Sydney production of The Laramie Project, based on murder of 21-year-old Matthew Shepard, to be performed next week

In a Wyoming courtroom on November 4, 1999, Dennis Shepard addressed his son’s killer directly.

“I would like nothing better than to see you die, Mr McKinney,” he said.

Aaron McKinney was waiting to learn his sentence after a jury found him guilty of murdering gay university student Matthew Shepard.

In October 1998, McKinney and another man, Russel Henderson, abducted the 21-year-old and drove him to a field near the town of Laramie.

They tied him to a fence, beat him with a pistol butt, and left him to die.

The attack left Matthew so disfigured the cyclist who found him mistook him for a scarecrow.

As Mr Shepard read out his victim impact statement in court, he said it was time to show mercy.

“I’m going to grant you life, as hard as that is for me to do.”

On Tuesday, Mr Shepard will deliver those same words on a Sydney stage, playing himself in an Australian production of the play The Laramie Project.

“I don’t have to put on a disguise or anything. I can just go as me,” Mr Shepard told the ABC.

A play and then a movement

The Laramie Project was created in the aftermath of Matthew’s killing. A New York theatre company interviewed people in the town and edited the conversations into a script.

Since Matthew’s killing, his parents Judy and Mr Shepard, have fought for stronger protections for LGBT people.

In 2009, the Obama Administration passed The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr Hate Crimes Prevention Act 2009.

The legislation expanded US federal hate crime laws to include violence based on a victim’s sexual orientation, gender identity or disability.

“It certainly did enable more prosecutions,” Ms Shepard said.

Last week, US President Joe Biden presented Ms Shepard with a Presidential Medal of Freedom to recognise her fight against hate.

Veteran actor Tony Sheldon, who starred in the musical Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, has come out of retirement for the Sydney performance of The Laramie Project.

“You’re seeing real people in those situations, talking about their immediate response,” Sheldon said.

“Those people deeply cared about what happened and were shattered and shocked. It started a movement.”

‘It’s an act of journalism’

Writer Benjamin Law, another cast member, said the play captured how the people of Laramie tried to make sense of the unthinkable.

“As much as it’s a work of theatre, it’s an act of journalism,” Law said.

The play will also feature Lyndon Watts, who shot to fame in the Australian production of the musical Hamilton.

Watts said he grew up in a “hugely homophobic” country town in Victoria similar to Laramie.

“If you are not a straight white person, it’s pretty dangerous place to be,” he said.

“You can find these kinds of stories all across Australia.”

The cast also features Casey Donovan, as well as Play School presenters Nicholas Brown and Zindzi Okenyo.

Tuesday’s performance at City Recital Hall is a “staged reading” of the play, which means the actors will have scripts.

“It’s a kind of rough and ready presentation,” Okenyo said.

Mr Brown said the transcriptions of the interviews were hard to learn.

“You can read so much into pauses, what an ‘um’ or an ‘oh’ means,” he said.

“It captures a moment in time so perfectly in this beautiful theatrical way.”

Donovan said the play helped drive the movement for law reform in the US.

“It made change from a very sad and horrendous moment in time,” she said.

Parallels with Sydney’s own history

Sydney’s own horrific history of gay hate crimes was recently laid bare during an inquiry, which found homophobic police failed to properly investigate the suspicious deaths of gay men.

Sheldon said The Laramie Project performance would help to keep the issue on people’s minds.

“I think the sadness about the investigation into the hate crimes is that most of the recommendations that were made to the police force have not been implemented,” Sheldon.

A NSW police spokesperson said a task force was conducting a “thorough and considered” evaluation of each recommendation.

Matthew’s parents said their work was not yet done, with a “two-tiered system” still operating in the US.

“Twenty-five years later, you can still be fired [for being gay] in 30 of the 50 states. You still can’t adopt in a lot of places,” Mr Shepard said.

He added Wyoming was the only state without a hate-crime law.

“The state motto is the ‘equality state’. But they’ve left off two letters, because it is really the ‘inequality state’,” he said.

Ms Shepard said talking about Matthew was like “yanking off a band-aid”, but she will do whatever it takes to make the world safer for people like her son.

“I think [Matthew] would be happy that we took this on,” she said.