사회적 드라마의 변증법적 파트너: The Laram ie Project와 The Laram ie Project: Ten Years Later

초록

The Laramie Project has been one of the most performed plays in America. The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later is the former’s sequel dealing with the same tragic incident but a different social issue raised in the identical community, Laramie, Wyoming. Matthew Shepard, a gay university student, was beaten to death by two town residents. The cause of his beating and death closely related to hatred against homosexuality generated enormous national attentions to this incident and its legal process. After hearing this tragedy, Tectonic Theatre Project led by Moisés Kaufman visited Laramie and conducted over 200 interviews with Laramie residents regarding their responses. Therefore, The Laramie Project consists of interviewees’ words, interviewers’ journal notes, mass media’s reports as well as court proceedings. Meanwhile, The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later started to be written during Matthew Shepard’s 10th memorial year, 2008. Kaufman has been wondering if Shepard’s death reverberated any kinds of changes in town. His finding was surprisingly enough to write another volume of a play, which deals with birth and circulation of a different narrative about Matthew Shepard’s death. For the purpose of analyzing these two powerful plays, this study utilizes Victor Turner’s concept of social drama. Turner divides a social drama into 4 stages, such as breach, crisis, redressive action, reintegration or schism. This paper considers the death of Matthew Shepard as a social drama and explores various social phenomena that occurred after his death and described in these two plays through Turner’s concept. In the end, the study demonstrates how closely a social drama correlates with an aesthetic drama by becoming a dialectic partner of each other.

키워드