'Rachel Corrie' In London: Requiem For An Idealist
The New York Times
March 31, 2006
THEATER REVIEW
By MATT WOLF
LONDON, March 30 — What happens when the dust clouds of controversy clear to reveal the hotly debated — if little seen — thing itself? One answer is being offered at the Playhouse Theater, where "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" opened on Thursday night for a commercial London run that is taking the place of the play's suspended New York engagement.
Over the next six weeks, theatergoers will discover a production that has matured through three London engagements (the first two, separated by six months, took place last year on the Royal Court's pair of stages), even if the work remains an impassioned eulogy that isn't quite the same thing as a play.
It's the nature of that passion, of course, that has stirred debate in the United States. The story is this: On March 16, 2003, Ms. Corrie, 23, was crushed to death by an Israeli Army bulldozer preparing to demolish a Palestinian home in Rafah, in southern Gaza. Quickly thereafter, she was invoked as a martyr by Yasir Arafat — and by extension, the Palestinian cause — even as she was demonized by others in the pro-Israel camp.
Ms. Corrie's affiliation with the International Solidarity Movement, an organization that has recruited Americans and Europeans to serve as human shields, turned her death into the stuff of ideological football. The recent decision by New York Theater Workshop to put its scheduled production on indefinite hold shifted the debate into the theatrical arena. (Ewan Thomson, spokesman for the Royal Court The
ater, said Thursday that a New York City premiere is still planned for this year, although a theater has not yet been chosen. A regional production has been scheduled for March 2007 at the Seattle Repertory Theater.)
But how is the show itself? Funny how often that question isn't asked. So the first thing worth reasserting about "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" is its right to be seen and debated: a society that won't allow that is one fearful of its extremes and, by extension, the world.
Not that fear seems to have been part of Ms. Corrie's vocabulary on the evidence of this 90-minute solo piece, a testimonial to her that has been distilled from her writings by Katharine Viner, features editor at The Guardian newspaper here, and the actor Alan Rickman, who doubles as the play's director. When first glimpsed, Rachel Corrie, played by Megan Dodds, is seen lying on her bed, head tilted back, in her Olympia, Wash., home: a firebrand, it is made clear, from an early age.
While other fifth-graders wrote of wanting to be an astronaut or Spider-Man, she was busy writing "a five-paragraph manifesto on the million things I wanted to be, from wandering poet to first woman president." That intensity of engagement would only be amplified by time. "I'm building the world myself and putting new hats on everybody," she says, and she is seen embracing pop culture (Dairy Queen, Pat Benatar) while apparently never losing a social awareness that took her in middle school to Russia and then, in her early 20's, to the Middle East.
Such a sense of mission can, of course, cause very real pain to others: a fascinating program essay by Ms. Viner reveals that Ms. Corrie's former boyfriend, Colin Reese, committed suicide in 2004. But in keeping with its title, "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" consists of its character's musings, which we must take straight. In theatrical terms, it might demand a George Bernard Shaw (or perhaps, the New York Theater Workshop alumnus Tony Kushner) to anatomize the contradictions in the psyche of the activist, as that famous Shavian zealot, Saint Joan, discovered to her cost. Nor, perhaps inevitably, does this piece ever acquire the ironic perspective on the sorts of passions and issues (her broadside against privilege, for instance) that figure more ambiguously in some of the solo narratives of, say, Wallace Shawn.
If this play doesn't exactly sanctify its subject, it still functions as a staged requiem that can't help but be both partial and partisan. One could take issue with Rachel's comment late on that the Palestinians are for the most part "engaging in Gandhian nonviolent resistance." But it's hard not to be impressed — and also somewhat frightened — by the description of her as a 2-year-old looking across Capitol Lake in Washington State and announcing, "This is the wide world, and I'm coming to it."
Perhaps thanks to the controversy, Mr. Rickman's production has gathered power since I first saw it last April, and the material actually suits its current 750-seat West End berth better than it did a Royal Court studio space about a tenth the size. Ms. Dodds, an American whose London theater credits include Neil LaBute's "This Is How It Goes," is a decade or so older than Ms. Corrie was when she died. But the actress subtly moves from a shining-faced earnestness to something darker and more dangerous, as the fire in Ms. Corrie's belly builds into a conflagration. (One can only imagine what a young Vanessa Redgrave might have made of the role.)
Apt conduit that Ms. Dodds is, it remains fitting that a piece driven by Ms. Corrie's own language concludes with a brief film of her. There she is, age 10, arguing for the eradication of hunger by the year 2000 and to give "the poor a chance." Unexceptional sentiments? Perhaps, at least to anyone who has heard (or sung) any of a thousand comparable protest songs. But that doesn't diminish the singularity of Ms. Corrie's death or of this paean to her, which gives activism a necessary center stage without quite arriving at the realm of art.
Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
March 31, 2006
THEATER REVIEW
By MATT WOLF
LONDON, March 30 — What happens when the dust clouds of controversy clear to reveal the hotly debated — if little seen — thing itself? One answer is being offered at the Playhouse Theater, where "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" opened on Thursday night for a commercial London run that is taking the place of the play's suspended New York engagement.
Over the next six weeks, theatergoers will discover a production that has matured through three London engagements (the first two, separated by six months, took place last year on the Royal Court's pair of stages), even if the work remains an impassioned eulogy that isn't quite the same thing as a play.
It's the nature of that passion, of course, that has stirred debate in the United States. The story is this: On March 16, 2003, Ms. Corrie, 23, was crushed to death by an Israeli Army bulldozer preparing to demolish a Palestinian home in Rafah, in southern Gaza. Quickly thereafter, she was invoked as a martyr by Yasir Arafat — and by extension, the Palestinian cause — even as she was demonized by others in the pro-Israel camp.
Ms. Corrie's affiliation with the International Solidarity Movement, an organization that has recruited Americans and Europeans to serve as human shields, turned her death into the stuff of ideological football. The recent decision by New York Theater Workshop to put its scheduled production on indefinite hold shifted the debate into the theatrical arena. (Ewan Thomson, spokesman for the Royal Court The
ater, said Thursday that a New York City premiere is still planned for this year, although a theater has not yet been chosen. A regional production has been scheduled for March 2007 at the Seattle Repertory Theater.)But how is the show itself? Funny how often that question isn't asked. So the first thing worth reasserting about "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" is its right to be seen and debated: a society that won't allow that is one fearful of its extremes and, by extension, the world.
Not that fear seems to have been part of Ms. Corrie's vocabulary on the evidence of this 90-minute solo piece, a testimonial to her that has been distilled from her writings by Katharine Viner, features editor at The Guardian newspaper here, and the actor Alan Rickman, who doubles as the play's director. When first glimpsed, Rachel Corrie, played by Megan Dodds, is seen lying on her bed, head tilted back, in her Olympia, Wash., home: a firebrand, it is made clear, from an early age.
While other fifth-graders wrote of wanting to be an astronaut or Spider-Man, she was busy writing "a five-paragraph manifesto on the million things I wanted to be, from wandering poet to first woman president." That intensity of engagement would only be amplified by time. "I'm building the world myself and putting new hats on everybody," she says, and she is seen embracing pop culture (Dairy Queen, Pat Benatar) while apparently never losing a social awareness that took her in middle school to Russia and then, in her early 20's, to the Middle East.
Such a sense of mission can, of course, cause very real pain to others: a fascinating program essay by Ms. Viner reveals that Ms. Corrie's former boyfriend, Colin Reese, committed suicide in 2004. But in keeping with its title, "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" consists of its character's musings, which we must take straight. In theatrical terms, it might demand a George Bernard Shaw (or perhaps, the New York Theater Workshop alumnus Tony Kushner) to anatomize the contradictions in the psyche of the activist, as that famous Shavian zealot, Saint Joan, discovered to her cost. Nor, perhaps inevitably, does this piece ever acquire the ironic perspective on the sorts of passions and issues (her broadside against privilege, for instance) that figure more ambiguously in some of the solo narratives of, say, Wallace Shawn.
If this play doesn't exactly sanctify its subject, it still functions as a staged requiem that can't help but be both partial and partisan. One could take issue with Rachel's comment late on that the Palestinians are for the most part "engaging in Gandhian nonviolent resistance." But it's hard not to be impressed — and also somewhat frightened — by the description of her as a 2-year-old looking across Capitol Lake in Washington State and announcing, "This is the wide world, and I'm coming to it."
Perhaps thanks to the controversy, Mr. Rickman's production has gathered power since I first saw it last April, and the material actually suits its current 750-seat West End berth better than it did a Royal Court studio space about a tenth the size. Ms. Dodds, an American whose London theater credits include Neil LaBute's "This Is How It Goes," is a decade or so older than Ms. Corrie was when she died. But the actress subtly moves from a shining-faced earnestness to something darker and more dangerous, as the fire in Ms. Corrie's belly builds into a conflagration. (One can only imagine what a young Vanessa Redgrave might have made of the role.)
Apt conduit that Ms. Dodds is, it remains fitting that a piece driven by Ms. Corrie's own language concludes with a brief film of her. There she is, age 10, arguing for the eradication of hunger by the year 2000 and to give "the poor a chance." Unexceptional sentiments? Perhaps, at least to anyone who has heard (or sung) any of a thousand comparable protest songs. But that doesn't diminish the singularity of Ms. Corrie's death or of this paean to her, which gives activism a necessary center stage without quite arriving at the realm of art.
Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
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