It's a strange layering of art and reality, interviewing Jedadiah Schultz. As I sit across from him and push "record," I can't help thinking that I'm performing the same action that led to the creation of one of the most frequently produced American plays of this decade.

Nearly eleven years ago, it was members of the Tectonic Theater Project who were sitting across from Schultz with a tape recorder. They were in Laramie, Wyo., where he was studying theater, and it was a month and a half after a young gay man named Matthew Shepard had been tied to a fence outside town, beaten savagely, and left to die.

The New York theater group led by Moisés Kaufman had come to document the town's reactions to the event in hopes of creating the play that would become "The Laramie Project." The residents were reluctant to talk after the treatment they'd been given by the national news media, but Rebecca Hilliker, the head of the University of Wyoming's theater department, was more receptive because her classes were studying Tectonic's most recent play. She struck a deal: Tectonic could interview the students -- as long as the students could interview Tectonic first.

"We got to ask them questions about what it's like being artists in New York City and struggling actors and about the play, and then it was their turn," Schultz tells me.

At the time, he was a 19-year-old freshman just beginning to take a look at the world outside his Southern Baptist upbringing, and he was one of the few theater majors at the University of Wyoming who had grown up in Laramie. He told Tectonic about how he'd gone against his parents' wishes by entering a theater competition with a monologue from a gay character in the play "Angels in America" -- not necessarily because he supported gays, but because he knew he could win with the monologue.

Tectonic took the words Schultz told them and turned him into a character in their play, using his real name. By now, "The Laramie Project" has been performed hundreds of times, so he has been played hundreds of times by other actors.

The first company to which Tectonic granted the rights to perform the play as a regional production was Salt Lake's Plan-B Theatre, who produced it in 2001. Schultz was in his final year at the University of Wyoming at the time, and since he was an actor living five hours away, he was invited to audition for the role of himself.

"When I asked him to do the show, I said, 'Thank god you didn't suck,' " says producing director Jerry Rapier. "Can you imagine saying, 'You're not quite right for the role of you?' "

One of the most memorable things about that original Salt Lake run, Rapier adds, was that one of the performances was attended by Chasity Pasley, the girlfriend of Russell Henderson at the time he and Aaron McKinney killed Matthew Shepard.

"I knew Chasity in junior high," Schultz tells me. "Actually, I had a crush on her in junior high. I remember staring at her in science class. She was this really sweet, innocent kid, and as the years passed, you could see her changing and searching for an identity. So we were waiting outside the theater for the play to start, and she came up and she recognized me and she was like, 'I heard you were in this,' and it's like, 'Yeah ...' It's that awkward conversation that you have with anyone who haven't seen for a while. You're like, 'What have you been up to,' but ... what do you say when there's this huge thing that's in the room?"

That wasn't the most uncomfortable moment to come, though. "She sat in the front row," Rapier recalls, "and she started crying before the play began. And she was racked with sobs throughout the entire performance. It was clear she needed to do that, and at that point, there was no point in judging her connection to the crime."

"As we were performing," Schultz says, "You could hear her very viscerally having this cathartic moment or emotional moment. She was a wreck throughout the whole thing."

He assumes, he says, that she was having a similar experience to the one he had when he sat in on one of the initial rehearsals down in Denver. Until that point, he'd had no idea that Tectonic would use his actual words and put him in the play as a character; he just thought they'd use some of his information and ideas. So when he heard actor Andy Paris speaking his own words, it was a shock.

"It was where I was talking in some negative ways about some of my feelings about homosexuality. Kind of spouting this indoctrination," he recalls. "When you're able to see yourself or a situation from a completely different perspective, that experience of watching it, in a theatricalized experience, is so revealing. I could just see myself and who I was in a way that we're not capable of in real life. So that was a really powerful moment for me, and I can only assume that that's what Chasity went through, was that she was able to kind of contextualize this whole situation in a totally different perspective."

Schultz has played himself one other time, in a production in Portland, Oregon. After earning his BFA from the University of Wyoming, he went on to attend Yale. While he was there, he sometimes had the opportunity to anonymously observe the auditions for the department, which, on at least one occasion, led to the man Jedadiah Schultz watching someone audition a monologue by the character Jedadiah Schultz.

He graduated from Yale in 2005, and has since performed in other regional theater productions and racked up a few off-Broadway credits.

Seeing his words frozen in time has been a sobering experience for him. "I think 'The Laramie Project' really captures a time of transformation in my life," he says. "I think Tectonic coming and asking me those questions planted the seed and it started a catalyst of me investigating a lot of these things. Having this image of yourself captured permanently is a little unsettling. But ultimately, it's just informative to see how far you've come."

That's also the idea behind The Tectonic Theater Project's new work, "The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later," an epilogue that examines how the town has continued to be affected by the murder.

Staged readings of the play will be performed simultaneously in more than 130 theaters on Oct. 12, the 11th anniversary of Matthew Shepard's death. The Salt Lake City performance will happen early, on Oct. 9, so it can be part of U. of U.'s Gay Pride Week and avoid the school's fall break.

Rapier is directing the reading, and the roles will be read by six of the eight actors from Plan-B's original production: Kirt Bateman, Colleen Baum, Anita Booher, Joyce Cohen, Carl Nelson and Jedadiah Schultz. Schultz says this reading won't offer him a chance to update the frozen image of himself that's been forever captured in "The Laramie Project."

"I'm not really a major character in this piece," he explains.. "It's more a reflection of how Laramie's changed in the last 10 years. How do you measure change? Do you measure it by laws? By legislative decisions? Do you measure it by physical monuments that have been built for Matthew? Do you measure it in individuals? People who have made dramatic shifts? How do you measure the progress, if any, that has been made in the last 10 years? Because I haven't really been in Laramie for the last 10 years -- I've been in Connecticut and New York -- I'm not a great person to talk to about how Laramie has changed."

So this time, he'll play Matthew Shepard's killers -- both of them.

The epilogue features segments based on hours of face-to-face interviews with Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, conducted in prison. As I sit talking with Schultz, he's just finished the second day of the two-week rehearsal period, and he's still digging into what it means to play the killers. But unlike many actors, he has his own memories to draw on.

"It's strange how you can sense things about people," he says. "Because I remember seeing Russell, and being like, 'This is a good guy. He's ultimately a good guy who's lost. He's just getting mixed up in the wrong crowd.' And I remember seeing Aaron and thinking, 'This is someone who's a bad kid. There's something deeper inside of him that's disturbed.' "

Years later, Henderson would be convicted of driving the truck that took Matthew Shepard to his death and of helping to tie him to the fence, while Aaron McKinney would be the one convicted of delivering the vicious pistol-whipping that killed him.

"It's incredibly powerful," Schultz says, as he contemplates the dialogue he's currently learning, "because these guys have completely different reactions 10 years later. I think Russell Henderson is truly investigating the decisions he made that night and the repercussions of taking Matt's life from him and taking the Shepard's son. He seems to feel true remorse, where Aaron McKinney doesn't. He has remorse for letting his family down, but he says that he ultimately has no remorse for killing Matthew Shepard."

And then he recalls another of his own memories. "I was at the sentencing," he says. "It was so intense. He walked in the courtroom, and he had this smile on his face, and he just looks back at his family and he's smiling this smug smile. And it was like he was enjoying it."

In addition to interviews with the killers, the epilogue covers new interviews with Matthew Shepard's mother and discusses the progress of anti-hate crime legislation since his death, so Schultz also plays the role of several politicians. He says he's finding fulfillment in revisiting this story as an actor again 10 years later.

"For a while, I had some trepidation because I've been involved in the world of theater, and I've been identified as 'the guy from "The Laramie Project," ' and I've struggled with that," he says, "because it was one moment in my life. And it was a really powerful moment, but there are a lot of other things there, and I ultimately want to be an actor."

"So I struggle with being defined by this moment," he says, "and for a long time I felt like Laramie didn't want to be defined by this moment. And I think myself and a lot of other people didn't want to give them much room for that. We wanted them to own it and I think they should own it, but ultimately, it's not the one defining aspect of me, or the town. How you move forward from it is what ultimately defines you."