On Oct. 6, 1998, two Laramie men, Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, offered 21-year-old Matthew Shepard, openly gay, a ride home from a bar called the Fireside Lounge. They drove him outside of town, beat him with fists, pistol-whipped him, tied him to a shake fence and left him to die. Six days later, after languishing in a coma, that's exactly what he did. Fred Phelps, the "spiritual" leader of Westboro Baptist Church, picketed the funeral, with signs that included such slogans as "Fag Matt in Hell." The killers claimed they were motivated to commit their vicious crimes by "gay panic," a violent homophobic response to an alleged attempt at physical contact. Their girlfriends claimed they pretended to be gay in order to rob Shepard, whose family was well-off. The jury believed the latter story. Henderson and McKinney each received two consecutive life sentences.

There are times when the death of a previously inconsequential person brings unexpected repercussions. Rachel Corrie was one. U.S. Army Specialist Casey Sheehan was another. Shepard's vividly horrible murder inspired an outpouring of sympathy, even from some who'd been raised to believe his orientation was a choice and a sin. It rallied support for an improved anti-discrimination law, enacted in 2009. Yet we're still working through the specifics of providing equal rights to gay citizens, and Christians remain sharply divided on whether homosexuality or anti-gay bias is the truer sin.

Make no mistake about it, The Laramie Project, compiled from interviews conducted by Moisés Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Project, wears its rainbow-striped politics on its sleeve. (So do I.) And in Tacoma, dubbed "America's gayest city" by The Advocate, any production of the play preaches to the Gay Men's Chorus. It's performed all the time, by gay-friendly theater folks around the country, so how does Tacoma Little Theatre's production stack up?

I found its near-constant music heavy-handed, and some actors - notably Jen Aylsworth, Michael Cooper, Marty Mackenzie, and Tiffani Pike Schmidt - are better than others at differentiating multiple characters. Its backlighting shone straight in my eyes, and I'm not sure we needed a talkback session. Yet director Brie Yost accomplishes something vital here: she keeps the show moving at a fluid gallop. Without stinting on emotional payoff, it keeps us engaged in its narrative. That makes it easy to recommend the show as entertainment, rather than lauding it as liberal sermon. If it makes you question your ethical outlook, so much the better, but I'd never recommend a show solely for echoing my political views. This company is passionately invested in the material, and Yost guns the engine on what feels like a very special episode of Law & Order: Wyoming - yes, I mean that as a compliment. It'll mean more to you than endorsing the show as preachy moral vitamin shot.

THE LARAMIE PROJECT, 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, through June 23, Tacoma Little Theatre, 201 N. I St., Tacoma, $9.50, 253.272.2281