By
Hanady Kader
April 12, 2007
Few Americans really understand what it is like to live in a war zone. Americans hear about war in Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan and Iraq, but few can say that they know it firsthand.
Rachel Corrie was one of those people. She, though, decided to see for herself what it was like to live in an area ravaged by war when she packed up in January 2003 for Gaza as a member of the International Solidarity Movement — a movement that is “committed to resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land using nonviolent, direct-action methods and principles,” according to its Web site.
Corrie attended The Evergreen State College. She was crushed to death in March 2003 by an Israeli bulldozer as she stood defending a Palestinian home that was being destroyed.
My Name is Rachel Corrie was written by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner and first performed in London. It has stirred long-standing feelings and feuds, and outside the playhouse people pass out pamphlets that reaffirm Rachel’s actions or disregard them as misleading and naïve. Theater-goers should tuck these pamphlets away and absorb this poignant play for what it is: the story of a passionate American girl who wanted to make a difference in the lives of people she saw struggling because of American foreign policy.
The play is an ongoing monologue composed entirely of Rachel’s journal entries and e-mails to her family. Rachel is played by Marya Kaminski, who captures Corrie’s ambition and determination as she understands the difficulties faced by the people she defends.
During the play, the set is transformed from Rachel’s cluttered bohemian-decorated room in Olympia to the homes of Palestinians in Gaza with whom she stays. The monologue is funny and engaging, and Kaminski recounts moments from Corrie’s life as mundane as skinny-dipping in Puget Sound to running into an ex-boyfriend at the library.
As the play progresses, Corrie’s e-mails to her parents, which have a looming eeriness in hindsight, become increasingly impassioned and frustrated as she experiences water wells being blown up, checkpoints that take hours to cross and startling gunshots that shoot through her tent and the homes she sleeps in. “How do you survive in a nonexistent place?” she asks.
The play has had its share of publicity and controversy. It was set to play in the New York Theatre Workshop in 2006, but amid concerns from groups and the theater it was postponed indefinitely. The pandemonium that followed gripped New York for weeks and ultimately the play was performed in Greenwich Village’s Minetta Lane Theatre.
My Name Is Rachel Corrie fills a void because instead of playing a third-party observer role, it sees war from the perspective of an average American who has physically and emotionally become a part of it. This inspiring play encourages viewers to embrace wartime struggles and understand them from a very American view in a time when America is very much at war.
1 Comments
#1 D. Gordon
on July 7, 2007 at 2:18 p.m.(Frederick, MD | Unverified Name)
I saw the play two nights ago at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, WV. I'm sympathetic to Rachel's politics, but I agree w/ reviewers I've seen on the Web who have argued that there's more to the Middle East conflict than Rachel was aware of (or tried to make herself aware of). Thinking further about Rachel's life trajectory today, it strikes me that she sort of resembles Zionist founder Theodor Herzl (a view that guarantees me anger from both sides, I realize!). Herzl, like Rachel, was a mediocre artist--a playwright, as it turns out--who couldn't find a place for himself in his home city of Vienna (both anti-semitism and lack of talent were factors). At a certain point in his adult life--after witnessing French anti-semitic reaction to the Dreyfus Affair, among other things--he decided to embrace the political mission of creating a national homeland for the Jewish people. Henceforth that aim was the center of his existence and he basically worked himself to death in the effort to make it happen, dying in his early 40s. Even as he took on this new role, however, he continued to write and promote light plays of the sort he was composing before he found his mission. --Hopefully some of the parallels are already apparent in the above: Rachel, too, was foundering and alienated until the effort to save an entire people took her over. She, like Herzl, occasionally looked backward and sideward to see if she ought to be doing something else. And she and the people she was trying to save were about as strange a set of bedfellows (she a self-described "migratory bird," Palestinians an intensely rooted group) as the secular, aristocratic Herzl and the largely devout, unpolished European Jewish community he tried to lead. In dying, they both became saints to certain interest groups, but as one reviewer has pointed out regarding Rachel, that makes her both a little more than, and a little less than, a person.
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