University of Mississippi’s school newspaper, the Daily Mississippian, posted this morning that an estimated 20 members of the Ole Miss football team were among a crowd that interrupted a school play on Tuesday night.
It was a performance of The Laramie Project, a play about the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student. The audience reportedly shouted homophobic slurs and made derogatory comments about cast members’ bodies.
One report also said that audience members took pictures with their cell phones and talked loudly during the performance.
The DM reported that the 20 football players were at the show to fulfill a requirement in a freshman-level theater class. By the second act of the play, school administrators were called to the theater and made the football players in the audience apologize to the cast and crew.
I'm told a number of people at Ole Miss now involved in investigating this, including the university's Bias Intervention Response Team
— Dan Wolken (@DanWolken) October 3, 2013
The Ole Miss Theatre Department Chair Rene Pulliam told the DM, “The football players were asked by the athletics department to apologize to the cast. However, I’m not sure the players truly understood what they were apologizing for.”
