Donald Brian

Hummingbird Theater Company's slogan reads, 'hover in the moment.' That thoughtful pause describes perfectly the theatrical experience director/producer Donald Brian Bartalo creates with his latest venture, THE AMISH PROJECT, at MUCCC. This extraordinary one-person show written by Jessica Dickey fictionally explores the Nickel Mines schoolhouse shooting that fragmented the lives of families in and around an Amish community near Lancaster Pennsylvania in 2006. At lights up, the audience enters an unfamiliar world. There are no introductions or explanations. We meet a young Amish girl sitting at a school desk who is fascinated with hats. The actor then morphs into her older sister thrilled by the beauty of the world, then a non-Amish woman feverishly smoking. These transformations continue for seven disparate characters. Each is a fragment laid out and unexplained like the patches of a quilt waiting to be sewn together, to be made whole. And that is the dramatic structure Dickey deftly stitches over the next 90 riveting minutes. She lovingly and sympathetically presents each character's terror, goodness and beauty. Slowly, these characters, torn to pieces, are inextricably knotted together by chance or fate or God. Jessica Dickey quilts an absolute masterwork that warms with compassion and unflinching fellowship.