A horrifying real-life event, the 2006 killing of Amish girls in a Pennsylvania school house, becomes the touch point for an entirely fictional play of the same theme in The Amish Project. Playwright Jessica Dickey weaves together the stories of seven characters related to the shooting and its aftermath. All seven characters are played by one woman, who remains dressed in typical Amish garb (white bonnet, plain blue dress, etc.) through the entire 70-minute show.
In the Milwaukee Repertory Theater production, veteran actor Deborah Staples bravely tackles this formidable task. She turns in one of her finest performances as she manages to inhabit each character in non-linear fashion. Sometimes she is a single character for a few moments, while at other times, she shifts quickly between characters with only a few lines of dialogue devoted to each.
In this way she becomes almost an entire community, including: two of the Amish shooting victims; the gunman and his wife; a professor who takes on the role of explaining the basics of Amish culture to the media; an “ordinary” non-Amish woman from the town where the event occurred; and a pregnant, 16-year-old Latina.
Yes, there is some deliberate confusion about what character Staples is playing, as she hops from one character to another. As a result, the audience learns new facts about the event in piecemeal fashion, as is often the case with breaking news.
The playwright offers equal measures of sympathy for the girls and the families who mourn their loss, but also at how the Amish react to the event. As in the real-life tragedy, the Amish in this play react to the dead gunman and his family with forgiveness. In fact, when money pours in for the families affected by the tragedy, they insist on sharing it with the gunman’s widow, who is also the mother of two small boys.
Deborah Staples starts the play as a seven-year-old girl who seems delighted to have the audience’s attention. She “draws” pictures in the air; and then asks the audience directly to guess what they are. This clever device hooks the audience straight into the story. Later, Staples becomes harder-edged adults, as well as a tough-talking teenager with an abundance of attitude. They all play critical roles in the aftermath of this mass shooting.
The Amish Project came to life in 2009, when the playwright herself played the one-woman role. The piece was work shopped at New York’s Cherry Lane Theater and later opened Off-Broadway at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, located in Greenwich Village. The show earned a positive notice from The New York Times and other publications. In order to reinforce the playwright’s message, the Milwaukee Repertory Theater is smartly re-configured. Its changeable, tiered seating becomes a giant “V,” so audience members can see each other as well as the stage. The stage itself is dominated by the thin, white steel frame of the schoolhouse set on a foundation of weathered wood. Inside the frame, one can easily see a few long wooden benches, a chair and a large, woven basket at the back of the set. These are the only props (almost) that Staples must use to tell her story. Under Leda Hoffmann’s excellent direction, the mini-monologues which comprise The Amish Project are neatly unraveled.
One disclaimer: The play doesn’t reveal more answers than one gets from hearing about the real-life event. Prospective audience members who attend the play with the notion of seeing a replica of TV’s “Dateline” (where the story ends with a satisfying conclusion) might leave disappointed. In this thought-provoking and entertaining play, emotions run high and facts must be gleaned like stray ears of corn after the harvest. As the audience (and some of the characters) keep asking themselves how such an awful thing could have happened, the playwright offers only bits of notions that might or might not be parts of the solution. After all, this is a play, not a TV episode.
