By Jessica Dickey. Directed by Evan Frayne. A Bleeding Heart Theatre production presented in association with Pacific Theatre. At Pacific Theatre on Friday, November 6. Continues until November 21

The Amish Project is okay. I had hoped it would be excellent.

Playwright Jessica Dickey took her inspiration from a real-life school shooting. In 2006, a man walked into an Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, and shot 10 girls, then himself. The Amish community shocked many by responding with forgiveness; they offered support to everyone affected, including the killer’s widow and children.
Dickey has not made a piece of documentary theatre, however. In fact, when she was writing, she was so intent on maintaining her artistic licence that she didn’t interview anyone touched by the tragedy. Oddly, she has used some of their names, but she has made up her own story.

In The Amish Project, one performer plays all seven characters: two girls, Anna and Velda, who are killed; the dead shooter; the shooter’s widow; an outraged local woman; a pregnant 16-year-old; and an academic who is an expert on the Amish.

Some of the writing is evocative. The killer, who planned to molest the girls, describes them, in their modest clothing and bonnets, as being “like a clean secret”. And his widow, who is struggling to hold herself together as she puts cereal on the table for her two young boys, says, “Suddenly, I am painfully aware of how alive they are.”

Too often, though, the script is pedantic. Bill, the academic, flat-out lectures about Amish culture until he finally reveals why he is personally attracted to it. And America, the pregnant teen, is worse: she delivers a series of on-the-nose thematic statements. America played Titania in a school reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and interprets one of the fairy queen’s speeches for us: “It’s from all of this fighting that the world is messed up.” America is also interested in St. Francis, who has taught her that “It is in giving that we receive.” Offering her own insight, she observes, “Everybody’s got problems.”

In early productions of The Amish Project, the playwright was also the actor, and the script is clearly designed to showcase a bravura performance. Under Evan Frayne’s direction, Susie Coodin doesn’t deliver one. Thanks in part, no doubt, to movement consultant Wendy Gorling, Coodin’s physical characterizations are sharply defined: the gunman’s hunch; the way his wife puts her hand, protectively, across her chest. But Frayne has set such a fast pace that it almost always feels like Coodin is skipping across the surface of the material instead of settling into its potentially heart-wrenching details.

Compassion is what goodness is all about. Other playwrights have found more effective ways to say so.