‘The Amish Project’ leaves you breathless

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Sadieh Rifai gives a tour de force as all seven characters featured in the American Theater Company’s staging of “The Amish Project.”

Updated: November 11, 2011 5:11PM

It happens very rarely. But there are times when you leave a theater fervently hoping no one will try to engage you in small talk and break the spell that has just been so magically cast.

This certainly was the case as I left American Theater Company’s altogether luminous production of “The Amish Project,” the one-woman, seven-character play written by Jessica Dickey, meticulously directed by PJ Paparelli, and performed to sublime effect by Sadieh Rifai, a young Chicago actress who emerges here as a blazing star.

Rifai gives a riveting performance in a play that requires both an extraordinary depth of emotional understanding and an exceptional level of pure technique. And Dickey’s 70-minute work, a little masterpiece of insight and concision, authenticity and high theatricality, gives her plenty to feed on.

With echoes of the multiperspective approach of both Anna Deavere Smith’s monologues and “The Laramie Project,” “The Amish Project” gives us an imagined yet piercingly real anatomy of a community devastated by a particularly heinous crime. (Dickey conducted no interviews in her research.)

On the morning of Oct. 2, 2006, in the Pennsylvania town of Nickel Mines, the community’s Amish children gathered in their one-room schoolhouse. Eddie Stuckey, the local (non-Amish) milkman who lived nearby with his wife and three young sons, drove up to the school in his truck, pulled out a gun, commanded all the boys and adults to leave, and proceeded to tie up and subsequently shoot 10 girls. Five of those girls died. As the police arrived, Stuckey turned the gun on himself.

But the most remarkable part of the whole savage event is this: Within hours of the shootings, the Amish not only offered condolences to Stuckey’s family, but offered forgiveness, bringing to bear a form of spirituality and a philosophy of life far more foreign to many than their horsedrawn buggies and rejection of electricity.

We meet two of the gunman’s victims — Velda Yoder, the adorable, precocious, ever-talkative girl who loves drawing with chalk, and Anna, her older sister, who seems quieter and more devout. We hear from the clearly twisted Eddie, and Eddie’s wife, Carol, who is driven to rage, terror and a certain insanity by the events. We meet America, the tough-talking young Latina rebuffed by Carol when she tries to help her, and Sherry, the local woman who has no great love for her Amish neighbors, but easily hurls blame on Carol for being an inattentive wife. We also hear from Bill North, a non-Amish scholar of Amish culture and spokesperson for the traumatized community.

Rifai, with her wonderfully expressive face and luminous dark eyes, never changes out of the robin’s egg blue cotton dress and white bonnet that she is almost ceremoniously dressed in as the play begins (a dress that was handmade for this production by an Amish woman from Nickel Mines).

But with her bravura, split-second shifts of body language, attitude, vocal tones and accents, she easily moves back and forth among the seven characters she vividly portrays. She is riveting as she makes an entire world, and a multiplicity of world views, spring to life.

William Boles’ haunting set, with its poetic evocation of corn fields, is exquisitely lit by Jesse Klug, with prayerful music and sound by Fabian Obispo.

In one of the play’s most compelling sequences, Carol explains how disoriented she felt when the Amish came to her with prayers, food and forgiveness. In some real sense, the hellishness of the crime seemed almost magnified by this effort to restore the ideal spirit of life.