Quick Q&A: Jessica Dickey

I had the pleasure of a quick chat with playwright/performer Jessica Dickey, whose The Amish Project is performing at The Cherry Lane Theatre through this weekend, following a sold-out run at the Fringe Festival last Summer.

The Amish Project is your debut as a playwright. When did it occur to you to become a writer?
Arthur Laurents is a friend of mine because I worked on a play of his at George Street. We were writing letters back and forth. Finally he said to me “You’re a writer. You should write a play”.
Although the play is fiction, you were initially inspired by the Nickel Mines shootings. How were you affected by them?
The morning of the events I happened to be on a treadmill with the tv on and that story broke right in front of me while I was running and it made me lose my step and fall. The crime just broke my heart. I could not even begin to wrap my head around this idea that someone had gone into an Amish one-room schoolhouse with a gun. And I’m from pretty close to the area, about an hour southwest. It just got worse as the details of the story started to surface, that the gunman intended to rape them and that he was prepared for a long stand off. It shook me. I felt some part of my soul permanently dim from just taking in the story. I don’t tend to get obsessed with a crime the way that we nationally do, the way we make a loop in the media that we watch for a week, but this stayed with me. I could not look away from it, so I’d have to say that a very deep painful seed was planted at the time.
What about the story most compelled you to dramatize it?
The response of the Amish community, which was in a way that I don’t think is even a blip in our national consciousness. Their reaction was to reach out rather than to hit back. Serial killers, the Unabomber, whatever it is – we as a nation tend to fixate on “why dd they do this?” And we get their journals or interview their neighbors. We want to know why but the truth is there is no why. If we could read their minds we could still not grapple with the idea that somewhere they crossed that line between a thought and an action. The Amish have a container for the why, which is in their minds “God’s plan” or that it’s not their place to question why. Their place is the work at hand, which is making something good of this.
Did you always intend for The Amish Project to be a solo play?
When I started writing I didn’t have any preconceptions about how many actors or how many characters. The three characters that immediately started – for lack of a better word – speaking to me were the two girls and Carol, the widow. Somewhere in there, around page ten, I realized “Oh. I’m saying these things.” It was suddenly very clear that I was playing them. That was such a surprise to me, and yet came so organically from the first phase of working on the piece. I just went with it and never looked back.
Had you ever performed a solo show before?
No. I’d never felt the drive to do one, and it’s a very specific animal. There’s a legacy behind “written and performed by” that I don’t necessarily feel honored to uphold, but solo shows have this ability to be so theatrical. So much theatre lacks theatricality much of the time and that’s so disappointing to me. So I have to confess, I was pretty terrified performing at the Fringe. I don’t pray before a performance but something about this play I would feel I needed help from the deepest parts of me.
Did the run of the show at the Fringe teach you more as a performer, or as a playwright?
As a performer. What was really amazing to me was how much information I was getting from the audience. I felt I could read their collective mind constantly talking to me while I’m constantly talking to them. I could feel when they were worried and fearful of a very sensitive subject and not knowing that I was going to take good care of them and carry them well through difficult terrain. I knew they were in good hands but I could feel the moments when they didn’t know yet. I could feel when their heart was hurting about the crime or when they needed to laugh. It was overwhelming at first, and then addicting.
What does the success of shows like The Amish Project say about the theatre marketplace right now?
I think it’s starting to be a self producing and self generating market in a lot of ways. Not that it’s the whole picture but it seems to be one aspect that is coming forward more and more, which is “you make it, then we’ll shop.” It’s the result of main culture getting homogenized more and more and then subculture starts to evolve to create that diversity so that theatre can survive.