On October 7, 1998, a young gay man was discovered savagely beaten and bound to a fence in the hills outside Laramie, Wyoming.

He was unconscious, suffering from hypothermia and so covered in blood (except where his face had been washed by tears) that the student who found him failed to recognise his fellow classmate.

Unprovoked and homophobically motivated, Matthew Shepard's death became an international symbol of intolerance and the small community of Laramie was overrun by the world's media.

But for director Moises Kaufman there was still much left unasked and unanswered - to which end he and fellow members of the Tectonic Theatre Company travelled to the town where, as well as visiting the murder scene and sitting in on the trial, they interviewed more than 200 residents.

"There are 20 anti-gay homicides a year which are reported," Kaufman has said. "But this one resonated. And I'm interested in those watershed, historical cultural moments where a whole nation says, 'Wait a minute.'

"I felt if we went to Laramie and we started to talk to the people of the town, we might gather a document about not only where Laramie was at but where we were all at at that moment in our history."

That document is The Laramie Project, a play comprised of real people's actual words which shows both the depths to which humanity can sink and the heights of compassion of which it is capable.

First staged in 2000 and later made into an all-star motion picture by HBO Films, it is now, courtesy of actors and graduates from Brighton's Academy Of Creative Training, getting its first outing in the city.

"I thought it had great resonances for Brighton because of the recent homophobic attacks in Kemp Town," says director Steve North. "The attack on Matthew was so random - the two lads responsible could never explain why they did what they did and it was completely out of character. It's the idea that these things can happen out of the blue and within a community."

Following a linear structure from the lead up to Shepard's murder through the aftermath and the court trials, The Laramie Project requires the 12-person cast to play more than 60 characters, from rural ranchers to university professors, from the Reverend Fred Phelps, who waited outside Shepard's funeral declaring that he would "burn in hell", to the victim's gay friend Romain Patterson, who stood between the cleric and the mourners wearing home-made angel wings.

"I've really tried not to make it manipulative and to direct the actors away from any kind of sentimentality," says North. "If you feel something as an audience it should happen naturally because you're watching something truthful. All I want to do is tell it as simply as possible and let the words speak for themselves."