Credit: Nick Romanenko

Carrie L. Nutt, an MFA at Mason Gross School of the Arts, wrote a play about her experience at a strict Christian boarding school

Carrie Louise Nutt was 17 when her parents sent her to a Christian boarding school for troubled teens in a remote section of Missouri.

Minutes after arriving at the Mountain Park Baptist Boarding Academy, she was ready to bolt.

But in a brutal introduction, staff and students grabbed her, dragged her to the showers, and shouted at her to strip, she said. Her jean shorts, T-shirt, and underwear were deemed sinful and confiscated. Girls had to wear modest split skirts called culottes.

“Everything that came in on my body was taken away,” she said.

Nutt, now a 32-year-old M.F.A. student at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, spent one year at the rigid, puritanical school, where she said students were routinely humiliated, ostracized, and subjected to corporal punishment. The school closed several years ago amid declining enrollment and allegations of abuse.

Nutt’s traumatic experience has fueled her recent play, Hard Heart, which she wrote for her master’s thesis. The drama made its world premiere last month at the Philip J. Levin Theater in New Brunswick for a weeklong run.

For Nutt, who has been haunted for years by her memories of Mountain Park, the play is an artistic and personal breakthrough.

It’s the Seattle native’s first full-length, professionally produced production. And it comes after a number of attempts to harness the searing memories and forge them into an artistic work that would appeal to a wide audience.

“For years and years, I would try to sit down and write this story, but I usually couldn’t finish it – it was too painful,” she said. “This is the most articulate expression of it I have ever been able to make.”

One crucial contribution to the creative process, Nutt said, was the mentoring she received from Lee Blessing, the noted dramatist and head of the playwriting program at Mason Gross.

Blessing, who was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Tony Award nominee for his play, A Walk in the Woods, encouraged her to write about her experience after reading an article she had penned about Mountain Park.

“He looked at that article, and he said, ‘Wow, this is your story,’ ” Nutt said. “You are very emotionally connected to this; you should forget everything else and write this.”

So over the course of a year, she reached across the 15-year divide and began summoning up the painful details.

Growing up in Seattle, Nutt was a high achieving student with a rebellious streak that eventually prompted her parents to consider private school.

Neither Nutt nor her parents knew the truth about Mountain Park, which had been recommended through a tough love support group. Nutt envisioned a New England prep school environment, where she’d read literature all day and pursue artistic endeavors.

She was in for a shock.

The daily routine at Mountain Park began at 6 a.m. with the sounding of reveille to roust students out of bed, followed by Bible readings. Spankings with a wooden paddle were meted out for a variety of infractions, including saying you wanted to go home, Nutt said. Students were also made to wear baby pacifiers, carry baby chairs, or stand in a corner.

“There was always the threat of physical violence,” Nutt said. “You could get swatted for a lot of different things.”

Nutt finished her senior year of high school at Mountain Park and eventually went on to attend the University of Washington in Seattle, where she earned a double degree in creative writing and drama.

But the year at Mountain Park continued to exert a hold on her inner life.

“Your ability to be intimate, to trust – all of that was destroyed,” she said. “The things you used to find pleasing, you can’t connect with anymore – you feel changed.”

Writing the play was a challenge on two levels. Although it was based on her experience, some of the details were fictionalized to create a succinct plot line. For example, a murder that occurs in the play actually happened after Nutt left the school.

The writing also presented a personal struggle: Nutt had to fully explore the emotional pain she has been living with for 15 years.

But in the end, she said, presenting the highly personal drama to the public seemed to relieve her feelings of isolation. And it also helped her forge a bond with other survivors.

“It was incredibly rewarding,” she said. “It brought a lot of the pain out of the closet and into the light of day.”