Artist behind 'Amish Project' hopes the play starts conversations

A play opening this weekend at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis examines how a community recovers from the horror of a school shooting. "The Amish Project" is based on a 2006 shooting at an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania.

The production is part of the Guthrie's new initiative to get audiences talking to each other after the show.

Moving around the Guthrie's Dowling Studio in a bonnet and blue dress, playwright and actor Jessica Dickey plays seven different characters, starting with 6-year-old Velda. She's a girl who likes to talk, especially about her older sister.

"Soon it will be Anna's Rumspringa," she tells the audience. "That's when she has to decide whether or not to join the church. And some don't, but most do. And if they don't, we don't speak to them." She giggles nervously.

Dickey said "The Amish Project" grew out of an incident in Nickel Mines, Pa.

"The local milkman walked into a one-room Amish schoolhouse in this very, very quiet intersection of farmland outside of Lancaster, Pa.," she recounted. "And he made the boys and the teacher leave, and he shot the girls — and then he shot himself, I should add."

He shot eight girls. Five of them died. It grabbed the attention of the nation, as such incidents do. Dickey was living in Brooklyn, but knew the area, having grown up in Pennsylvania.

"And I really felt some light go out inside of me for a little while," she said. "It really flattened me and depressed me and I just felt a grief about it that was acute."

Then came an unexpected twist. Amish representatives announced they had forgiven the shooter, and regarded his widow and children as victims of the violence, too.

Dickey was stunned by what she saw as the generosity of the Amish response. She was also aware of the desperate pleas for privacy, both from the Amish and from the gunman's family. The story stayed with her, really gnawing at her.

"Probably a year after that is when I began writing 'The Amish Project,'" she said.

But she decided that when she told the story, she would do it as fiction: "I really had no desire to knock on the doors of the people that had lived through this and put my microphone to them and say, 'Hey what was this like?'"

She did research, but more to fill in details after she had written her early drafts. As she puts it, she wants audiences to hover, or meditate more on what actually happened. She began writing characters: first, the two girls, Velda and 14-year-old Anna; then Carol, the widow of the shooter.

Carol seethes with rage at a world which makes no sense to her anymore.

"The news is the worst," she barks in the play. "Something bad happens, you can see them salivating. Literally, the newscasters frothing at the mouth. 'THIS JUST IN!' We don't watch TV anymore."

"The Amish Project" doesn't apportion blame. It's more interested in how to move on. And that's why Dickey is excited to be part of the Guthrie's new Singular Voices Plural Perspectives series. In it, every performance is followed by a discussion.

At a preview this week, an audience member asked Dickey what motivated her to write the piece. She looked around the room and said, "This!"

"It's the kind of play that people stay and wait to talk to you and to each other," she said. "And I loved that idea, of building that space and making that part of our work for the night, and a sort of gentle Act 2, if you would."

Some audience members at the preview talked about how the show left them feeling sad, worried or guilty. Others used words like "inspired" and "hopeful."

The Guthrie's new associate artistic director, Jeff Meanza, said the idea is to use the art as an ignition point to start the conversation and engage the Guthrie community.

"We want the audience talking to each other as much as they're talking to whoever is up here on stage," he said.

Meanza admitted that not every audience member wants this. But he said that during last October's "Wrestling Jerusalem," the first show in the series, 65 percent of the audience stayed at least to listen.

Correction (Feb. 5, 2016): An earlier version of this story included an incorrect title for Jeff Meanza.