Nine years have passed since Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project created The Laramie Project, the groundbreaking documentary play about the homophobia-inspired murder of Matthew Shepard. Using published news reports and personal interviews with some 200 townspeople in Laramie Wyoming, the piece was a moving meditation on the murder’s effect on the community in which the young gay college student lived and died. Kaufman and the company went back to Laramie last year for an update and The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later is scheduled be presented as a staged reading on Oct. 12 at theaters across the country, including Alice Tully Hall here in New York.
That is good news. What isn’t is the proliferation of imitations The Laramie Project has spawned. Many would-be playwrights now seem to think all they need to do is find a calamity, patch together excerpts from news reports about the event and slap the word “Project” in their title. But it takes more than that to make a play, at least a meaningful one. A few, like The Amish Project, the one-woman show about the slaughter of five girls in an Amish schoolhouse that emerged from last year’s Fringe Festival, do achieve their own grace, finding a way to turn tragedy into art. But others are like The Columbine Project, the new play about the 1999 massacre at a Colorado high school in which 15 people died, including the two students who committed the attack. The only word I can think of for the latter is exploitative.
I take no pleasure from beating up on a small show and I know that small productions have to make do with less. But that’s where creative stagecraft and imaginative storytelling come in. The Columbine Project lacks both. Playwright Paul Storiale serves as his own director and lets himself down by staging scene after scene with actors just walking on, standing in the middle of the stage, shouting some dialog and then walking off.
Actors are valiant creatures and a couple of the 19-member-cast—most notably, Rya Meyers as the devout Christian student who was the shooters’ first victim and Marquerite Wiseman as the mother of the sole African-American student killed—do manage to sneak a little life into their characters. But it’s not enough. Josh Iacovelli, who is listed in the program as responsible for “set adaptation” didn’t even try. The curtain that serves as the backdrop for a table and a few chairs kept splitting open to reveal offstage actors who shouldn't have been seen at that moment. My class did a better job with the set for the spring play when I was in 6th grade. And I went to a school in a poor neighborhood.
Of course I’ve seen poorly written, poorly directed, poorly acted and poorly designed shows before. What so upset me about this one is that in my all years of theatergoing, it is one of the very few times when I didn't applaud at the end of a show. I simply couldn't do it because I felt ashamed as I sat in the Actors Temple Theatre, where The Columbine Project is currently running. I felt as though I were complicit in a violation of the memory of the people who suffered that day and of the professionalism of the theater people who once worshipped at the Temple. They—and I—deserve better.
Some people look at theater as an escape. But for me the best theater doesn’t take me away from the world but helps me better understand what is going on in it. So I was blown away back in 1991 when I first saw the documentary theater Anna Deavere Smith created with her one-woman show Fires in the Mirror.
Culling a series of monologues from interviews with real-life people who had participated in or observed the riots that ensued after a car driven by an Hasidic man killed a seven-year old black boy in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, Deavere Smith made better sense of those tumultuous events than any of the scores of news accounts I saw at the time. Moisés Kaufman did something similarly affective with The Laramie Project, which used interviews, private documents and published news reports to tell the story of the homophobia-inspired murder of Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard in 1998.
My vivid memories of those brilliant productions made me eager to see The Amish Project, the new show about the slaughter of five girls in an Amish schoolhouse in 2006 that opened this week at the tiny Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in the Village. Like Fires in the Mirror, The Amish Project, written and performed by Jessica Dickey, is a one-woman show told through the voices of various people connected to that tragic incident. But as the program notes make clear, Dickey has taken a different approach to creating her voices.
Unlike Deveare Smith and Kaufman who spent weeks interviewing people about the incidents they portrayed, Dickey has simply imagined the thoughts and feelings of the people involved. “I was highly aware through the entire process that somewhere out there are the real people who went through the event,” she writes. But, she continues, “I purposefully did not research the gunman or his widow nor did I conduct interviews of any kind.”
Oh dear, I thought, my heart sinking as I read her comments, so this is going to be documentary theater lite. The fact that I like Dickey’s work as much as I do and that I found it so moving is a testament to her strong writing and acting skills and to the sensitive direction of Sarah Cameron Sunde.
Working on a stage with a minimal set—a chair, a few suspended window frames—and dressed in traditional Amish garb, Dickey creates seven characters, including two victims of the shooting and the widow of the man who committed the crime. She has changed the names of these people but slips into and out of their personalities with impressive agility, etching them so sharply that, in most cases, you can tell, by the hunch of a shoulder or the way the eyes move, who is going to speak before she or he even says a word.
Dickey is particularly winning as the young, wide-eyed Amish girl who opens the play. Having done some homework, she also does a good job of conveying the details of Amish beliefs and customs, channeling much of the information through her impersonation of a local college professor who has studied the group.
But Dickey makes missteps too. Far too much time is spent on the only marginally-related story of a stereotypically sassy Puerto Rican salesgirl who works in a store near the shootings. The character provides some levity but Dickey seems to keep her around largely because she so clearly gets a kick out of playing that character. Meanwhile, the gunman's wife that Dickey imagines seems unnecessarily crude. The program note says she doesn’t want to hurt any of those involved in the tragedy but it’s hard to see how the real-life widow wouldn’t be further wounded by this portrait.
For the most part, though, this small 70-minute show fulfills its mission as a hymn of praise to the Amish community. It doesn’t explain why such terrible things as the massacre happen but Dickey's admiration for the Amish way of life is sincere and her heartfelt play shows that even the most tragic events can produce moments of grace. And so does The Amish Project.
Nine years have passed since Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project created The Laramie Project, the groundbreaking documentary play about the homophobia-inspired murder of Matthew Shepard. Using published news reports and personal interviews with some 200 townspeople in Laramie Wyoming, the piece was a moving meditation on the murder’s effect on the community in which the young gay college student lived and died. Kaufman and the company went back to Laramie last year for an update and The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later is scheduled be presented as a staged reading on Oct. 12 at theaters across the country, including Alice Tully Hall here in New York. 
