By Moisés Kaufman and the members of the Tectonic Theater Project. Directed by Nicola Cavendish. A Theatre at UBC production. At the Frederic Wood Theatre on Thursday, November 19. Continues until November 28

The Laramie Project, which is about the 1998 beating death of openly gay university student Matthew Shepard, has had hundreds of productions around the world—often in high-school and university drama departments. But plays that do a lot of good aren’t necessarily well made.

Members of New York’s Tectonic Theater Project constructed the piece from interviews they did with citizens of Laramie, Wyoming, where 21-year-old Shepard and the two young men who murdered him lived. The play is a portrait of the town. In the script, most of its citizens are decent—by conservative reckoning. The killing shocks them and, in some cases, forces them to examine their acceptance of the homophobic norm.

There’s some thematic complexity here, but there are also structural problems. Members of the Tectonic Theater Project appear as characters, but their role as observers isn’t examined with enough subtlety to be interesting. And because we get snippets from so many town residents, who almost all speak in monologues, we don’t go deep into any of these characters or their relationships. More fully fleshed dramas, including the film Boys Don’t Cry and Terrence McNally’s play Corpus Christi, cover similar territory much more affectingly.

Still, enormous goodwill flows from this UBC mounting. Everybody on the stage performs with heart wide-open. Some combine that sensitivity with restraint. Meaghan Chenosky, who plays a number of roles, is stellar as Dr. Cantway, the emergency-room physician who treated both Shepard and one of his assailants. In Chenosky’s performance, emotional nuance emerges from physical stillness. Barbara Kozicki is similarly engaging as Reggie Fluty, the police officer who attended the scene and risked exposure to HIV in the process. And Eric Freilich shows impressive flexibility as a number of characters, including an acting student named Jedediah Schultz and an older gay man called Harry Woods. Without overstating the case, Freilich creates his personae in his body and then allows emotional truth to blow through that subtly adjusted instrument and make music.

Sometimes, though, Cavendish allows her actors to make The Laramie Project a sob fest, and she sentimentalizes passages—including the address Shepard’s father makes to the jury at the trial of one of the killers—with weeping violins.

Both this play and this production would be stronger if they were less reverential and more hardheaded. There’s goodness in the citizens of Laramie and hope in their openness to change, but we should not confuse the flickering of these qualities with heroism, and we shouldn’t see the forced recognition of humanity as anything more than a small fraction of what queer citizens deserve.