Rachel’s Words

Published in the London Theatre Guide

My Name Is Rachel Corrie is the one-woman play based on the real-life writings of a young American peace activist who lost her life in Gaza. A sell-out success during two runs at the Royal Court last year, the production opens tonight in the West End for a limited season at the Playhouse after a controversial last-minute rejection by a New York theatre. Star of the play Megan Dodds talks to Caroline Bishop about why she’s determined to make sure American audiences get to see it…

Megan Dodds spent six years living in New York. A Californian, she swapped coastlines after college to study drama at the famous Julliard School and grew to love the city where her career started. So that’s why it seems so personal to her that the one-woman production in which she stars in London has been “indefinitely postponed” across the Atlantic by the theatre it was supposed to be opening at this spring, the New York Theatre Workshop.

Visit Whatsonstage for photos from the opening night

Following the last-minute cancellation of its New York premiere, Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner’s triple Whatsonstage.com Award-winning My Name Is Rachel Corrie – the one-woman play based on the writings of the late Rachel Corrie, played by Megan Dodds – received its West End premiere at the Playhouse Theatre last night.

Why did a 23-year-old woman leave her comfortable American life to stand between a bulldozer and a Palestinian home? My Name Is Rachel Corrie recounts the real story of “the short life and sudden death of Rachel Corrie, and the words she left behind.”

Rickman took the idea to the Royal Court after reading emails written by Corrie and posthumously published in the Guardian. With the permission of Corrie’s family, he and Guardian journalist Katharine Viner developed the 80-minute monologue based on Corrie’s emails and extensive journal entries.

Following its sell-out premiere season in the 80-seat Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, My Name Is Rachel Corrie returned to the Royal Court’s 395-seat Jerwood Theatre Downstairs for a second limited season last October. It was due to receive its US premiere at the New York Theatre Workshop this month ahead of a planned international tour.

After ignoring the event of March 22nd, the New York Times now reviews the actual play in a style and with a political bias which are familiar to us.

Tom Wallace responds to Matt Wolf’s review.

Mr. Wolf begins by noting that “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” is a eulogy not a play. He then makes a disengenuous attempt to link Rachel Corrie to Yasir Arafat. But, it is when he gets to the paragraph below that he crosses the line of any sort of feigned objectivity. He is not reviewing the play, he is taking a political side and turning a false accusation into a statement of fact.

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.

By Paul Taylor
Published in The Independent

One welcomes My Name Is Rachel Corrie to the West End with mixed feelings. It is great that it means more exposure for this moving 90-minute monologue, pieced together from the journals and e-mails of the 23-year-old US activist who in 2003 was killed by an Israeli bulldozer.

By rights, though, Alan Rickman’s pitch-perfect Royal Court production, featuring an incandescent Megan Dodds, should be playing at the New York Theatre Workshop, where it was to have opened on 22 March. Yet because of “the very edgy situation” created by Ariel Sharon’s illness and Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian elections, it was felt that the play needed “contextualising”, with post-show discussions and perhaps the addition of a companion piece with an opposing point of view. When the Royal Court refused, the production was “indefinitely postponed”, in what looks like an act of self-censorship. This is troubling because the NYTW is a liberal institution, which has nurtured the writing of Tony Kushner and presented the US premieres of Caryl Churchill’s last plays.

by Mark Shenton
Published in Whatsonstage
4 out of 5 stars

It’s not a good time for individuals to try to challenge US government policy: if you’re not for us, you’re against us, is Bush’s openly stated belief. In the same way, those who challenge Israeli policy on events in Palestine are accused of being anti-Semitic. But some brave people set out to make a difference, regardless. The real-life Rachel Corrie was one such, who didn’t just speak out but actually stood up, literally, to an Israeli, American-made bulldozer about to flatten a Palestinian home. It cost her her life, aged just 23.

But in the multi Whatsonstage.com Theatregoers’ Choice award-winning play My Name Is Rachel Corrie that Guardian journalist Katherine Viner and director Alan Rickman have co-edited from Corrie’s own journals and emails, she is, all too briefly, brought back to life in a haunting, evocative memorial to the journey that took her from a safe, comfortable life in a Washington state suburb to die defending a home that wasn’t her own in Gaza.

Cat Radio Cafe
hosted by Janet Coleman & David Dozer

Actresses Kathleen Chalfant and Leila Buck, and activists Brian Avery and Ann Petter on the aftermath of Rachel’s Words: An Event to Honor the Words and Life of Rachel Corrie.

Subscribe to the Cat Radio Cafe podcast at their site.

Photos of the March 22nd event by Matthew Weinstein

March 22, 2006 – In the light of the cancellation by the Manhattan Theater Club’s production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie, several thousand New Yorkers turned out tonight at Riverside Church to hear writers, artists, playwrights and activists speak her writings. The play would tell the story – in her own words and emails – of the courageous 23-year old American woman who travelled to Gaza to protect innocent Palestinians and who stood in front of an Israeli bulldozer in an attempt to prevent the driver from destroying a Palestinian home. The bulldozer drove over her and then reversed and crushed her a second time. “My back is broken,” she said before she died.

Declaring that the Sharon government could destroy her body but could never kill her spirit, people have stood up to those who would cave in to the new McCarthyism that attempts to stifle opposition and protest to the unjust policies of the U.S. and Israeli occupations.

by Billy Bragg
Download song here [.mp3]

Rachel Corrie went to Gaza to draw attention to the plight of the Palestinians, whose voice is seldom heard in her country, the US. That she herself should be silenced – first by an Israeli bulldozer, next by a New York theatre cancelling a play created from her words – is a testimony to the power of her message. This song was written on a plane on March 20 and recorded at Big Sky Recordings, Ann Arbor, Michigan on March 22. The tune is borrowed from Bob Dylan.

An Israeli bulldozer killed poor Rachel Corrie
As she stood in its path in the town of Rafah
She lost her young life in an act of compassion
Trying to protect the poor people of Gaza
Whose homes are destroyed by tank shells and bulldozers
And whose plight is exploited by suicide bombers
Who kill in the name of the people of Gaza
But Rachel Corrie believed in non-violent resistance
Put herself in harm’s way as a shield of the people
And paid with her life in a manner most brutal

But you who philosophise disgrace and criticise all fears,
Take the rag away from your face.
Now ain’t the time for your tears.

First, I must admit that when the Corrie play controversy started I was one of the voices in our email circle least upset, or at least most in the vein of “let’s hear what they have to say before we send out the lynching party.” I engaged in dialogue but not nearly as passionately as some of my peers, feeling like while the larger issues raised were ones I wholeheartedly agree with, that people were jumping to conclusions based on past and politics, not on this case. Tonight made me see and remember a whole host of other sides to this story. Somehow you managed to put together people who spoke to the context, the personal, the political, the intersection of the two, the larger controversy yet never leaning to diatribes or political posturing. I was SO impressed with the quality of writing and speaking, with the moving turnout, and with the smooth organization and orchestration of the whole event. It was amazing to see what you pulled together so professionally in such a short time.

By Misha Berson
Published by the Seattle Times

Seattle Repertory Theatre is now the first major U.S. regional theater to announce that it will produce “My Name Is Rachel Corrie.”

The controversial play, a hit in London, will appear at the Rep (March 15-April 22, 2007) as part of the theater’s boldly contemporary 2006-07 season, the second under its new artistic head David Esbjornson.

Other standouts on the compelling, nine-play agenda: the season-opening, 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about suspected child abuse in a Catholic school, “Doubt” (Sept. 21-Oct. 21). A little-known Edward Albee work, “The Lady from Dubuque” (Jan. 11-Feb. 10, 2007). A new adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s resonant novel, “The Great Gatsby” (Nov. 2-Dec. 10).

Also: “Gem of the Ocean,” the only work in August Wilson’s 10-play African-American cycle not yet staged in Seattle (April 5-May 6, 2007).

Local ties a factor

But the most provocative choice is “My Name Is Rachel Corrie.” Drawn from writings by an American political activist who died in Gaza while protesting Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, the Alan Rickman-Katharine Viner script sparked a censorship debate when New York Theatre Workshop delayed a spring staging of it, due to political concerns.