business mistake of the theatre department, the GLBT organizations have more important issues to work on, such as working to increase understanding and awareness so another Gay or Lesbian college student in some unknown Midwest town isn't killed by two imbeciles.
I encourage everyone to see The Laramie Project. It will be a moving and thought provoking show, but it has come at the expense of GLBT organizations and people, including Matthew Shepard.
Nicholas Barnard
Theatre Studies
Lambda Union Webmaster
PFlag Dayton Member
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