Coming to the Fountain Theatre in Hollywood for only 3 performances – November 21 – Nov. 23 is Amy Englehardt’s IMPACT. IMPACT is an award-winning multimedia solo monologue with music – an exploration of compassion, grief and human kindness. She is the narrator, singer, and keyboard artist – accompanied by a cellist and a drummer. Initially developed at the National Winter Playwrights Retreat, IMPACT’s first iteration was co-produced by the Cell Theatre NYC and Michigan’s Playhouse at White Lake. This one-act solo-show by playwright/composer/performer Amy Engelhardt is a deep reflection on the response of local Scottish people to the horrific Lockerbie bombing of Pan Am flight 103 on 21 December, 1988. More recently, IMPACT was included in the Edinburgh Festival in August 2023, where it had 26 performances.
Some of us recall this first of many terrorist attacks seem in the world since then. The plane, named Clipper Maid of the Seas, was blown up while flying from London to New York on that day in 1988. A total of 270 people died, 259 on board the Boeing 747 and 11 on the ground. Amy Englehardt was a student at Syracuse University in New York State in 1988 when 35 of her classmates perished in the fatal bombing of the plane.
Perhaps we have become even more jaded about tragedies of this scale since the Bombing of the World Trade Center in 2001 or the current genocide in Gaza. But Amy Englehardt created this 65-minute theatre piece to explode response of the local people in and around Lockerbie at the time of the disaster and how they reached out and continue to reach out to families and friends of victims. What Englehardt has chosen to do is to focus on the human response and healing process that people found for themselves after that event.
I spoke with Amy Englehardt about the inception of the play, which resulted from a visit she had to London as part of the cast of show promoting the Amazon series “Good Omen” in 2018. There she met up with two former Syracuse University students and the three headed north to Lockerbie to visit the site of the plane disaster, pay their respects, and visit local people. She describes her experience as a “strange series of coincidental thin moments” from which we gather deeper meaning. In the course of life, we often “follow signs” that seem random but lead us to greater understanding of what it is be human. She was so moved by the kindness of the local people of Lockerbie that it had a profound “impact” on her.
We talked about some of the stories of people lost in the plane bombing. She traveled to Lockerbie with Renee Boulanger, whose sister Nicole was a 21-year-old theatre student at Syracuse when she was killed in the bombing. Amy was traveling to Lockerbie with Kim Wickham, who was a friend of Nicole Boulanger, one of the victims whose remains were never found. A local woman named Josephine Donaldson actually found the purse that had belonged to Nicole. The local people treated these artifacts with great care and reverence – knowing that they mean so much to those who lost loved ones.
Amy stresses the importance of being a “witness” to places and others. Certainly, that is what she found at Lockerbie, when she visited the town in southwest Scotland. The “impact” in her solo-artist show is focused not so much on the “impact” of the plane disaster and loss of life as it is on the “impact” of those who have survived and helped and continue to reach out to others in need. She hopes that the greatest “impact” will be on the audience at the play and what they take away from the show.
Life is full of coincidence and it takes a disaster of this magnitude to bring out the best in human nature. Amy Englehardt gathered her thoughts and reflections about her experiences visiting Lockerbie in 2018 and ended up creating a one-person show with five songs that are full of hope and faith in other people. Amy has a long career in music and was a member of the Bob Band. She has five original songs in IMPACT. You can check out her albums on Bandcamp.com.
Performances at the Fountain Theatre are Friday, Nov. 21 at 8 p.m.; Saturday, Nov. 22 at 8 p.m.; and Sunday, Nov. 23 at 2 p.m. The Fountain Theatre is located at 5060 Fountain Avenue in Los Angeles (Hollywood) near Normandie. Tickets are $37.00. Contact the Fountain Theatre at (323) 663-1525.
