Tuscarora High play portrays aftermath of Pennsylvania Amish school shooting

Oct. 26—Tuscarora High School theater students are tackling a heavy subject for their fall play this year: a 2006 shooting in an Amish schoolhouse that claimed the lives of five girls.

"The Amish Project" by playwright Jessica Dickey was originally crafted as a one-woman show, but it's been adapted for ensembles.

Terence Moore, Tuscarora's assistant drama director, said he knew early on that he wanted this year's play to challenge his students, especially those who might want to pursue acting as a career.

He also wanted to choose a topic that would feel relevant to them — something serious, but still doable.

"The Amish Project" fit the bill.

"It's got a lot for them to sink their teeth into," Moore said.

The play is a fictionalized account of the attack on a one-room schoolhouse in the village of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, near Lancaster. The shooter, a local milk truck driver, turned the gun on himself after killing the victims he had taken hostage.

But in the aftermath of the shooting, the community made national headlines — and inspired books and movies, as well as the play — for the compassion and forgiveness residents extended to the family of the shooter.

"The thrust of the headlines and the articles are about faith and forgiveness," Moore said, "and how amazing it was that the Amish very, very quickly forgave the shooter and went to grieve with his widow."

Natalie Cruz, a Tuscarora senior, plays the shooter's widow in the play. She said it was difficult, at first, for students to dive into the dark material.

"But then we all realized that it's something that is really important to share and really important to talk about," she said.

She echoed Moore, emphasizing that the core of the play didn't focus on the shooting itself, but rather the community's response.

Hector Garcia, who plays a professor of Amish culture in the play, said the script forced him to grow as a performer.

The material also taught him lessons about life off the stage, he said.

"It's been helping a lot to learn how to move forward, how to process, how you want to take things in," Garcia said.

Moore said he'd heard "murmurs and whispers" of criticism for choosing "The Amish Project" from people who thought the material was too mature.

No students were forced to participate in the play, he said. But he said offering the script wasn't much different than, for instance, assigning college-level math work to 10th graders who sign up for advanced courses.

"We ask [students] to be more mature than perhaps they should be in just about every other way," Moore said. "In the arts, shouldn't we be requiring that same kind of rigor from them?"

The topic of mass violence is something students are all too familiar with, he said.

On the evening before the show's opening night, a gunman killed at least 18 people and injured more than a dozen others in Maine.

"To the people who are coming tonight, it will probably make them think even more," Garcia said on Thursday, "because of this that has happened just now."