Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
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by Jessica Dickey, directed by Matt White
• Green Light Arts, Registry Theatre, Kitchener;
April 13-16, 2017;
• Staircase Theatre, Hamilton
April 20-23, 2017;
• Schoolhouse Theatre, St. Jacobs
April 26-30, 2017
St. Francis: “It is in pardoning that one is pardoned”
Green Light Arts, a young professional theatre company in Waterloo Region, has taken its acclaimed production of The Amish Project on tour. I was lucky enough to catch the show in St. Jacobs the day before it closed, and the production was so good I suggest that theatre-lovers in the area, or anywhere else, keep an eye out for the company’s next production.
The Amish Project is a fictionalized account from 2008 by American playwright Jessica Dickey of the West Nickel Mines School shooting that occurred in Amish community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. On October 2, 2006, a single white male armed with a handgun, shotgun and rifle enter a single-room schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, ordered the teacher and male students out of the room and shot eight of the remaining ten girls, aged 6 to 13, before shooting himself. Five of the eight girls died. When the girls knew they were going to be killed, two sisters pleaded with the gunman to be killed first.
While mass shootings have literally become a daily occurrence in the US, the West Nickel Mines School shooting drew attention because of the outpouring of forgiveness that the Amish community expressed for the shooter and the care it showed his wife. How could people forgive anyone for such a horrific crime?
To explore this question, Dickey’s complex play presents a collection of fragments of thoughts of seven people affected by the incident – two Amish sisters, the shooter, his wife, an scholar of Amish culture and two non-Amish female residents of the town. One actor, Amy Keating, plays all the roles. As Dickey rapidly shifts from one perspective to another, Dickey does not tell the events of the shooting in chronological order. We learn about the shooting almost incidentally as it comes up in the characters’ monologues.
Instead, Dickey makes another incident the main chronological thread of the play. This involves Carol, the dazed wife of the shooter trying to choose a skin lotion at the local supermarket, being verbally abused as the wife of a “sicko” by Sherry, a total stranger. Carol collapses in the parking lot afterwards and is helped by America, an Hispanic clerk from the store, who witnessed the abuse and its effect.
This incident is central to the meaning of the play. The Amish, who from an outsider’s point of view, should be the angriest as the shooter’s wife, are the most compassionate while a non-Amish person whose only knowledge of the incident is what she’s seen on television, is the most abusive. The question is what would allow the Amish to forgive such a terrible crime.
The answer comes from two non-Amish characters and one of the Amish girls in the schoolhouse. Bill North, a professor specializing in Amish culture, makes a point about the Amish that many people don’t realize. Dickey has him say that the whole Amish way of life is a form of “sacrifice”. The Amish have given up the ways of those around them for a life in which there is little distinction between everyday life and religion. We are so used to hearing the intolerant views of American fundamentalists who call themselves Christians, that we forget how far their view are from Jesus’s teachings in the Bible. The Amish live according to those teachings: “But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matthew 5:39) and “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).
With the kind actions of the 16-year-old non-Amish girl America, Dickey shows that such beliefs do not have to be foreign to Christians. America is a Catholic and one of the guides that helps her through life is the “Prayer of Saint Francis” an anonymous French prayer of unknown origin, which has the key line, “It is in pardoning that one is pardoned”.
From the lively 6-year-old Velda we learn who is her favourite martyr from Martyrs Mirror (1660), the second most important book for Amish families after the Bible, with tales of the non-resistance of Anabaptist martyrs to persecution and death. Velda’s favourite story is of Dirk Willems (d. 1569), who escaped from prison but turned back to help the guard who pursued him, who would have let him go except that the burgomaster ordered Dirk taken back to the prison, tortured and killed. Velda acts out the whole story filled with admiration for the young hero. From these three example Dickey helps us understand how the Amish response to Carol was a natural part of their faith and makes us question why the most common reaction to a mass killing should be hatred and revenge.
Under Matt White’s careful direction, Amy Keating does not so much shift from one character to another as fluidly glide into and out of each personality. Each of the seven characters she gives a distinctive voice and gestural repertoire. Of the seven the one who is hardest to distinguish is Anna, the 14-year-old sister of Velda. Otherwise, the other six are absolutely clear even when Dickey increases the pace of character shifts and intercuts one character’s story with another’s.
Keating’s two most memorable characters are Velda and Carol. Keating is able to get completely inside the innocent mind of the 6-year-old who unselfconsciously tells us about all her likes and dislikes while providing chalk drawings of everything on her slate, on the chalkboard and then on the black floor of the set. In thinking of Velda one tends to think of the quotation, “Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:4).
Keating makes the distraught, swearing non-Amish Carol, the shooter’s wife, completely different from Velda, but Carol is humbled twice. First, humiliated by the stranger in the store and second uncomprehendingly overwhelmed by the kindness shown her by the Amish. Keating brilliantly shows us the tumult of contradictory emotions that rage in Carol’s mind until they are soothed by a mysterious word an Amish elder speaks to her.
Dickey has created a compelling play that in only 65 minutes forces us to weigh the reactions to the shooting from the seven points of view she presents. Part of Green Light Art’s Mission Statement is “To provide creative programming that inspires, nurtures and challenges audiences”. The Amish Project certainly lives up to that goal. We have to be grateful to have another company bold enough to present this kind of theatre in Waterloo Region. The fact that the run was sold out and an extra performance added in St. Jacobs would suggest that there is an audience for the kind of well performed, well directed, serious, challenging theatre that Green Light Arts aims to present. I certainly look forward to their next project.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: Amy Keating in The Amish Project. ©2017 Joel Mieske.
For tickets, visit www.greenlight-arts.com.
2017-04-30
The Amish Project