Tectonic Theater Project

Tectonic Theater Project is an award-winning company whose plays have been performed around the world. The company is dedicated to developing innovative works that explore theatrical language and form, fostering an artistic dialogue with audiences on the social, political, and human issues that affect us all. In service to this goal, Tectonic supports readings, workshops, and full theatrical productions, as well as training for students around the country in our play-making techniques.

Tectonic Theater Project was founded in 1991 by Moisés Kaufman and Jeffrey LaHoste. Tectonic refers to the art and science of structure and was chosen to emphasize the company's interest in construction — how things are made, and how they might be made differently.

Its plays, The Laramie Project, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, and I Am My Own Wife among others have sparked national discourse and have inspired artists and audiences worldwide.

In the early years of Tectonic, the company staged works by writers who were testing the boundaries of the theatrical form: Samuel Beckett, Franz Xaver Kroetz, Sophie Treadwell, and Naomi Iizuka. In time, however, Kaufman realized that in order to be rigorous about exploring theatrical form, the company had to deal with the issue of text. Thus, he set about writing his first play, Gross Indecency, based on transcripts, biographies, letters, and other found materials about the life and work of Oscar Wilde.

One month after the murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard, Kaufman and ten company members traveled to Laramie, Wyoming to interview people in the town torn apart by the crime. The play forged from these interviews was created collaboratively by the members of the company over a long workshop process in which participants were encouraged to operate outside their area of specialization: actors and designers became writers and dramaturgs, directors became designers and actors, and the company uncovered a new way of creating a theatrical event in the form of The Laramie Project.

Tectonic continues to employ these techniques in creating some of the most unusual and innovative works on the American stage.

In April 1895 Oscar Wilde brought a libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his youthful lover, who publicly maligned him as a sodomite. In doing so, England’s reigning man of letters set in motion a series of events that would culminate in his run and imprisonment. For within a year the bewildered Wilde himself was on trial for acts of “gross indecency” and-implicitly-for a vision of art that outraged Victorian propriety.

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