The Amish Project

For 70 minutes, Dickey -- under the direction of Sarah Cameron Sunde -- imagines how those involved might have acted as the tragedy unfolded and in its agitated aftermath, before employing her handiwork as a showcase for herself. During this time, Dickey covers the slaughter of these innocents from several perspectives, including doomed sisters Anna and Velda, gunman Edward Stuckey, his widow Carol, and an expert on the sect, Bill North, who's introduced holding a press conference to explain the complex Amish response. Still, the show doesn't entirely surmount its major drawback -- which is that it's fictionalizing the thoughts of its still-alive subjects.

One of Dickey's goals is to attempt to get to the motive behind the crime, while scrupulously avoiding saying anything cut-and-dried about Roberts' criminal behavior. At one point, she has the hard-edged, inconsolable Carol say of Roberts: "He couldn't keep his darkness down anymore, and it ate him up -- it ate him, and it ate those poor little girls, and now it's eating me." But the work's larger purpose -- and her play's strongest feature -- is to underline the forgiveness that is at the foundation of Amish belief. She reports it in numerous passages, not the least when Carol describes a conciliatory visit she received from the dead girls' families. Dickey also has North remark with a certain amount of professional awe, "I've been teaching about them, studying them for 25 years -- it doesn't matter what your faith is or if you even have one -- something about them makes you wonder: What am I? Could I be more?"