What do you do after a tragedy like the Marathon bombing? Mourn for your fellow Bostonians.
Donate to a fund. Visit Copley
Square. Try to find something to bring joy back.
Promise to make every encounter, every day a better one. Practice kindness.
But forgiving the bombers is not on my list.
That’s what the Amish did in 2006 when a gunman entered a school house, sent
the little boys outside and murdered the little girls, one by one, then killed
himself. The Amish community brought food, comfort and forgiveness to the wife
and children of the gunman. THE AMISH PROJECT (at the Cambridge Y Theater
through June 27th) is playwright Jessica Dickey’s lyrical attempt to
grasp the unknowable after the unthinkable has happened.
THE AMISH PROJECT is reminiscent of Moises
Kaufman’s THE LARAMIE PROJECT because much of the dialogue seems testimonial,
as if playwright Dickey had interviewed town folk and relatives of the murdered
girls. At other times, the dialogue is internal, as if Dickey were privy to
what the gunman (or his widow) thought about their Amish neighbors. And
magically, we hear what the victims felt when they died and what they feel now
that they reside in the spiritual world.
The Circuit Theatre Company production,
lovingly directed by Alexandra Keegan, unfolds like a poem, the first stanzas
chanted over and over: “Man enters a school. Man enters a school. Man enters……”
Dickey introduces us to characters in hazy snatches: A little girl who loves
hats (She even draws them on Jesus) plays with her older sister until her
mother calls them in. Mother sews quilts and holds her girls close. Another
mother seems distraught, scratching her own skin raw. The poem becomes dark,
sinister. We can feel the change in the language, the rhythm of the piece.
Dickey has an ethereal style and a nice
momentum going until she switches gears and the scenes (monologues) get longer.
One peripheral character gets a whole story as if it were her play instead of the
murder play, although a thread connects the two at the end. The outstanding
actors make it all work, but I felt the play was out of joint when it ceased
being poetic—and when the end
wasn’t clear: Gorgeous, hymn-like harmonies begin the play and at the hour
mark, they return as if to book end it. It seemed to me that it could, should
end there and then—but
peculiarly, there are ten or fifteen more minutes devoted to the widow of the
murderer.
Dickey has lovely ideas in her play, like the
notion that all the “fighting” we do messes up the world and causes violence.
Swedenborgians believe in a similar imbalance that causes pain, as do many
Eastern religions. One issue she did not raise, that I wish she had (and she
had the opportunity since the gunman targeted only female children) is the
frequency with which women are the victims of mass killings, like Newtown where all the
adults who were murdered were female (teachers). What does that say about the
value of women in this world?
Dickey’s play certainly benefits from Circuit’s
remarkable cast (and from Adam Wyron’s expansive barn of a schoolhouse): Janett
“Becky” Bass in multiple, male and female roles like the caring Amish mother,
capable community spokesman and plucky high school student/ compassionate salesclerk;
Mackenzie Dreese and Anne Kocher as playful sisters, delighting in their
innocent dreams; Emma Johnson as the distraught widow of the shooter and Karin
Nilo as the tortured gunman: powerful performances, every one.
P.S. I find plays which dissect violence step by step, extremely
difficult to watch. Any time you turn on a television, that’s practically all
you see: Real (news), imagined (CSI, NSA, FBI, CIA) and recreated (crime tv).
This is the second play this spring I’ve seen about school shootings and, for
me, it’s just too painful.
