I had heard it would be harrowing. I had read that it might be offensive. But the last thing I was expecting of My Name is Rachel Corrie, a one-woman show about the young American activist who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer, was to see Rachel Corrie’s real life mother deliver a talk-back at the end. For those who don’t know Corrie’s story, a brief history:
Rachel Corrie was a young American activist from Olympia, Washington, who travelled to the Gaza Strip in early 2003 to support Palestinians there in non-violent demonstrations. Two months later she was run over and killed by an Israeli bulldozer while protesting the demolition of a Palestinian home in Rafah. The bulldozer operator either clearly saw her before he ran her over, or didn’t see her at all (depending on who you ask, of course).
In the wake of her tragic death, Corrie was alternately portrayed as:
More than a few commentators pointed out that her death would not have made the front page had she been just another Palestinian.
(To get a sense of just how politicized the reactions to her life and death have been, take a look at the Talk Page associated with her entry on Wikipedia. Try not to get sucked into the wrangling over whether The Guardian, The Jerusalem Post, and The Electronic Intifada are neutral sources, or the fight about how many times the word “tunnel” should appear in the article’s lede.)
Fortunately for those who would understand her actual thoughts and motivations, Rachel Corrie was a skilled writer and diarist. The actor Alan Rickman and Guardian newspaper editor Katherine Viner have adapted Corrie’s diaries, correspondence, and poetry into My Name is Rachel Corrie, a ninety-five minute one-woman tour de force. It opened to raves at the Royal Court Theatre in London, only to have its New York and Toronto debuts cancelled (or indefinitely postponed) amid fears that the play might be insulting or upsetting to Jewish audiences. The official (and convenient) explanation of Toronto’s CanStage was that the play worked better on the page than on the stage. It finally arrived in Toronto thanks to the much smaller Theatre Panik, in a production starring Bethany Jillard in the Tarragon’s extra space.
Given all the hoopla surrounding the play’s politics, I was surprised at just how much of the play dealt with Corrie’s personal life in Washington before she left for Gaza. Jillard’s Corrie spends the first half-hour of the play cartwheeling around the stage, mooning over her pompous ex-boyfriend, arguing with her “neo-liberal” father, worrying about the responsibility that comes with her privilege, and gradually crystallizing her political critique on her country’s involvement in the Middle East (“I just think we have the right to oppose our government’s policies”). The mood shifts considerably when Corrie leaves for Israel. She finds herself “amazed at the strength” of the Palestinians living in Rafah, and while she had earlier described herself as “scattered, deviant, and too loud”, she seems to find purpose and focus in her activism. Soon enough, however, the play darkens considerably as she begins to despair over the treatment of the stateless civilians around her. The tragic conclusion that the whole audience knows must be coming starts to loom over the play’s final sections, and left us all gutted when it finally came. Jillard, in tears, returned to the stage to a rapturous ovation.
As mentioned above, the biggest surprise came after the play, when producer Niki Landau introduced Rachel’s mother, Cindy Corrie, for a post-production talk-back with Jillard. Mrs. Corrie, who had seen a total of ten different actresses play her daughter, was composed as she spoke about the solace she has found in Rachel’s writings in the nearly six years since her death. She also spoke of her politicization in the wake of Rachel’s life and work, and of how she was “transformed in her understanding of the situation” in the Middle East. She is now the President of the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice, which seeks to continue Rachel’s work.
I was a little surprised at how personal and blunt some of the audience questions were after such a moving and raw performance, but I suppose Mrs. Corrie must have had to answer these questions a million times already. When someone asked her if she could speak about the operator of the bulldozer that killed Rachel, she talked about the family’s (mostly fruitless) efforts to get additional information on the driver, and more generally about the need for accountability in all cases of civilian deaths in the conflict (part of the “Justice” mandate of the Rachel Corrie Foundation). It was her response about the driver himself, however, that struck me particularly. Mrs. Corrie, with a slight tremor in her voice, relayed her husband Craig’s standard answer to the question: “If the bulldozer driver could come to acknowledge what he’s done, Craig feels he could find it in his heart to forgive him.”
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