The Amish Projectis a theater piece crafted for a virtuoso performance. It gets that at American Stage from Katherine Michelle Tanner. She becomes seven different characters in a fictionalized version of the killing of rural Pennsylvania Amish schoolgirls on October 2, 2006.
Actually, The Amish Project is not so much a drama as a narrative told via a few narrators’ points of view with scenes acted out or accompanied by drawings. Tanner dutifully changes her voice, facial expressions, bodily stances and gestures to convey changes of personages, their thoughts, and their feelings.
Tanner is helped by lighting and the adaptability of the set, which features chairs she can move and doors she goes through in various ways. The set’s main importance is to contain glass on which she writes and draws. Stick and circle and rectangular figures represent the girls at school, a pet or two, family members, and the gunman.
Undoubtedly the main narrator is the young Amish girl who makes drawings into people. There’s also Bill North, a professor who has studied the Amish and introduces the motif of forgiveness in an often interrupted speech. America, a Hispanic girl of 16, is the closest thing to a character with a conflict. Perhaps the most powerful of those dramatized is 31-year-old Carol Stuckey, widow of the shooter. She’s both a victim herself and a sort of redeemer.
An early line struck me as applicable: “Just because something is written doesn’t mean it is true.” However, Todd Olson’s direction and Tanner’s performance are powerful enough to make it seem so.
