Oleanna, David Mamet’s tense two-hander about student-professor gender politics and power dynamics, was arriving in theaters only three years after Anita Hill testified against Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court. And it was just two years after Oleanna’s successful stage-play debut Off Broadway. But in those heady early-Clinton years, as the post-p.c. era was dawning, the Reagan- and Bush-era campus culture wars seemed far away, at least to those then on campus. Another 15 years later, with the Broadway revival of Oleanna opening at the Golden Theatre Sunday night, its sexual-harassment standoff feels as historic an artifact as Justice Thomas’ can of Coke.

In Oleanna’s first scene, Carol, a student who doesn’t understand what’s been going on in class, comes to her professor’s office to ask for assistance; John, the professor—distracted, as-yet untenured and attempting to be compassionate—offers to help. In its second scene, Carol has filed a report with the tenure committee, accusing John of sexual harassment, and John is attempting to find out why. In its explosive final scene, he has been denied tenure, and Carol has accused him of rape.

That first scene is meant to be ambiguous—whose interpretation of the events is true, or at least more true?—but at the Golden it doesn’t play that way. This is partially because its culture-war language is today so unconvincing. (“I saw you, Professor. For two semesters sit there, stand there and exploit our, as you thought, ‘paternal prerogative,’ and what is that but rape,” Carol says at one point, sounding ridiculous to our 2009 ears but not, I think, meant to read as self-parody.)

But it is also because Julia Stiles, the lovely film actress, is so miscast as the student. She gives a good if inevitably mannered performance in her Broadway debut. (The always-mannered Rebecca Pidgeon, Mr. Mamet’s wife, originated the role.)

“You have no idea what it cost me to come to this school” is simply unbelievable coming from a poised, confident Wasp. She never seems harassed, only commanding. Bill Pullman, who plays John, is on the other hand shamblingly professorial from the first scene. Which means that the audience is automatically wondering only to what extent, and to what end, Carol has manipulated her professor.

During the two scene breaks, director Dough Hughes has automated Venetian blinds along the upstage wall of John’s office raise and lower themselves, with the hum of their motor amplified through the theater. That amplified hum grows obnoxiously louder, especially leading into the final scene, presumably to convey building frustration and anger. What’s left—and there is something—is an interesting portrait of interpersonal power dynamics, rendered in dexterously handled vintage Mamet dialogue.

OLEANNA IS A mere adolescent alongside The Royal Family, George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s satire of the Barrymore family, which debuted on Broadway in 1927 and returned last week to the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in Manhattan Theatre Club’s latest revival of an aged script that was in no particular need of reviving.

Granted, if you must revive The Royal Family, this is the way to do it. The cast is near uniformly excellent: Jan Maxwell plays Julie Cavendish, the reigning star of a legendary family of stage actors, and Rosemary Harris, who was Julie in the 1975 revival, plays her mother, Fanny, the aging Cavendish matriarch. They share a sprawling East Side duplex with Julie’s daughter, a promising ingénue played by Kelli Barrett; an overburdened butler and housekeeper; and, finally, when he returns from Hollywood with press and perhaps police giving chase, Julie’s brother, the womanizing bon vivant Tony Cavendish.

Jon Lee Beaty’s set is decadent and commanding, a huge Edwardian living room filled with overstuffed furniture, a grand piano, tchotckes on tables, stagebills on walls, and plenty of doors and hallways to be run in and out of. And the period costumes by Catherine Zuber are—pun intended, but unavoidable—exuberantly handsome.

The basic question of the night is whether these to-the-stage-born actors can be happy as normal people, folks who, for a change, value their romances and real-world commitments over their devotion to their craft. And in the second act, when Ms. Harris and Ms. Maxwell sing the praises of their profession with ardor and enthusiasm, when director Doug Hughes moves his many actors on and off the stage with farcelike speed and precision, bringing them together at center stage in perfect tableaux, everything comes together, and the audience is delighted.

But, alas, you’ve got to sit through a lot to get to those moments of delight. The boring first act is heavily expository—though one suspects it would be funnier if today’s audiences had a finer appreciation for Barrymore jokes—and the third is dull and maudlin. And, of course, we all know the answer to that main question from the moment the curtain first rises:

There’s no business like show business; there’s no people like show people; and of course all the Cavendishes will remain onstage.

I just saved you—well, Irving Berlin and I just saved you—three hours.

WHILE NEW YORK’S major institutional theater companies are keen to gaze wistfully at the past—whether that early-20th-century acting dynasty at MTC; Elvismania and the putting on of a happy face, starting tomorrow night at Roundabout; or the eternal question of whether one can in fact spend an enchanted evening with a man who has two half-Polynesian children, for a solid year and a half at Lincoln Center Theater—the Second Stage Theatre has the odd habit of confronting with the present.

Let Me Down Easy, Anna Deavere Smith’s new one-woman show, which opened there last week, takes on current, pressing, real-world issues—life, death and the health care system—and it’s spectacular.

Ms. Smith is best known for her technique, performing monologues of real peoples’ words, mimicking each speaker, often with the aid of small props—glasses, a hat. The result is a series of impressive, uncannily realized performances. But it’s also something of a parlor trick, Rich Little in a legitimate theater.

Ms. Smith’s true genius lies in the editing. She is a wonderful actress, but she is an even better journalist. Let Me Down Easy uses the words of 20 different people, from whom Ms. Smith has elicited fascinating, moving, sad, funny and gut-wrenching stories. She knows how to ask questions, and she knows how to assemble the answers, well-crafted testimonials shaped into a well-crafted play.

Lance Armstrong talks about the body as a machine, one that must be kept in proper operating condition. Brent Williams, a rodeo rider, has a Westerner’s skepticism of big plans and big government but speaks admiringly of the care he received at a military hospital, where doctors are all government employees and work together, for a salary. Hazel Merritt, a poor woman in New Haven, Conn., tells of her daughter’s disastrous dialysis—the machine malfunctioned, blood spewed on Merritt, her daughter, and the room, but no medical staff was nearby to hear their cries for help. Finally, nurses shut down the machine, told Merritt to bring her daughter back another day and sent them home in a taxi, Merritt’s blood-soaked daughter wrapped in a sheet.

And Kirsta Kurtz-Burke, a doctor at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, talks of the dawning realization during Katrina that her poor patients were being ignored and forgotten.

“You just see the desperation of being poor in this country, and in some ways the distrust, I mean the deep down—this is not the first time this has happened to people,” she says. “I’m privileged, and this is the first time I’ve ever been totally abandoned by my government. But this wasn’t the first time for my patients or the nurses.”

The Kurtz-Burke monologue is devastating, but each one is profound and meaningful. (A few of the celebrities could have been excised; Eve Ensler and Lauren Hutton, for example, add little.) Together, they create a deeply thought-provoking look at life and death and a powerful and necessary reminder that the health care debate isn’t just about reimbursement rates and CBO scoring and Olympia Snowe but about real people, who sometimes get sick and who eventually die.

It’s the best theatrical experience I’ve had this season.

MEANWHILE, DOWN AT the Public Theater, artistic director Oskar Eustis is busy trying to convince the world that his current (and excellent) cash cow, the Broadway transfer of 1968’s “American Tribal Love-Rock Musical,” Hair, is actually about modern gay-rights protesters. (It’s not.) But on Monday night, as the Hair cast returned from Washington and a gig at the National Equality March, Lemon Andersen’s entirely up-to-date one-man memoir, County of Kings—a production not of the Public but of the Culture Project, plus high-profile backers including Spike Lee—opened in the Public’s Newman Theater.

County of Kings begins with Mr. Andersen onstage at the Tony Awards; Russell Simmons’s Def Poetry Jam, in which he performed, has won for special theatrical event. (“When they say this is the Great White Way,” he says, “man they sure ain’t playing.”) It flashes back from there: He grew up in a Brooklyn housing project with a loving but heroin-addicted mother and a loving but heroin-addicted and car-stealing stepdad. Mom died of AIDS; Mr. Andersen dealt drugs and did two stints in prison. Behind bars a second time, he discovered books and words. And, when released, he stumbled upon an open-mike night at the El Puente community center in Williamsburg. Words—poetry—saved his life.

The play suffers from some of the standard pitfalls of biographical solo shows. (There’s a bit too much of “And then I remember my neighbor, Mrs. Judy,” followed by a stylized portrayal of crabby Mrs. Judy.) But that’s a small matter. The thrill Mr. Andersen gets from language, from massaging it, finessing it, delivering it, is palpable and delightful. His script is impressive, his delivery better. And Elise Thoron’s direction (she’s also listed as a “developer” of the show), combined with Jane Cox and Lily Fossner’s lighting and Robert Kaplowitz’s sound design, give impressive texture and dynamism to what could otherwise be one guy standing onstage talking.

Most important, County of Kings is unmistakably a piece for today. And it has brought an audience of actual New Yorkers—my fellow theatergoers were much younger, and far more diverse, than usual in New York, especially at a Sunday matinee—to the theater. Their exuberance at the show’s end was cathartic—and infectious.

editorial@observer.com

–Frank DiGiacomo

Holy Meta-Morty-phosis!

Television producer Robert Morton picked Independence Day to change the state of his union. Mr. Morton, the longtime bachelor, executive producer of You Don't Know Jack and former producer of The Late Show with David Letterman, quietly tied the knot with his fiancée, the Santa Monica, Calif., restaurateur Jenny Rush, on July 4 at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons in East Hampton.

The couple, who met three years ago at the Coffee Bean in Malibu, where they currently live, was married by Rabbi David Gelfand in the presence of the couple's parents. Private investor Stuart Kreisler and his wife, Tracy Bonbreast, served as the couple's official witnesses. Mr. Morton told The Transom that he and Ms. Rush had come to the Hamptons, where he keeps a home, expecting to tie the knot, but without a firm date in mind. It was Rabbi Gelfand who suggested the date. "He said, 'What about July fourth? That's a good anniversary to have,'" Mr. Morton recounted.

The following Sunday, Mr. Kreisler and Late Night with Conan O'Brien producer Jeff Ross celebrated the next phase of their buddy's familial evolution: Mr. Morton and Ms. Rush are infanticipating (as Walter Winchell used to put it) a daughter in September, and so the two men threw Mr. Morton a "boys-only" baby shower at Mr. Kreisler's Bridgehampton restaurant, 95 School Street. Guests included Greater Talent Network president Don Epstein, restaurateur Steve Hanson, attorney Gerald Lefcourt, Gil Morton, hotelier Jon Tisch and his producer brother Steve Tisch, attorney Andrew Fox, Lulu Guinness handbag company chief Michael Schultz, screenwriter Kevin Wade, former Leslie Fay chief Alan Golub and design executive Alan Kerner. Martha Stewart enjoyed the distinction of being the only woman invited to the party, but she never showed.

Ms. Rush, who owns the Blue Plate restaurant in Santa Monica, arrived in time to watch her husband open the gifts. One of the first ones out of the box was a man-sized pink tutu, from Mr. Epstein, which the black-clad Mr. Morton donned for the remainder of the party. Mr. Golub gave the gift of several DVD's that, he said, needed to be watched in a specific order. The first one was Snatch ; the last, Panic . Mr. Lefcourt bestowed earplugs.

Diapers were also prevalent. Jon Tisch brought a case of Huggies. And as part of his gift package, Mr. Hanson–who recently became a father–included what appeared to be a used diaper. After Mr. Morton showed it to the crowd, Mr. Hanson instructed him in the ways of Pamper analysis. "First you smell it," Mr. Hanson said, burying his nose in the presumably fragrant item. Then, applying his finger to the diaper's sweet spot, he added, "If you're not sure, you taste it." In this particular case, Mr. Hanson tasted some pretty convincing-looking peanut butter.

Mr. Kreisler also gave Mr. Morton diapers. But they were the adult kind, Depends. "What do you get a 48-year-old father-to-be?" Mr. Kreisler said.

–F.D .

Gallo's Song

Polly Jean Harvey's pummeling, acid-etched songs have jump-started the hearts of many an emotionally damaged man. But who knew that actor, musician and Buffalo 66 director Vincent Gallo would be among them?

After having been spotted hanging out together at the Park restaurant and at one of U2's Madison Square Garden shows (where Ms. Harvey was the opening act), Mr. Gallo told The Transom that he and Ms. Harvey plan to consummate their professional relationship by recording a duet for an album featuring the work of the late Texas singer-songwriter Lee Hazlewood, a cult hero of the Sonic Youth crowd best known for penning "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" for Nancy Sinatra.

But even Mr. Gallo–whose politics recall Republican cloth coats and Spiro Agnew–seemed surprised by Ms. Harvey's beguiling ways. "I always just thought her appeal was to a feminist sensibility," he said. "I mean, I thought she was cute. But I'd just sort of detach from her, because I'm not interested in the artistic work of any woman." Mr. Gallo added, "I don't think there was a woman in history who had any kind of impact in any way."

But then he saw Ms. Harvey perform. "I caught the last two songs. I was blown away. But I blocked it out and just forgot about her," he said. Two years later, he saw her again. "I saw she was … special," he said. "But I was so focused on what I was doing, I didn't take the time to listen."

Three months ago, however, Mr. Gallo broke up with his longtime girlfriend ("She lied about everything "), which left him feeling lonely. He tried to play the field but, he said, every time he got someone into bed, he'd get repulsed–"It's almost like Polanski's film with Catherine Deneuve, Repulsion ," he said. "Or a horror movie."

Enter Ms. Harvey–actually, her albums. Mr. Gallo found himself listening to Ms. Harvey's oeuvre for weeks on end. When he got to meet the artist through some friends, she was nice to him. Now they go to concerts together, they have dinner and they talk about Mr. Gallo's tortured inner life, which probably means that Ms. Harvey spends a lot of time listening.

Mr. Gallo said that the Hazlewood song they're singing together–"Come on Home to Me"–pretty much sums up his last breakup. "It's about pretending you don't have feelings for somebody anymore," he said. "It's one of the greatest songs of all time."

After a little prurient prodding about the extent of his relationship with Ms. Harvey, Mr. Gallo–who's readying his own album for release in the fall–said he's too broken up about being broken up to want to get Ms. Harvey into the sack. "I don't think I'd like to lift up her skirt–which is weird, because I'm sort of compulsive sexually. I don't even know if she likes me," he said with a teenage quaver. "I guess I'm sort of in love with her as a person. She smells nice. Real girly. Real, real nice. Like a milky flower. A girly, milky flower."

–Ian Blecher

Rue Sticks It Out

"Everyone always asks me, am I really like Blanche Devereaux?" actress Rue McClanahan, best known for her slutty Golden Girls character, was telling the mob at Chelsea's Blu bar the other night. "I always say, 'Puh- leeeze ! Just look at the facts! Blanche Devereaux was a mad, crazy, glamorous, oversexed Southern belle from Atlanta, and ... well, I'm not from Atlanta!'"

Ms. McClanahan, though she was busy rehearsing for her upcoming Broadway appearance in The Women , and though she was being sued by a former friend for allegedly abandoning her geriatric German shepherd, Ginger, somehow found time to host a few episodes of "Faggot Feud,"apseudo-game show that plays at the gay bar Wednesdays at midnight.

Dressed like a Boca retirement-home dominatrix in a sheer zebra-print top, black gloves and an ostrich feather sprouting from her head, Ms. McClanahan flitted about the stage assisted by Dick Dawson, a leather-underpants-and-dog-collar-clad beefcake.

"We got all these answers from a hundred faggots surveyed," Ms. McClanahan assured the Master and Slave families from her podium, which was decorated with a large, glittery silver phallus. "So this is all legitimate–you know what I mean?

"Name something," Ms. McClanahan continued, "that, although painful, provides much pleasure."

One of the Masters hit his button and a blue police light started flashing.

"Anal sex!" he shouted.

"I think everybody heard that," Ms. McClanahan said as a buzzer blared, indicating a wrong answer.

"Anal sex! I'm surprised!" she murmured.

Suddenly the judge up in the D.J. booth changed his mind, and the correct-answer bell dinged as the words "getting fucked" appeared on a screen.

"Aha!" said Ms. McClanahan. "Where's the next contestant?"

"Biting!" guessed another Master.

"I bet it's up there!" Ms. McClanahan sang. The buzzer buzzed again.

"I can't believe that biting isn't on there! Well, let's see what it is , for God's sake!" she declared.

The correct answers were revealed.

"Nipple clamps! Oh, heavens–I hadn't thought of that! These are hard questions!" Ms. McClanahan said.

"Other than lick," she went on, "what is something else you can do with your tongue? Gee …. "

"Flick!" a Slave chirped.

"What the hell's a flick ?" the judge demanded.

"I'll show you later!" Ms. McClanahan said, looking over her shoulder toward the voice.

The buzzer buzzed.

"My guess would be 'rim,'" a Slave said.

"Rim … rim …. " Ms. McClanahan mused, pursing her lips. The bell dinged.

"What about that!" screamed Ms. McClanahan. Then, after giving the Masters a shot, she looked at the audience. "O.K., now I'm going to tell you what I would say. I would say 'stick it out.'"

"Oh, Rue," the judge lamented as the buzzer sounded again. "Any other ideas?"

"No, that was it," Ms. McClanahan said.

–Beth Broome

One-Woman Showbiz

There's no question that performance artist, actor, writer, director, N.Y.U. professor and 1996 recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" award Anna Deavere Smith is a hard-working woman. But now she's added even more diversity to her portfolio.

First came news of her involvement in The Seagull, a translation of Anton Chekhov's 1895 play by Tom Stoppard that will be performed in late July and August in Central Park as part of the Public Theater's free "Shakespeare in the Park" series. Though the cast includes Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Natalie Portman, Marcia Gay Harden, John Goodman, Christopher Walken and Philip Seymour Hoffman, the play's director, Mike Nichols, apparently felt that his talent base wasn't strong enough. So he asked Ms. Smith to serve as the production's dramaturge. Ms. Smith will be responsible for providing "reflection on the text," according to John Dias, a Public Theater producer and dramaturge for their Shakespeare productions.

"In Seagull , a question came up about a bingo game [the characters] play. And the director and actors needed to know how the game was played, who would have played it, did it have particular meaning, did it say anything about class?" Mr. Dias explained that Ms. Smith was researching the game and reporting back to the cast on its historical context, cultural significance, and rules and regulations.

After she's brushed up on her late 19th-century Russian bingo, Ms. Smith will take on an entirely different task. Next spring, she will tackle teaching at New York University's School of Law. At press time, Ms. Smith's assistant was unable to track down her busy boss for comment, but Mary Schmidt Campbell, Dean of N.Y.U.'s Tisch School of the Arts, explained that in addition to her position in Tisch's performance-studies department, Ms. Smith has an affiliate appointment at the law school, where she will participate in a "lawyers' ring colloquium" designed for people who are "not necessarily lawyers" to discuss specific themes in broad cultural contexts.

When asked if Ms. Smith's appointment might have something to do with her recurring role as District Attorney Kate Brunner on ABC's The Practice , Dean Campbell said, "Oh, God, no!" But given Ms. Smith's appearances as National Security Advisor Nancy McNally on NBC's The West Wing , all we can say is: Watch your back, Condoleezza Rice.

– Rebecca Traister

Watch Your Back, Anna Deavere Smith

For The Sopranos ' Robert Iler, the summer hiatus has been a study in method acting, what with the July 4 arrest of the 16-year-old, who plays Mafioso Tony Soprano's son on the HBO series, on charges of robbery and drug possession. But it's Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who plays his sister Meadow, who has really lived up to her role as the "perfect older sister" by spending her break diligently sticking her fingers into other career-opportunity pies.

First, the 20-year-old actress belted her way through the title role in the touring musical Cinderella . Then she began recording her first album, a solo affair that will be released this fall. "They are all original songs, and I wrote four of them," Ms. Sigler said via e-mail. In June, she began peddling a "teen-survival" book–"part memoir, part inspirational"–to New York publishers. "Of course, it will mainly focus on my eating disorder, but it will have a lot of light subjects, too," said Ms. Sigler.

But perhaps the most visible project is her rendition of the 1980 Diana Ross hit "I'm Coming Out," which appears in the ubiquitous commercials for Levi's Superlow jeans. But instead of featuring the cherubic multitasker, the song is lip-synched by a bunch of belly-buttons. "My friends that I didn't get a chance to tell about it call me all the time telling me that the voice on the commercial sounds just like me … =)," wrote the enthusiastic Ms. Sigler.

Asked what else Ms. Sigler has her sights on, she replied, "I just want to do it all! I am so lucky and fortunate to be able to do film, Broadway, recording and writing and I never want to stop. This is in my heart and it will always be." Well, it beats petty larceny.

– R.T.

It's a tribute to the generous gifts of the director Moises Kaufman and his committed ensemble of eight actors that the five desks that greet us with the gravity of obelisks at the start of The Laramie Project didn't send me scurrying from the Union Square Theatre. To be lectured five times over, and threateningly even more-for some of the desks had two chairs behind them!-only conjured up multiple images of spawning Spaldings telling us the endless stories of self-satisfied bourgeois griots. But we needn't worry on that score. Mr. Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Project are the admired creators of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde , and they have important stories to tell us as witnesses to history and to "the magnitude of hate."

The Laramie Project ambitiously reconstructs the events surrounding the 1998 murder of the 21-year-old openly gay student Matthew Shepard and the trials of his two killers. His vile death divided and traumatized the citizens of Laramie, Wyo., and became a famous cause célèbre. The young boy who discovered the battered, scarcely alive Shepard tied bleeding to a fence in a field thought he'd come across a scarecrow. Mr. Kaufman also wrote this immensely moving piece with members of his troupe. They traveled to Laramie to conduct some 200 interviews in over six visits, like investigative journalists. Each ensemble actor plays several roles (and those desks soon disappear). They have created a docudrama, nevertheless. As one of the college students says to the actor studying her: "You're going to be, like, onstage acting us? That's so weird!"

Weird to the sheltered Laramie folk, maybe, but the docudramas of Anna Deveare Smith alone have made the form well-known. Fires in the Mirror , her theater piece about the Crown Heights riots in 1991, and Twilight: Los Angeles , about the Rodney King beating, had a political and social urgency that's compellingly similar to that of The Laramie Project . In the shocking absence of anything approaching controversial television documentaries in the U.S., the theater has an effective role to play. But the experience of Ms. Smith's recent piece on the American presidency-the outcome of 425 interviews over five years-was like plowing through a blurred, messily edited living history of familiar material with the usual cast of suspects, including George Stephanopoulos, Gary Hart and those White House loveboats, Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche. The problem with Ms. Smith's Studs Terkel approach is that she ended up interviewing everyone, like an Elvis sleuth gleaning a morsel from one of his 92 chefs. ("He sure loved his fries and grits.")

The Laramie Project skirts earnestness, too, and its harrowing theme may be familiar to those who have previously read one or two of the many articles on the case. It is more of a ritual ceremony that we are sharing. And do we know all we should know in this vigil? What do most of us-you and I-truly know of hate crimes and the quality of mercy?

Earlier in the season, I resisted seeing a one-man show about gays in the military, feeling in smug ignorance that I knew the story. But Another American: Asking and Telling , written and performed by Marc Wolf, and directed by Joe Mantello, was beautiful. Mr. Wolf had spent years interviewing gays and bigots in the military, and the more gently restrained he was in his stories and impersonations, the more he had us all in tears of utter frustration and outrage. A grieving mother's testimony was about the son she loved who was beaten to death by a fellow soldier for being gay. The son was unrecognizable, except for a tattoo on his arm.

What do we really know of a thousand such deaths, and the deaths by stealth through a thousand more humiliations? Another American was performed at the small theater within St. Clement's Episcopal Church on the fringes of Broadway. Don't ask, don't tell? But a sign in the church foyer reads: "There Will Be No Outcasts."

So The Laramie Project is within the oral tradition that elicits the response, "I hear you!" Or as one of the more tolerant Laramie natives puts it: "As I always say, 'Do not fuck with a Wyoming queer.'" Ah, those "natives." Bit of vivid local color there, among the hicks and plain folk in Our Town cowboy country. Mr. Kaufman has made a tactical error, I think, in presenting the Laramie locals mostly in the guise of Thornton Wilder innocents and "characters." No doubt this is how they were pleased to present Laramie to him-"People are happy here." "A good place to live. Good people. Lots of space." "I love it here"-but was "our town" ever Our Town in the first place? This sentimental myth about community, caring and tolerance in middle America galls. It couldn't happen here? You bet it could. Laramie is just the sort of place the Shepard murder could happen. It did.

Perhaps it's a minor quibble that Mr. Kaufman and his ensemble have adopted a somewhat passé journalistic technique of making themselves part of the story. They are actors playing the dual role of reporters. They are fair and honest reporters, too. But when an actor who's playing Moises Kaufman explains how they all moved out of their Best Western hotel in hopes of "a better Western," is it relevant to the story? Another member of the troupe, playing himself in a scene, tells us how he wept when visiting the site of the killing. But doesn't this story-and the compassionate telling of it here-speak better for itself?

"I've never done anything like this in my life," one of the actresses tells us naïvely at the beginning. "How do you do it? What do you ask people?"

Well, you go to Laramie and you ask questions. And that they surely did . The Laramie Project compels us to remember the sweet life and homophobic murder of Matthew Shepard with love and fear and some sense of grace and tolerance, from angels in America.

When Shepard mercifully dies in a hospital, there's a short scene that takes place in the rain. Rain falls onstage, and at first, it surprised me like a director's trick. But Mr. Kaufman is better than that, and the effect I thought I'd seen before was startling and fresh, a symbolic washing away of bad blood, a cleansing, and a new beginning.