Written by Emilie Kefalas
Photo courtesy of the Amish Project Event Page
Even before the lights dimmed in the Mondanaro Theatre Friday March 4, the “The Amish Project” promised its audience multiple moments of uneasiness with dramaturge Meagan Mulgrew’s detailed statement of purpose on the back of the show program. The show, presented by the SCAD Department of Performing Arts, is founded on the basis of a real tragedy that happened Oct. 2, 2006, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Playwright Jessica Dickey’s plot is complete fabrication from fact, and her story is not intended to depict or explain the real world event upon which it is based.
The eight actors, all onstage at once yet singular in their intertwining worlds, chant a common denominator headline almost lyrically throughout the hour long show: “Man enters Amish schoolhouse and opens fire.” Without the gruesome details, that phrase summarizes exactly what happened in 2006.
I observed the action onstage occurring in rotation to gears in a clock, where one character would confess to the audience while the rest of the company froze in unmoved intention. Director Sharon Ott delivered a compelling adaptation of Dickey’s material while managing to maintain its disturbing content and thought provoking messages of interpretation, that is, how truth is analyzed in the face of confusion. In spite of such a heavy composition, Ott’s actors incited a couple generous laughs from the audience on three notable monologue moments.
If any one character can be described as the center of the plot’s cyclone, I would say that title belongs to Velda: innocence incarnate beautifully portrayed by Lauren Jessica Bertini. An Amish school girl who talks to the audience like a child to a parent, Velda said what no one else could in the lightest of childish mannerisms. “This is Anna,” she said as she drew an invisible figure with her pencil. Scenic Coordinator William Maizel utilized the three screen projections onstage as Velda’s virtual chalkboard, which made for moving, striking storytelling.
Eddie’s (Daniel Patrick Sheridan) disturbed wife, Carole (Samantha Binkerd), can’t shake the words of a woman, Sherry (Kelly Stowell) who stopped her in the grocery store to tell her, “There’s a fresh hell waiting for you and your sicko husband.” Sitting center stage, Carole clamped her hands against her ears, remembering the word and replaying the memory in an attempt to forget or make sense of the idea her husband’s legacy boils down to “sicko, sicko, sicko sicko.” These were the lines, slogans of speculation, that stayed with the characters as they began to build upon the little fact they were given surrounding the tragedy and the Amish themselves.
Between Dickey’s words and Binkerd’s interpretation, Carole’s character was unsettling. Binkerd had Carole straddling the borderline of a breakdown. Costume Designer Meghan Fudge even dressed Binkerd in loose-fitting, disheveled attire. Her rants about God, truth and judgement were raw but her expression made the stuns of each revelation stung. They offered perspective of her grief and more importantly her congested embarrassment of being brandished as, “the crazy guy’s wife.”
All but two characters were double casted between the production’s four showings over the course of the weekend. Bertini’s Velda and Cecilia Eligio’s incredible America were the only two actresses who were not given this treatment. Friday’s performance included Melissa Doge as Velda’s sister Anna. From her first appearance — a rather ghostly presence –Anna described the pain she saw inflicted from her horrible death.
Dickey took the real life massacre and its tidal wave of “why” that followed to create her own, non-related production. Fiction was almost all the characters used to dissect why Eddie decided to shoot 10 Amish schoolgirls in the head before shooting himself. He was going to molest them. His banter, “I wanted to have the girls, I wanted to have the girls,” caused me to shield my ears. The poetic aspect of Dickey’s script was undeniably effective: several lines in the play are repeated similar to poetic verse, so much so that I remembered them after leaving the theater.
I didn’t go into “The Amish Project” expecting to come out smiling. In fact, I was warned prior to entering the theater to “appreciate the show” as an appropriate alternate to “enjoy the show.” Ott’s production was a hard one to take in on a Friday night, but it forced me to ask not “why” but “why not” in my own judgement of real world tragedies.
We like to think we can differentiate fact from opinion, but until we’re in a situation where fact is minimal do we unearth the foils of speculation: an ugly, tangled mass of assumption and bias.
