After 34 years of professional acting, directing and play writing, Nicola Cavendish returns to UBC, her alma mater, to direct The Laramie Project—a play she believes Vancouver needs. On a rainy Saturday, after a tech run and just days before opening night, she sits in the lobby of the Frederick Wood theatre, exhausted, eating a bowl of microwaved soup and explaining, between mouthfuls, her hope for the play.

“I want the audience to be compassionate,” she says. ” I want them to understand because this is a play about homosexuality. The prime rule of theatre is to shake people up from their complacency, to make people look at something dark that exists. This play exists on the streets of Vancouver. In Stanley Park we had Aaron Webster who was beaten to death just like Matthew Shepard. Three weeks ago in Toronto, a young gay man was beaten to death right in downtown Toronto. And Vancouver has its fair share of gay bashing, so we have to shake people up who want to look the other way.”

The Laramie Project does just that. On October 6, 1998, Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student, was lured into a car, robbed, beaten, tortured and tied to a fence on the outskirts of Laramie, Wyoming. After 18 hours, he was found in a coma and put on life support. He died six days later.

The event was a watershed moment for gay rights; media coverage was salacious, brutal and brisk, generalizing the residents as hicks and rednecks. The subtext was loud and clear: What do you expect in a place like this?

The Tectonic Theatre Project, headed by Moises Kaufman, set off to Laramie to do the exact opposite. From hundreds of interviews with Laramie residents over the span of a year and half, Kaufman pieced together the resulting play, The Laramie Project. It pieces together the ethos of the town, painting finely tuned portraits of the residents using their verbatim quotes.

We meet the slow-talking cowboy types we’ve come to expect. But one of them is so good-natured we like him instantly, and the other is gay and proclaims, “Don’t fuck with a Wyoming queer ‘cos they’ll kick you in the ass.” Expectations are upended. We meet a self-described “Islamic feminist” and an emergency worker, played beautifully by Barbara Kozicki. She contracts HIV while tending to Matthew Shepard because of shoddy gloves. A fun-loving, straight-talking waitress is handled with such precision by Claire Hesselgrave that the small-town, redneck stereotype all but shatters.

The play that emerges is warm, compassionate and honest. It’s a work of theatrical journalism that is as much about Matthew Shepherd and the residents of Laramie as it is about that giant of philosophical questions: What does it mean to be human?

Evil and our capacity for it is embodied in the wooden fence (made from pine sawbuck, the same wood as the original fence to which Shepard was tied) that sits prominently on the stage and is the mainstay of Ronald Fedoruk’s set design. Like the memory of Matthew Shepard, it never goes away, and characters must move around it, lifting a slab to step over it, putting it back up, using it as a makeshift bar.

As a shy theatre student Jedediah Schults, played spectacularly by Eric Freilich, explains, “Now, after Matthew, I would say that Laramie is a town defined by an accident, a crime. We’ve become Waco, we’ve become Jasper. We’re a noun, a definition, a sign. We may be able to get rid of that, but it’ll sure take a while.”

Nicola Cavendish’s direction moves the play along swiftly, hitting all the right notes and never getting mired in one character for too long. As the play ends, the word ‘hope’ projected onto a backdrop of a night sky filled with stars. Hope and love is the answer, according to Cavendish.

“It sounds simple because it’s a complicated world,” she says, “but when you push the papers off the desk and you open the window and you breathe in some air in what is a tense or tight, stressful time, I think the one thing that flies in the window and sits on your shoulder is love. The bluebird of love, the bluebird of contentment, of happiness, the bluebird of satisfaction. All you need is love, you know.”

The Laramie Project is playing from November 19-28 at 7:30pm  at Frederic Wood Theatre, UBC.