Some thoughts

I was doing some brief background research on some of the characters I play while trying to find some music that I thought might suit the show. After a few hours, I'm not really sure how much time had actually passed, but I was in a down kind of mood, sad but more than that. I got a skype call from my friends while I was googling peoples' names and I was caught off guard when they were laughing. Not that I was completely in a dark cave of doom and gloom but I'd stumble upon something on the internet pertaining to a character I was looking for, then that would lead to something else and so on, and I ended up finding some really interesting and helpful things. But I couldn't search anything without finding the headlines that read something like, Night of Terror, things about murder, obviously, etc. But anyway, after I was done researching for the night I went to wash my face and thought about what my drama cub director told us to do after we were put into a sad mood when working on a drama: to step back, get out of that world, and remember reality. But then it dawned on me: this play, The Laramie Project, is 100% reality. This IS the world and this did happen in real life. This isn't something you can rehearse and then remove yourself from after a few hours just because it's a play. And I don't want people to become depressed or extremely upset after seeing this show or even while working on it, because I know that can be scarring, and that's not what we're trying to do. At one point in the show Romaine Patterson states that her and her angels are spreading a message of love and compassion. This is what this story is about. That, and making people aware that this is real life and that it actually happened, to real people in a real place called Laramie. I just thought it was something interesting to think about, and that I've never come to that realization before during other productions. Just something else that makes this piece so extraordinary.

-Kaitlin, actor