BWW Reviews: Staples Masters Seven Roles at Stiemke Studio's THE AMISH PROJECT

September 13, 27, 29 and October 2, 2006. These forgotten dates inherit new meaning when Milwaukee Rep stages Jessica Dickey's The Amish Project in the Stiemke Studio. Each of these four dates represents a school shooting--and one occurred in a tiny Wisconsin town-- while debut playwright Dickey focuses on October 2. On October 2, 2006 the local neighborhood milkman walked into Pennsylvania's Nickel Mines schoolhouse with a gun and shot ten young girls, five who survived.

What differentiates these dates, all within a two-week time frame, is the Nickel Mines schoolhouse tormented a quiet Amish Community among the Pennsylvania farmlands. The Amish immediately forgave, offered condolences, to the widow and children of the shooter, who had then killed himself.Their religious beliefs stress that the Amish must forgive or God will refuse to forgive them.

While the Amish choose to lead a pacifist lifestyle instead of seeking revenge, this belief opens the doors to healing for this community, which caused considerable reaction in the national media despite covering three recent school shootings. At the Rep in Depth held before the production, the discussion centered on "What does this say about American society when we are more appalled by forgiveness than violence?"

Debut Director Leda Hoffmann and veteran Rep Associate Artist Deborah Staples connect the innocence and indescribable indecency between forgiveness and violence, divergent forces still at work in the world. Staples revels in seven characters affected by the Nickel Mines shooting from inside and outside the Amish community. In Dickey's creative play, a six-year-old Amish girl Velda primarily narrates the story together with a 16-year-old Puerto Rican teenager named America, who worked at the food store where the shooter's family shopped for groceries. Observing these events through the lens of youth, Dickey adds nuanced revelations to the tragedy's aftermath.

Anyone who has lived, played or spent time with a six-year-old will immediately connect to Staples compelling performance of Velda. Equally appealing playing the teenager America, Staples captures a young person hovering between girlhood and womanhood, struggling to find her identity in light of these events. When America sees the shooter's left-behind-widow shopping in her store and subjected to a mean derision by a local, she seeks to help the widow and suffers the same derision from her.

Pared down scenic design by Courtney O'Neill coordinated with Jason Fassl's lighting design reveals to the audience a ghost structure of the actual Nickel Mines schoolhouse under which Staples also gives voice to Velda's 14-year old sister, the shooter and his widow, another farmer's wife from the area and an Amish historian, a professor who relates his own story regarding the Amish community. The schoolhouse on the stage, angled in the Stiemke, draws the audience toward a supposedly lush vista of Pennsylvania farmland which was penetrated by this unspeakable violence. Today there are only three trees planted to replace the torn down schoolhouse to honor the girls who died and suffered.

While Hoffmann and Staples convey the community's beauty against the horrific contrast of this shooting in a no intermission, 80-plus-minutes performance, benevolence appears in almost every scene. Perhaps most profound is a statement by the shooter's widow when she buys Advil and wrinkle cream, and asks the audience what will they believe--- "How is it society cannot believe what is written on a bottle or label, in ads, perhaps what politicians and assorted marketers tell them, and yet, what society cannot believe is what actually happens--the four school shootings within two weeks--which is the truth?"

In an incredible premier first play by Dickey and a bravado performance by Staples,The Amish Project asks the audience to examine more questions than the production answers, To traverse these completely fictional characters' inner thoughts based on the October 2 event when tragedy again destroyed innocence. While current international headlines scream of gun violence throughout the world, the audience will ask when will this stop: the 9/13, 9/27, 9/29 and l0/2?

In the production's final scene, simple remnants of several children's lives, aged 6 through 14, hang on humble clothesline, a scene to be remembered. Six-year-old Velda, who the audience grows to know, views the future with hope as only innocent youth can. A masterful The Amish Project asks the audience to commit to memory the line from this community's beliefs that says unless a person attains the faith of a child, they will never see heaven. Unless the world begins to view the future with Velda's hope, joy and trust, will humanity ever achieve peace or any heaven on earth? .

Milwaukee Rep presents The Amish Project in the Stiemke Stuido at the Patty and Jay Baker Theater Complex through March 22. For special programming, information on performances or tickets, please call 414.224.9490 or visit www.milwaukeerep.com