The Center for the Performing Arts will give you a reality check when it presents The Laramie Project tonight and follows it up with The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, An Epilogue on Thursday night. Considering midterms are in most of our immediate futures, we’ll be in the perfect mindset for this performance.

The Laramie Project tells the story of the aftermath of the 1998 kidnapping and death of Matthew Shepard in the town of Laramie, Wyoming. Five weeks after the death, members of New York City’s Tectonic Theater Project interviewed townspeople and wrote this play off of the interviews. They came back a decade later and created the sequel production based on the second round of interviews.

It’s obvious with all I’ve said that any of my usual douchey comments will send me directly to Hell. So we’ll cut to the chase: student tickets for one show are $15 and $20 for both. The shows are tonight and tomorrow night at 7:30 p.m. in the Eisenhower Auditorium. The actors will stick around after the shows to answer questions.