October marked the 25th anniversary of a crime that hit close to home in Colorado and shook the world at large. Attention to that anniversary was paid throughout the month in Arvada, in Laramie, around the globe and in this newspaper.

And I can’t recall any recent story topic that has drawn as much vitriolic response.

Why, I was repeatedly asked, are we still talking about the death of Matthew Shepard all these years later? It’s history.

Correction: It’s living history. While important advances have been made for equal treatment of gay and nonbinary people, reported hate crimes have been on the rise every year since 2016. Wyoming remains one of three states that still does not have a single hate-crimes law on the books. According to the National Library of Medicine, more than 40% of transgender people have attempted suicide, with the highest rates among transgender youth.

There is more work to be done.

Oct. 12, 1998, was the day Shepard finally 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.  

The Arvada Center marked the 25th anniversary of Shepard’s murder by fully staging “The Laramie Project,” co-directed by Kate Gleason and Rodney Lizcano.

“I wish it had been a history play – but it’s not,” Gleason said. “It is an absolutely present play that speaks to what is happening today more than ever.”

“The Laramie Project” was created by New York’s Tectonic Theater Project, which came to Laramie in 1999 and conducted more than 200 interviews with residents during the year following Shepard’s death. The play, which premiered at the Denver Center in 2000, has since been seen by an estimated 10 million on stages throughout the world. It has also drawn protests – generally from people who have never seen it.

“The Laramie Project” is not about the Shepard murder. Not really. It’s about how the town – its ranchers, cops, students, bartenders, religious leaders and LGBTQ community – were forever changed by that murder. Thanks in part to the killer’s admission 10 years later that he did “have hatred in his heart for homosexuals” that night, and that “Matthew Shepard needed killing,” the federal Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act was signed into law in 2009.

To mark the 25th anniversary of the murder, six Tectonic members went to the University of Wyoming to join with 20 students, faculty and residents for a remarkable, community-wide shared reading of the play at a packed Buchanan Center for the Performing Arts. It was part of a full week of campus activities hosted by the student-run Shepard Symposium on Social Justice.

“This is where we wanted to be – and needed to be,” said Tectonic’s Amanda Gronich, who performed in the original play at the Denver Center. “I won’t call this reading a completion, because I think this conversation will be ongoing for decades to come.”

Among those in attendance was Wyatt Chapman, a 16-year-old junior at Centaurus High School in Lafayette. He had seen the play with his family at the Arvada Center and was wrecked by it. And he then immediately wanted to come to Laramie for the Tectonic reading.

“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,” 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.”

Gleason believes the greater good in bringing the play back and presenting it anew for the Arvada Center’s audience base – and beyond – was to simply get them talking about it.

“This play opened up conversations in this community that maybe would not have happened otherwise,” Gleason said. “Especially because, of late, we are seeing the same kind of hate, the same kind of brutality and the same kind of lies about Matthew being spread. We wanted to have this conversation again because it hasn’t gone away.”

And what is motivating the resurgence of hate, I asked Gleason?

“It’s absolute fear,” she said. “And fear leads to hate.”

The “Month of Matthew” ended with a powerful appearance at the Arvada Center by Matthew and Dennis Shepard, who have devoted their lives since their son’s killing to transforming their grief into positive change through the Matthew Shepard Foundation despite persistent conspiracy theories that try to obfuscate the murder as a drug deal gone bad – or worse.

Judy Shepard’s message in Arvada was simple.

“If we could just take a step toward being kind and understanding, and try to be respectful of one another, we could just make so much progress in this world,” she said. “Let’s just try it.”

Note: The True West Awards, now in their 23rd year, began as the Denver Post Ovation Awards in 2001. Denver Gazette Senior Arts Journalist John Moore celebrates the Colorado theater community by revisiting 30 good stories from the past year without categories or nominations.