A Texas High School Canceled A Play About Hate Crime Victim Matthew Shepard

A Texas high school has canceled its spring production of “The Laramie Project,” a play about the aftermath of the 1998 vicious murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student in Wyoming.

Timber Creek High School administrators emailed parents on Friday to say that the play would be canceled but did not provide an explanation, according to The Dallas Morning News. The email said the school was working on “an alternative production opportunity.”

“We understand that it is unusual for a production change like this to take place. Students will still have an opportunity to read, discuss, and analyze the play during the school day,” the email read.

Bryce Nieman, a spokesperson for Keller Independent School District, told the outlet that the decision to “move forward with another production” was “made by many stakeholders.” Nieman noted that the Fort Worth school wanted to promote theater productions that create “much excitement from the community” like “Mary Poppins” and “White Christmas.”

The district did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

“The Laramie Project” first debuted in 2000, two years after Shepard’s murder, and has been performed by high schools around the country to help facilitate conversations about violence and hate toward the LGBTQ+ community.

Shepard was a 21-year-old student at the University of Wyoming when he was brutally attacked and tied to a fence, where he was left to die.

His death, which has been memorialized as one of the most egregious anti-gay hate crimes, helped fuel a fight to expand federal hate crime legislation in the 1990s and 2000s. In 2009, then-President Barack Obama enacted the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which broadened