What happens to a town like Laramie when something unexpected, unconscionable and unforgivable rips it apart? What happens to its people when they are thrust into the unrelenting glare of a national media spotlight? And what happens to a community when trust among its own people has been shattered?

For a group of young actors and writers from a New York City theater company, these are the questions that have led them to this unassuming town, where they seek out Laramie residents - shopkeepers, teachers, students, bartenders, social workers - whose lives were forever changed on October 6, 1998. That was the night when a gay college student named Matthew Shepard was brutally beaten, tied up and left for dead on a fence off a rural road... and when Laramie, Wyoming became the Hate Crime Capital of America. Five members of the theater company - Moises, Greg, Leigh, Steve and Amanda - have arrived here to research a play they are writing about how the Shepard assault has changed this town. The details of the case are clear-cut and well-known. On October 6, Matthew Shepard met two men at the Fireside Bar in Laramie. Eighteen hours later, a cyclist found Shepard unconscious, severely beaten and tied to a fence. He never regained consciousness, and died five days later. Two Laramie residents, aged 20 and 21, were apprehended for the crime, which became front-page news around the country. But as Moises explains as the company assembles at a local diner, "This is not about the case. This is about the town: why did this happen here, what are people saying, how do they feel and think about what happened."

Armed with a list of names, Moises and his fellow company members interview a cross-section of Laramie residents who reveal as much about the collective psyche of their town as they do about the crime itself. Among those who we meet (and whose stories are interwoven throughout the narrative): a University of Wyoming Theater Department teacher who was originally skeptical about The Laramie Project but who now feels that talking about the incident will be therapeutic for the community; a student who won a theater scholarship by performing (against his parents' wishes) a scene from "Angels in America"; a car-service driver who drove Matthew Shepard to a gay bar in Fort Collins, Colorado, an hour away (there are no gay bars in Laramie); a teacher who was the first lesbian to be "outed" at Wyoming University; the bartender of the bar where Matthew was picked up; the cyclist who found an unconscious Matthew by the fence; the officer who was first on the scene, and who later feared she had been exposed to the AIDS virus when it was determined that Matthew was HIV-positive; friends and acquaintances of Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, the two Laramie men accused of the crime; several ministers from local churches, who preach tolerance but do not condone the homosexual lifestyle; the leader of an anti-gay group that crashes the Shepard funeral; and many others.

The Laramie Project includes scenes from the separate trials of McKinney and Henderson, climaxing with an impassioned speech from Matthew's father at McKinney's sentencing. "I would like nothing better than to see you die," Dennis Shepard tells one of his son's killers. "However, this is the time to begin the healing process, to show mercy to someone who refused to show mercy... I give you life in the memory of one who no longer lives."

Over the course of the theater company's one-year stay in Laramie, we feel how the Matthew Shepard incident has exposed the raw nerves of prejudice and fear in a town that once believed - as so many other towns do - that such prejudice and fear do not exist, and that a hate crime "could never happen here." Although the case may now be closed, the healing process in Laramie, and in America, has just begun.