Tectonic Theater Project
On 6 October 1998 Matthew Shepard was beaten and left to die tied to a fence in the outskirts of Laramie, Wyoming. He died 6 days later. His torture and murder became a watershed historical moment in America that highlighted many of the fault lines in our culture.
A month after the murder the members of Tectonic Theater Project traveled to Laramie and conducted interviews with the people of the town. From these interviews they wrote the play "The Laramie Project". The piece has been seen by more than 30 million people around the country.
Matthew Shepard
On October 26, 2018, Shepard‘s ashes were interred at the crypt of Washington National Cathedral nearly 20 years after his death. The ceremony was presided over the first openly gay Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson, and the Bishop of Washington Reverend Marianne Edgar Budde, with music from the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington DC, GenOUT, and Conspirare. His was the first interment of the ashes of a national figure at the cathedral since Helen Keller's fifty years earlier.