At one point during "The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later," I became aware that I was watching the actor Jedadiah Schultz playing the character of Andy Paris, a writer and actor who has played the character of -- guess who? Jedadiah Schultz. It was enough to make my head spin around...or at least to make me start muttering, "Malkovich, Malkovich." While that's the most extreme example, it wasn't the only time I felt art and reality melding into one another during last Friday's performance at Kingsbury Hall.

The members of New York's Tectonic Theater Project put themselves in the play as characters to document their interviews with the residents of Laramie, Wyoming about how things have changed in the 10 years since a young gay man named Matthew Shepard was killed there. They got enough responses along the lines of, "We've moved on" that I almost started to wonder whether they really were dwelling too much on the events of a decade ago, and whether their decision to revisit the people featured in their original "Laramie Project" was self-indulgent, a form of navel gazing.

But then I realized that that was exactly the point: Ten years went by without significant hate crime legislation being passed. We can't afford to forget. Still, many of us try, and this play is a look at the reasons why we attempt to ignore or revise the past.

The performance was a staged reading, which meant that the six actors had their scripts in hand. That's more than understandable when you realize that, although they'd been rehearsing for two weeks, primary author Moisés Kaufman was in town and had given them changes to the script as recently as the night before the performance.

Though the actors looked at their scripts from time to time, they still maintained a lot of eye contact with the audience, used dynamic body language, and gave emotionally invested, distinct portrayals of 45 different characters.

All six actors are experienced and accomplished, and there were six powerhouse performances, but I was especially engaged by Joyce Cohen's transitions between a female ex-police officer and a Catholic priest; Kirt Bateman when he played bigoted townspeople; and Jedadiah Schultz when he was channeling Matthew Shepard's primary killer, Aaron McKinney.

A deep silence blanketed the nearly full hall while Schultz was speaking as McKinney. No one seemed to want to miss a word of what the prisoner had to say for himself.

Some of it seemed like a twisted joke, like when he said that he might like to go to Germany, but he probably wouldn't be able to because the Nazi tattoos he's acquired in prison would be illegal there.

And some of it was shocking, revealing that his mind doesn't work the way a normal, compassionate person's does. When asked whether he has remorse, he said that he felt bad for Matthew's father for losing a son, but not that bad for Matthew's mother, because "she never shuts up about it, and it's been 10 years." When the interview responded, "But you brutally murdered her son," he said "Yeah. I know."

The evening ended with a Q&A session, during which director Jerry Rapier announced that on the day before -- Thursday, Oct. 8 -- the U.S. House of Representatives passed The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crime Prevention Act. It now moves on to the Senate, and President Obama has said he would sign the bill.

Thank god the Tectonic Theater Project has helped prevent us all from simply "moving on" from the memory of Matthew Shepard.