I recently saw a play called "The Amish Project," and thought I should share the unique perspective that it presented. This play is a fictional story about a real incident that happened in 2006 in Lancaster Pennsylvania. Lancaster has a little pocket called the Amish country, hosting the people who prefer to live an Amish lifestyle. In 2006, there was a shooter who entered an Amish school and killed five schoolgirls, then killed himself. This incident is what inspired playwright Jessica Dickey to write a one woman show that depicts multiple characters and opinions.
The show highlights the response of the Amish compared to the response of the rest of the Lancaster community. The characters who are not Amish react as the audience expects: they are mortified and choose to pity the Amish, who, they admit, they do not really understand. One character even calls the Amish bizarre and weird in their ways. The Amish choose to react in a much unexpected way, which reminds me of the expectations derived from affect.
The Amish were shocked and distraught by the situation, and the playwright chose to create a situation that involved one Amish family in particular that lost two daughters in the shooting. The audience sees the pain that this family goes through, but they also see the family approach the wife of the shooter with kindness. The wife of the gunman is a main character in the play, and she goes through multiple episodes of struggling with how to deal with her horrific situation. Most of society is disgusted with her because they only associate her with the gunman. One woman even tells her that it is her fault that the girls are dead because she didn't "handle her husband as a woman ought to."
The Amish family, however, reaches out to the wife, and consoles her. They bring her food and attempt to comfort her. The audience is drawn to admire the Amish because most people would despise anyone that was related to the killer of their children, but the Amish chose to see the situation differently, acknowledging that the wife was not at fault for the killings, and they extended a helping hand for a woman that lost everything because of what her husband did.
This challenges the expectations of affects because of the reactions of those who lost someone they loved. The Amish behaved differently than what the rest of society expected, which may mean that affect behaves differently in the Amish society.
