Notes From a Young Idealist in a World Gone Awry

MY NAME IS RACHEL CORRIE (New York Times theatre review)
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: October 16, 2006

Few plays have traveled to New York with as much excess baggage as “My Name Is Rachel Corrie,” which opened last night at the Minetta Lane Theater. This small, intense one-woman drama, first staged last year at the Royal Court Theater in London, makes its delayed American debut freighted with months of angry public argument, condemnation, celebration and prejudgment: all the heavy threads that make up the mantle of a cause célèbre.

So how does it stand on its own, this quiet, 90-minute work that has been preceded by so much noise?

Toward the end of the performance I attended, I heard one man choking back sobs and another snoring. I could sympathize with both responses.

I doubt that either was inspired by the sort of partisan politics that have made the play a topic of such bruising debate in New York. Edited by the British actor Alan Rickman and the journalist Katharine Viner, “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” is assembled from journal entries and e-mail messages written by its title character, a 23-year-old American who was killed in March 2003 by an Israeli Army bulldozer while protesting the razing of a house in the Gaza Strip.

In its initial London run, the play — which starred the American actress Megan Dodds, who repeats her performance here — was warmly received without setting off polemical fireworks. Those didn’t erupt until the New York Theater Workshop, a nonprofit institution known for championing politically daring work, announced in late February that it would indefinitely delay the play’s American premiere.

Given Ms. Corrie’s lightning-rod status as a pro-Palestinian activist — she has been held up as both a heroic martyr (by Yasir Arafat, among others) and a terminally naïve pawn — the New York Theater Workshop drew accusations of moral cowardice. Theater artists including Vanessa Redgrave, Harold Pinter and the American playwrights Tony Kushner and Christopher Shinn joined the fray. Rachel Corrie became a name best not mentioned at Manhattan dinner parties if you wanted your guests to hold on to their good manners.

Now that the Royal Court production of “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” has finally arrived in Manhattan, under the aegis of James Hammerstein Productions, many theatergoers wonder what all the shouting was about, especially in a town where one-person shows expressing extreme points of view are common theatrical fare.

The play, directed by Mr. Rickman, is not an animated recruiting poster for Palestinian activists. Its deeper fascination lies in its invigoratingly detailed portrait of a passionate political idealist in search of a constructive outlet. And its inevitable sentimental power is in its presentation of a blazing young life that you realize is on the verge of being snuffed out. (I kept thinking of the letters from Julian Bell, Virginia Woolf’s nephew, who was killed in the Spanish Civil War.)

The play’s most obvious hold on the audience’s attention comes from its being structured as a sort of countdown to a tragic death. The very look of the stage at the beginning — in which Rachel’s bedroom in Olympia, Wash., seems to float against a ravaged Middle Eastern townscape — presages a journey we know will be fatal.

It is all the more surprising, then, to discover that for long stretches “Rachel Corrie” feels dramatically flat, even listless. This is not the fault of the text. From earliest adolescence, Ms. Corrie, who wanted to be a poet, had a voice that was unusually and emphatically her own, and a precocious gift for concrete metaphors that give form to nebulous feelings.

To read what she wrote in the last decade of her short life, as assembled by Mr. Rickman and Ms. Viner, is to perceive sometimes eerie patterns of recurring images, with that sense afforded only by hindsight of how each human existence seems to possess its own poetic structure.

From the opening scene, in which Rachel says living in her room in Olympia is like being “inside a terrifying mirror,” an aura of claustrophobia and confinement prevails that must be overcome. The description of a dream of “falling to my death off of something dusty and smooth and crumbling like the cliffs in Utah,” recorded shortly after she arrived in Gaza in early 2003, acquires a harrowingly prophetic echo. And throughout there is an awareness, uncommon in the young, of how easily a life can be erased.

The production does not belabor the ominous here, and it doesn’t need to. Nor, when Rachel gives voice to her increasingly firm convictions about the Middle East conflict (“What we are paying for here is truly evil”), does Ms. Dodds ever seem to be orating from a platform, bullhorn in hand.

Both her performance and Mr. Rickman’s direction emphasize Rachel as a figure of radiant and unsullied youth, given to striking physical poses (head to the sky, arms extended) that bring to mind movie posters about odds-defying mavericks with big dreams. Sometimes, especially when embodying the pre-Gaza Rachel, Ms. Dodds appears to be merely playing young, with all the attendant cuteness.

Though Ms. Corrie had a streak of preciousness (what poetry-loving teenager does not?), there’s nearly always a redeeming grit in her writing and a feeling of energy that could burn. (You sense that fierceness in photographs of the real Ms. Corrie in demonstrations in Gaza.) These textures are mostly absent from Ms. Dodds’s performance. And when Rachel, describing an encounter with a sometime boyfriend, speaks self-mockingly of acting as if she were in a Mountain Dew commercial, it seems like a reasonable assessment of Ms. Dodds’s performance at that point.

Her Rachel is most compelling after she has arrived in Israel, and later Gaza, when her childhood habit of making lists — of things to do, of items needed — to keep chaos at bay acquires a heartbreaking urgency. No matter what side you come down on politically, Ms. Corrie’s sense of a world gone so awry that it forces her to question her “fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature” is sure to strike sadly familiar chords.

MY NAME IS RACHEL CORRIE

Taken from the writings of Rachel Corrie; edited by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner; directed by Mr. Rickman; designed by Hildegard Bechtler; lighting by Johanna Town; sound and video by Emma Laxton; production manager, Aduro Productions; production stage manager, Renée Rimland; general manager, Roy Gabay; associate producer, John O’Boyle; associate director, Tiffany Watt-Smith. A Royal Court Theater production presented by Dena Hammerstein and Pam Pariseau for James Hammerstein Productions. At the Minetta Lane Theater, 18 Minetta Lane, Greenwich Village; (212) 307-4100. Through Nov. 19. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

WITH: Megan Dodds (Rachel Corrie) and Bree Elrod (Rachel Corrie, matinee performances).

MOST HELPFUL READER REVIEW

Revealing and Incisive, October 9, 2006
Reviewer: lockerassociate0

Rachel Corrie's very personal journey challenges and unmasks the illusions that most Americans harbor about the Isreali-Palestinian ongoing conflict. The moving words of this young student at Washington's Evergreen College expose the raw truth about how Israeli occupation affects ordinary families in Gaza and the West Bank. While Rachel Corrie attempts to struggle with her own privileged position, in the end, due to her act of solidarity, she falls victim to the conflict she hopes to resolve. Yet her attempt to find meaning for her life and reveal the hypocrisy in our own culture finds stunning voice in this play. Megan Dodds does an amazing job in portraying Corrie. This insightful production is well worth seeing.