Slain activist’s own words create live theater
Every aspect of Rachel Corrie’s story has been so interrogated, probed and picked apart that we’ll probably never know what really happened.
When in 2003 this 23-yearold activist from Olympia, Wash., was killed after placing herself in the path of an Israel Defense Forces bulldozer heading toward a Palestinian home in the Gaza Strip, was there actually a Palestinian family inside the home? (That’s what her organization, the International Solidarity Movement, has claimed.) Or was the structure empty, not a home but a front for storing weapons and entrance to a network of tunnels? Did the driver of the bulldozer see Corrie and forge ahead nonetheless, or was she obstructed from view? Is this whole line of questioning, about a young blond American woman from a middle-class family, suspect, since Palestinians and Israelis get injured and killed all too frequently but international press hardly bats an eye?
Yet if there was any interrogation happening at the Saturday, April 29, opening night of the one-woman play “My Name Is Rachel Corrie,” presented by Sawtooth Productions at the Magic Theatre, it happened only inside audience members’ heads. That’s in contrast to the 2009 screening of the documentary “Rachel,” also about Corrie, at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Protesters sympathetic to both Palestinian and Israeli perspectives on Corrie’s death organized outside the Castro Theatre, where the showing took place.
“My Name Is Rachel Corrie” doesn’t pretend to take an objective stance. The late actor Alan Rickman and the Guardian’s editor-in-chief Katharine Viner created the show from Corrie’s journals and correspondence, so it would be foolish to expect the show to be anything other than onesided.
Yet as performed by Charlotte Hemmings, that onesided perspective proves thoughtful, provocative and very worthy of attention, especially in a country whose historically steadfast support of Israel can blind us to the ways Palestinians also suffer.
Sure, some of Corrie’s writings reveal a naive and girlish idealist, prone to statements like “tomorrow, my whole life will be different” or “I’m building the world myself.” But which of us wasn’t at least a little like that in our early 20s? And unlike most of us, Corrie both talks the talk and walks the walk. She has persuasive, point-by-point rebuttals of her mother’s objections to her decision to place herself in harm’s way in the Gaza Strip. She knows that everything she says or does on behalf of the International Solidarity Movement as a non-Jewish American risks “sounding antiSemitic,” but she emphasizes the importance of drawing “a line between the policies of Israel as a state and the Jewish people.” She recognizes the privileges of her affluence, her nationality, which means she can leave Gaza at any time, and she admits, “I don’t always know the implications of my words.”
“My Name Is Rachel Corrie” is more than just a screed on a very specific political situation. Especially if you’re the kind of person who can’t understand how someone from a highachieving family could embark on a radical life path, the play offers a compelling origin story for activism, broadly speaking. Corrie truly couldn’t be any other way. It’s not just her lifelong passionate progressivism. It’s her mischievous zest for life.
That’s the strongest part of Hemmings’ performance. If at times she’s unvaried, embarking on passage after passage with the pattern of newscaster intonation, she also always has a twinkle in her eye, a twinge of drollery she might direct at any situation, any person, including herself. That, ultimately, makes “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” work. If it can be hard to put a human face on the Israel-Palestine conflict, it can be just as hard to remember that even this doggedly committed activist was no mere mouthpiece but a funny, complicated human being — one whose words and deeds, warmth and energy we were deprived of far too early.
Lily Janiak is The San Francisco Chronicle’s theater critic. Email: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LilyJaniak