My Name is Rachel Corrie
Alan Rickman (Director and co-editor) and Katherine Viner (co-editor)
Minetta Lane Theater, through December 30th
Three years after the death that turned a young woman into an icon and set off floods of tears and dialogue groups on campuses across the country, the specter of Rachel Corrie is back—and she’s more sympathetic than her critics would have ever suspected. My Name is Rachel Corrie, a one-woman play about the 23-year-old American activist who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003, is a sensitive and chilling character study that hardly deserves the infamy it has acquired.
The play, which opened to critical acclaim in London, in 2005, has not found an easy way to the American stage. In the year leading up to Rachel Corrie’s U.S. premiere at Minetta Lane, two theaters in New York and DC—one of them Jewish—canceled their plans to stage productions and readings of the play, citing its controversial nature. We likely have those skirmishes to thank for propelling this play into the extended-run spotlight, where it belongs.
Adapted for the stage by Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner from Corrie’s journals and emails, My Name is Rachel Corrie is a rare combination of political stridence and theater that manages to feel less like the former and more like the latter without ever compromising Corrie’s commitments. Sitting in the 400-seat theater, one gets the sense of intimately knowing the activist at an arm’s length: close enough to feel privileged by her candor but distant enough to put her fervor into perspective.
Until the last four weeks of its showing, the title role has belonged to actress Megan Dodds, who fills the stage with her frenetic enthusiasm and introspection. The lights go up on a bedroom in Corrie’s native liberal womb of Olympia, Washington, and the opening moments lay out the tensions that characterize the young woman before she leaves for the Middle East: a fierce love for her over-involved mother, whose presence looms above her like a “Macy’s Parade balloon”; her adolescent competitiveness with an ex’s new “hoochie-ass” girlfriend; and the sentiment that ultimately propels her to join in a geopolitical struggle across the world: a feeling of rank intolerance for entrapment. In typically symbolic yet casual prose, Corrie links her ethical compass to the heroic efforts of the migratory salmon swimming beneath the roads of her hometown. “It’s hard to be extraordinarily vacuous when you’ve got salmon on your mind,” she laments.
The play’s initial mention of the Israel-Palestine conflict sounds like another in a string of political issues to which the protagonist lends her heart. But after Dodds pushes aside the red wall of Corrie’s thought chamber and reveals the rest of the bullet-ridden, concrete Gaza set behind her, her earnestness is clear and her delivery admirable, and her age—at 36, she is 13 years older than the character she plays—is the only hurdle she grazes on her way up. Against a backdrop of mosquitoes buzzing, children shouting, and occasional artillery fire, Corrie provides a running reflection on her time in the Occupied Territories, musing on checkpoints, house demolitions, her post-Palestine future, and suicide bombing. Had Rickman and Viner chosen to dramatize a piecemeal solution from Corrie’s impassioned writings, critics might have a case in raising a stink. But Corrie is not drawn as a politician; she is a witness and an intellectual—and a compelling one.
We see the woman sail over her mother’s point about the senselessness of suicide bombing by describing the “atrocities” of economic strangulation, home destruction, and innocent deaths. Paying no heed to the emailed reminders of realpolitik, she juxtaposes the horror of being a bystander with the warm moments she spends sitting in a “big puddle of blankets” with a host family who pokes fun at her difficulty watching a Hollywood thriller. And while Corrie reports on the disintegration of her faith in humanity, she remarks on her newfound appreciation for people’s ability to “remain human” under duress. “I think the word is dignity,” she muses.
We don’t see Corrie’s presciently dreamt-about death by an Israeli bulldozer; we hear it on a radio newscast, broadcast over a darkened, empty stage, spinning a narrative that evokes the revisions and dogma it immediately started to feed. What is ultimately most alluring about the play is that it neither heroizes nor demonizes the young student, but tells a tale of one war so deeply that her ruminations on humanity are universally relevant.
In an email sent one month before her death, Corrie reflects on being noticed by an on-duty Egyptian soldier. “Something disturbing about this friendly curiosity,” she says. “It reminded me of how much, to some degree, 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…” Uttered from the relative safety of a Greenwich Village stage, the dispatches of the tragically curious kid from Olympia reverberate more lucidly than explosions and picket lines ever could.
