LARAMIE – Brown and gold University of Wyoming flags hung heavily and at half-staff throughout the campus Wednesday, weighed down by hours of relentless rain and 25 years of intermittent tears.

Thursday is the 25th anniversary of the day Matthew Shepard, a gay, 21-year-old University of Wyoming student, succumbed after having been tied to a fence on the outskirts of town and left so savagely beaten, the first passerby mistook him for a scarecrow. In a final act of cruelty, the two perpetrators removed Shepard’s black patent leather shoes – just to make sure that, if he did somehow manage to wriggle out from the cord they left cutting into his wrists and ankles – he wouldn’t get very far.

It’s also the 25th anniversary of a town ever-wrestling with the aftermath of the heinous crime that drew worldwide condemnation – and what, if any, complicity it shares in it.

To mark this sad yet restorative occasion, members of New York’s Tectonic Theater Project returned to Laramie to join with 20 local students, faculty and residents for a remarkable, community-wide shared reading of its play “The Laramie Project,” which has been seen by an estimated 20 million people on film and by another 10 million on stages throughout the world.

The reading, performed to a packed house at the Buchanan Center for the Performing Arts, is part of a full week of campus activities hosted by the student-run Shepard Symposium for Social Justice.

The abridged reading ended with a symphony of sniffles and a prolonged standing ovation, followed by a 40-minute dialogue. It was clear that, for as many times as this story has been told, it was being told anew for many – both in the audience and among the student performers who weren’t yet alive in 1998.

“The most surprising thing to me was the quality of mercy shown to Aaron McKinney by Matthew’s father,” said Allen Gonzales-Willert, who works for AmeriCorps in Laramie and portrayed then-university president Phil Dubois. It was Dennis Shepard who took the death penalty off the table for his son’s killer in a devastating courtroom address that is included in the play. “Dennis had his life in his hands,” Gonzalez-Willert said. “It’s remarkable just how merciful he was.”

But “The Laramie Project” is not about the murder of Matthew Shepard. Not really. It’s about how the town – its ranchers, its cops, its students, its bartenders, its religious leaders and its decimated LGBTQ community – were forever changed by that murder.

Part of the ongoing healing, Tectonic co-founder Jeffrey LaHoste said, is accepting the reality that Laramie is “that kind of town” that can breed this kind of hate. Same as Littleton. Or San Diego, where the Aurora shooter was raised. Or anywhere that has spawned a killer. Which is just about everywhere.

“We hear the same thing everywhere we go,” said LaHoste. “Laramie is like my town. Yokohama. Milan. Houston. This play is universal but it is also a snapshot of a very particular community taken at a moment of vulnerability and grief.”

A sunny day turns wet and gloomy

The sunny day began with a noontime public conversation featuring five Tectonic company members. Some, like actor Amanda Gronich and Stephen Belber, were deeply involved in the 2000 world-premiere staging of the play in Denver, produced in partnership with the Denver Center Theatre Company. Gronich remembers constantly having to run backstage at the Ricketson Theatre to double-check a scene list that was taped to the wall, because for those first few performances, the order changed nightly.

She called it both “a nerve-wracking and miserable experience” – and “wonderful and incredibly moving” at the same time. Eventually, the script congealed, and “The Laramie Project” became one of the most performed plays in the world.

Among those in attendance was Wyatt Chapman, a 16-year-old junior who really should have been in class back at Centaurus High School in Lafayette. Instead, he was in Laramie with his parents and sister because he considers Tectonic actor Grant James Varjas, who went to college with his dad, to be his uncle. And because his family had just attended a significant staging of the play running through Nov. 5 at the Arvada Center. Wyatt was wrecked by it.

“I’ll never forget that quote when they say the only skin on Matthew’s face that wasn’t covered in blood was the tracks of his tears,” Wyatt Chapman said. “I have plenty of friends that are gay, and it’s just crazy to think of how it could have been one of them.”

Later that night, after the sun yielded to an obstinate rain, the Chapmans and about 250 others gathered for the reading of the play. On this somber occasion, Gronich said, Laramie is where Tectonic members wanted to be – and needed to be.

“I won’t call this reading a completion, because I think this conversation will be ongoing for decades to come,” she said. “But, 25 years later, I think there is something incredibly powerful about bringing this conversation back into this community and exploring how their feelings are evolving around all of the issues that the play raises.”

A suspect beginning

When the Tectonic interlopers first arrived in 1999 to interview more than 200 Laramie residents as the basis for their script, they were met with a weary mistrust from a burned citizenry that just wanted it all to go away. Unyielding international media attention had already tried and convicted the town, right alongside the two perpetrators, in the court of opinion.

“We were very suspicious when you showed up,” Susanna L. Goodin, former associate professor in the philosophy department, said at the public forum. “It’s hard for the town to keep having to live this over and over. And we didn’t know what you people were going to do.”

But over nearly two years, Tectonic Artistic Director Moisés Kaufman and his team slowly gained the community’s trust. Today, company members freely mingle with the people of Laramie as if they are members of the same extended family. They came back to perform the play here in 2002. They came back again in 2008 to write an entire sequel called “Ten Years Later” that on Oct. 12, 2009, was simultaneously presented by more than 120 theater companies in all 50 states. And they have kept in contact with many of their interview subjects. So when they came back one more time for Wednesday’s anniversary reading, they were met with open arms.

“They earned our respect because they did all the hard work,” said Alyson Hagy, an English and creative-writing professor at the university. “They made the phone calls, they knocked on the doors, they went to church services, and they went to community events. They were respectful, they listened, and they created bonds.”

Still, she admitted, “I was amazed that they wanted to come back for a 25th anniversary reading. They didn’t have to do that. I mean, this play is done all around the world. But they wanted to be here to honor the 200 people who essentially gave Laramie to them so they could make this play.”

Even Goodin, that cynical philosophy professor, thanked them for coming back – “because events like these keep it alive,” she said, “and they make Laramie keep dealing with it.”

A gone but never forgotten image

Perhaps the most enduring image from the grisly murder is the fence where Shepard was tied up and left to die just a few miles from the university in what is now a rural residential neighborhood lined with ubiquitous “No Trespassing” yard signs – and a few unkind assessments of Liz Cheney and President Biden.

People still try to find that fence, but it’s long gone. It was taken down by its property owner just a few months after the crime to discourage the pilgrims who were coming from around the world to pay their respects to Shepard. Gone, almost as if to try to erase the incident completely. But on the other end of town, a tall wooden fence runs along the Laramie River Greenbelt Trail – and it’s been artfully spray-painted with the cursive words “God is non-binary.”

Time passes. So much has changed. And so much has not.

Reported hate crimes in the U.S. have steadily climbed every year since 2016. Despite Aaron McKinney’s 2009 confession to Tectonic Theater’s Greg Pierotti that he did have hatred in his heart for homosexuals that night, and that “Matthew Shepard needed killing,” some still falsely dismiss the incident as a simple robbery or a drug deal gone bad. Wyoming remains one of just three states that still does not have a single hate-crime law on the books.

Then again: McKinney’s confession to Pierotti has been credited with helping the 2009 passage of the federal Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all state bans on same-sex marriage. Many students in the Wyoming theater department today do not recognize the Laramie they see in the play.

When one student from Aurora first began to consider Wyoming as a college option, his friends pointed to the lesson of Matthew Shepard. “I was told about the story many times – how horrible it was, and how there was nothing but hate in Laramie,” the student said. “I think the thing that surprised me the most when I got here was the rally of support that came for the queer community. And as I read through this play, I realized that even though there is hate, that hate was the loudest minority. The support that came after that was leagues bigger than I could have ever imagined.”

People came to Wednesday’s reading for all kinds of reasons. But for LaHoste, the goal was not to bring neatly wrapped closure to the people of Laramie. It was, as it was in the beginning, to give the people of Laramie a voice.

“My hope was that people felt seen and felt heard tonight, and that they were able to express something that needed to be expressed,” he said. But he left wanting one more thing.

“Everyone should know the Matthew Shepherd story,” he said. “This is part of our civil rights story. People should know it the same way they know about the murder of Emmitt Till.”

There’s something horrific whenever a town becomes a flashpoint for a cultural debate that rages across the country, Gronich said. “My hope is that the Laramie community feels pride in the extent to which they fully engaged in the really core, critical, hard questions that had to be asked. And those questions continue.

“Really, the people who are struggling with those questions today are the ones who take up the mantle and carry our story on their backs.”