Jewish Week: Rachel Corrie The Play, At Last
Katharine Viner, who adapted the activist’s journal to the stage, weighs in on the furious controversy and Corrie’s ‘powerful voice.’
Liel Leibovitz, Jewish Week
As a preview performance of the new play “My Name is Rachel Corrie” drew to an end in a downtown theater one day last week, it didn’t take long for passions to run high.
With some members of the audience still applauding the now-empty stage, others quickly engaged in political scuffles. “You,” one woman hissed at two excitable teenagers, clapping hard, “clearly didn’t understand the play,” implying that the teenagers’ enthusiasm was due to an incomplete understanding of the intricacies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The teenagers muttered something in response.
Elsewhere in the thick line of people snaking out of the theater, debates sprung up forcefully: Was the play moving or manipulative? Was Corrie, the 23-year-old American activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza in 2003, a martyr or a stooge?
Even before she became the subject of a play, Corrie’s legacy galvanized supporters and enraged detractors. To the former, she was a heroic figure, a fearless young woman who was not afraid to sacrifice her life for a cause she believed in, namely Palestinian rights and the end of Israeli occupation. To the latter, Corrie and the organization to which she belonged — the International Solidarity Movement — were, at best, apologists for Palestinian terrorism and, at worst, hateful zealots.
Like a handful of other cases — the now-famous photograph of the Palestinian child Mohammed al-Dura, cowering in his father’s arms before being struck by a bullet, comes to mind — Corrie’s death sparked a furious flurry of accusations on both sides.
An official report issued by the Israel Defense Forces ruled that Corrie was “not run over by an engineering vehicle but rather was struck by a hard object, most probably a slab of concrete which was moved or slid down while the mound of earth which she was standing behind was moved.” The report, however, was called into question by many, including Human Rights Watch, which interviewed numerous eyewitnesses to the incident and concluded that “the impartiality and professionalism of the Israeli investigation into Corrie’s death are highly questionable.”
Like few plays in recent memory, “My Name is Rachel Corrie” is stirring the sort of controversy that does not die down easily. It was scheduled for production with another New York theater, the New York Theatre Workshop, which dropped it last spring citing, among other reasons, concerns expressed by unnamed sources in the local Jewish community. It was slated for a reading at Theater J, Washington, D.C.’s prestigious Jewish playhouse, and was quickly cancelled for unclear reasons. Just last week, the eighth-grade students at Southwood, an arts magnet school in the southern tip of Florida’s Miami-Dade County, were prohibited by their teacher and principal from including excerpts from the play in a performance, a decision a spokesman for the county’s schools, John Schuster, pinned on the play’s controversial nature.
Sitting in a downtown café last weekend, a few days after the play began its previews at the Minetta Lane Theatre, Katharine Viner seemed baffled by the maelstrom. Viner, who is features editor at the Guardian in London, and actor Alan Rickman adapted Corrie’s e-mails and journal entries into the 95-minute, one-woman play, which became the fastest-selling production in the Royal Court’s history and enjoyed two runs at the reputable theater before moving on to a larger house at the West End, London’s equivalent of Broadway. Playing Corrie is Megan Dodds, winner of the 2006 London Theatregoers’ Choice Award for best actress for her portrayal of the American activist. (Bree Elrod plays Corrie in the Saturday and Sunday matinee performances.)
“I think the power of the play must lie in how easy [Corrie] is to relate to,” Viner said. “It must lie in the fact that she’s an ordinary American girl, albeit one very engaged in the world, and albeit one who’s an excellent writer, but still easy to relate to, still struggling with her parents, still struggling with boyfriends.”
Another reason, she added, was the power of Corrie’s writing. Often sounding more like a West Coast, modern incarnation of Rimbaud than a confused, well-intentioned young woman, Corrie’s words are evocative, weaving irony and indignation together into an elegant tapestry.
Corrie’s voice, Viner continued, was what drew her to the play. She first became aware of Corrie in March of 2003, shortly after her death, when the Guardian published a selection of her e-mails. Rickman, the actor best known for his portrayal of Professor Snape in the popular Harry Potter films, was attracted both to Corrie’s tragic story and her distinctive voice as a writer.
“Alan saw [Corrie’s e-mails] in the Guardian, and he was just bowled over by the writing,” said Viner. “He took it to the Royal Court, and said, ‘Not only does she write brilliantly but she also writes in a way that would work well in performance. The words sound good, somehow.’ And I was asked to get involved at that point, because it was editing non-fiction material, and that’s what I do all day long, and also I spent quite a lot of time in the Middle East.”
At first, Viner said, she approached Corrie’s death from a multitude of angles, collecting interviews given by anybody from Corrie’s childhood friends to the Israeli soldiers involved in her death. It didn’t take long, however, for Viner and Rickman to discover that the drama emanated not from a multitude of voices but from one.
“We realized that it was Rachel’s voice that was powerful,” she said, “and to have this kind of patchwork would be aimless, whereas Rachel’s voice has a very clear narrative, a very clear progression you can follow.”
Having received the blessing of Corrie’s parents, along with her diaries and other correspondences predating her stay in Gaza, Viner and Rickman arranged the entries into a full narrative that begins with Corrie preparing to leave her Olympia, Wash., home and ends with her death, run over by an Israeli bulldozer she was trying to prevent from demolishing a Palestinian physician’s home.
The play opened in April 2005 at the Royal Court Theatre — best known, perhaps, as the house that first staged most of George Bernard Shaw’s plays — and returned for an encore engagement in October of that year before moving on to a nine-week run at London’s Playhouse Theatre in spring 2006. The play was also nominated for an Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement, one of British theater’s top honors.
As the play was getting ready to cross the Atlantic, however, controversy came courting. Originally picked up by the New York Theatre Workshop, a respected outfit with a long history of political plays such as Tony Kushner’s “Homebody / Kabul,” the production soon made headlines for not being produced.
A few weeks before the play was scheduled to open in New York in the spring of 2006, the workshop’s artistic director, James Nicola, announced that the production would be indefinitely postponed. In an interview in The Washington Post earlier this year, Nicola explained that his decision came after consulting with a few friends, some of whom were Jewish. “Nobody told us not to do the play,” Nicola said of his talks with his Jewish advisers. “The only thing we heard was ‘Do the play, sure. But be aware that this is a community on the defensive and if somebody is going to pick a fight, there is going to be a response.’”
The workshop’s decision not to risk the ire of the Jewish community — it remains unclear whether any Jewish group actively attempted to dissuade the theater from producing the play — drew sharp criticism from many in the artistic community. On March 20, The New York Times ran a letter from more than 20 prominent Jewish writers, including Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, expressing their dismay over the cancellation.
“In London [the play] played to sell-out houses,” read the letter. “Critics praised it. Audiences found it intensely moving. So what is it about Rachel Corrie’s writings, her thoughts, her feelings, her confusions, her idealism, her courage, her search for meaning in life — what is it that New York audiences must be protected from?”
The current production, however, has not received any protest from anyone in the Jewish community. A possible reason for the discrepancy between the first, cancelled production and the current one, said a source close to the production, may lie in the differences between the two productions’ economic models. While the New York Theater Workshop is a nonprofit, depending for its existence on the support of committed patrons, the current production is a strictly commercial endeavor put on by the James Hammerstein Productions company.
Comparing the two “is like comparing apples and oranges,” said the source. “The New York Theatre Workshop has board members. It has subscribers. It has people who donate money. The current production is commercial.” Therefore, while the Workshop has long-term relationships with a variety of patrons to consider, the current production is a short-term enterprise, offering a production in high demand.
Still, some in the Jewish community remain critical. David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, said that although he had not seen the play, he has heard some concerned voices.
“We’re certainly not in the business of trying to stop a play from being presented,” said Harris, “although the word on the street is that it’s a rather tendentious and politicized play. People should know that going in, and draw their own conclusions.”
The criticism is one that still occupies Viner. The furor over the play, she said, might be due, in part, to its portrayal of Corrie as a young woman in full.
“We just wanted to show her as a kind of ordinary person,” Viner said, “to show her flaws and her moodiness and her bossiness maybe, just to try and show her as a rounded human being, rather than a caricature. … Lots of untruths have been written about her, and she has been demonized.”
Corrie’s text supports this assertion. Far from containing anti-Israeli diatribes, she details the hardships of daily life for ordinary Palestinians, occasionally hitting on several profound truths.
“To some degree,” Corrie writes in what is one of the play’s deeply touching moments, “we are all kids curious about other kids. Egyptian kids shouting at strange women wandering into the path of tanks. Palestinian kids shot from the tanks when they peak out from behind walls to see what’s going on. International kids standing in front of tanks with banners. Israeli kids in the tanks anonymously — occasionally shouting and also occasionally waving — many forced to be here, many just aggressive — shooting into the houses as we wander away.”
Such observations, Viner said, propel the play above the realm of the merely political, injecting it with universal value. “I would say that it’s a political play, but that’s not all it is, and she was a political woman but that’s not all that she was,” she said.
And still, Viner added, she was well aware that even the play’s merits were unlikely to quell the critics accusing it of one-sidedness. To that, Viner has a clear answer: The play is not about Palestinians, or Israelis, but about one young American woman.
“It’s one person’s view of the situation,” she said. “We don’t pretend that it’s the definitive story of the Middle East from 1948 to the present day. This is Rachel Corrie’s take. And I think audiences are sophisticated enough and understand that it’s one voice, and that that voice has validity.” n
“My Name is Rachel Corrie” is playing from Oct. 15 through Nov. 19 at the Minetta Lane Theatre, 18 Minetta Lane, Manhattan. For tickets, $45 - $65, call the box office at (212) 420-8000.
