Putting a fresh face on Mideast conflict
‘Corrie’ presents words of activist who became symbol in death
In February 2003, Rachel Corrie, an idealistic college senior from Olympia, Wash., was two weeks into a trip volunteering as a peace activist in southern Gaza when she emailed her family and friends back home: “Today, as I walked on top of the rubble where homes once stood, Egyptian soldiers called to me from the other side of the border: ‘Go! Go!’ because a tank was coming. And then (they were) waving and asking ‘What’s your name?’ Something disturbing about this friendly reminder. It reminded me
of how much, to some degree, we are all kids curious about other kids.”
Some people will be reminded of the tragic and controversial circumstances of Corrie’s death when they hear those words spoken by actress Charlotte Hemmings in the limited-run Sawtooth Productions presentation of the 2005 one-woman play “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” at the Magic Theatre.
The 23-year-old Corrie’s expressions of youthful curiosity — about a part of the world riven by conflict and, more fundamentally, about how one idealist like herself might make a difference in it — have been both lauded and denounced ever since she died just five weeks after writing that prescient message home.
On March 16, 2003, during the height of the second Palestinian intifada, Corrie was killed when she stood in the path of an advancing Israeli Defense Forces bulldozer, attempting to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian family’s home.
Reactions to Corrie’s death were instantly polarized. She became a global symbol for the Palestinian cause, called a martyr by Yasser Arafat, yet called naive, even anti-Israel, by the Israeli right and some American Jews.
The Corrie family pursued legal action against the Israeli military (citing eyewitness testimony that the Caterpillar driver saw Rachel in his path), but a Haifa court ruled her death an accident in 2012. The opinion was upheld by the Israel Supreme Court in 2014.
“My Name Is Rachel Corrie” is based entirely on Corrie’s diary entries, emails and letters from early childhood through her death, which were pieced together into an affecting script by the late actor Alan Rickman and journalist Katharine Viner (now editor in chief of the Guardian).
“We hoped to find out what made Rachel different from the stereotype of today’s consumerist, depoliticized youth … to uncover the young woman behind the political symbol, beyond her death,” Viner wrote in the Guardian in April 2005.
Compared in reviews to George Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia,” another verbatim first-person drama, as well as to David Hare’s “Via Dolorosa” (also about the IsraeliPalestinian conflict), “Rachel Corrie” is a prime example of the way character-driven drama that’s pulled from the headlines — like J.T. Rogers’ “Oslo,” currently on Broadway — can serve to illuminate and humanize news events.
“Rachel brought us to this issue (of Palestinian rights),” said Rachel’s mother, Cindy Corrie, by phone from Olympia. “Of course we’d known about the situation in the Middle East all our lives, but had kind of tuned it out as ‘that problem’ that would never be fixed. Rachel changed that. It’s something we hope people still take away from the play.” (The Corries now run the nonprofit Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice to support human rights and cross-cultural understanding.)
As portrayed in “My Name Is Rachel Corrie,” Rachel is by turns an exuberant, poetry-writing, Pat Benatar-loving adolescent, a wide-eyed traveler far from home and, most importantly, a humanitarian awakening to the world’s miseries and to her own activist conscience. The play emphasizes her life, not her death.
The drama arrives in San Francisco following three sold-out London runs, an acclaimed 2015 New York production (also starring Hemmings) — as well as a raft of contradictory press and opinions that have dogged the play as well as Corrie’s legacy.
A 2006 New York Theater Workshop production was canceled at the last minute amid a political storm. Locally, an uproar in 2009 over the planned screening of the documentary film “Rachel” led the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival to pull the event, suffer condemnation by the Israeli Consul General and cause the festival board’s president to step down.
Given the extent to which its reputation precedes it, “Rachel Corrie” serves as a timely reminder that whenever a new work of art becomes embroiled in political controversy — think of Mapplethorpe’s nudes or even Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” (before achieving its canonical status) — it can be difficult when the dust settles to remember exactly which intimate or uncomfortable truths the artist at the center of the cultural conflict was seeking to express.
Yet, conversations with Rachel’s parents, Hemmings and director Jonathan Kane all reinforced the idea that political art, especially about thorny subjects like the longrunning strife in the Middle East, has value because it “humanizes conflict,” said Craig Corrie.
“We have pictures on our wall of three different young women who were killed in the same conflict — Rachel, a 10-year-old Palestinian girl and a 14-year-old Jewish Israeli girl,” Craig Corrie said. “And I look at them every time I walk out of the office door. Those individual stories can’t be lost.”
As to whether Rachel knowingly laid down her life, Kane said, “There’s this argument that Rachel was naive. I think she just had the true idealist’s point of view that things could be better in the world and she asked, ‘Why aren’t they?’ That’s something a lot of us stop asking as we get older. To me that’s the heart of the play.”
Kane acknowledges that some people still “come to the theater with assumptions, that the play is pro-Palestine, anti-Israel. But the irony is that the people that are most upset at the play haven’t seen or read it.
“I’m Jewish, my family is Jewish and very proIsrael, and the response I’ve heard from them after seeing it is that to think this is anti-Semitic is ludicrous, just so offbase. They kind of wondered, ‘What is the controversy?’ ”
Hemmings, 34, who lives in Portland (and whose father was the famous British actor David Hemmings, who starred in Antonioni’s “Blow-Up”), said that “at this point with our political world in mayhem, it’s an extraordinarily important time to take an appreciative look at Rachel. She literally put her life on the line, which is what political passion can look like.
“Hopefully soon there will be a resolution to this conflict and the politics surrounding the piece will disappear. That’s my hope, that the play can continue on as a beautiful piece of theater that’s not so highly politicized.”
“Of course we’d known about the situation in the Middle East ... but had kind of tuned it out as ‘that problem’ that would never be fixed. Rachel changed that.” Cindy Corrie, Rachel’s mother