Drama begins before theater festival starts
By Mary Carole McCauley
published by Baltimore Sun, July 1, 2007
On March 16, 2003, a bulldozer powered by the Israeli Defense Forces on the Gaza Strip lowered its blades and rumbled into motion — and a young American protester named Rachel Corrie was crushed to death.
Four years later, the ground still has yet to settle back into place.
At least, that’s true metaphorically, if not literally. Consider the reaction when the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, W.Va., announced that one of four productions for its 2007 season would be My Name Is Rachel Corrie, a one-actor play based on the tragedy.
Within 48 hours of the announcement last December, H. Alan Young, a retired attorney and festival director, and his wife withdrew their pledge of $100,000 for the festival’s building campaign, Ed Herendeen, the festival’s artistic director says. Organizers anticipate that the programming decision will cost an additional $20,000 to $50,000 in lost box-office revenues.
Initially, the 27-member board was so split on the wisdom of mounting such a divisive show that the festival hired a mediator. At the end of a session in mid-February, the board, with one dissent, decided to move forward with the production.
In the months that followed, Herendeen received more than 100 letters and e-mails, some many pages long. Many of his correspondents passionately opposed the play’s inclusion in the four-week festival.
“This play was hijacked long before it ever got to me,” Herendeen says. “It was co-opted by both sides and used for their own purposes. I think if people actually see the play, they’ll be surprised it’s controversial. It’s really a small, lovely, personal story about one young woman’s journey.”
Corrie’s death at age 23 caused an international furor, primarily because accounts of the circumstances leading up to her killing are diametrically opposed.
A report by the Israeli government concluded that the bulldozer was searching for underground tunnels used in terrorist attacks. The government argues that the driver’s view was obstructed and he couldn’t see Corrie. The activist died, the report concludes, when she fell from a mound of dirt created by the bulldozer, and the mammoth machine piled debris atop her body. The government calls the death an accident.
But members of the International Solidarity Movement, of which Corrie was a member, say they were in the area to prevent the destruction of a home owned by a Palestinian pharmacist. They claim that an armored bulldozer deliberately ran over the helpless young woman twice, and they call her death a murder.
Two of the most outspoken proponents of the murder claim, actor Alan Rickman and journalist Katharine Viner, excerpted Corrie’s diaries and e-mails home and crafted them into a theatrical piece that expresses the young woman’s sympathy for Palestinians and anger about the Israeli military presence on the Gaza Strip.
Surprisingly, My Name Is Rachel Corrie elicited little controversy when it debuted in London in 2005. Its reception in the U.S., though, was far different.
A planned run at the New York Theatre Workshop was put on hold amid opposition from that city’s large and influential Jewish community. The show finally opened off-Broadway in October at the 400-seat Minetta Lane Theatre, where it ran for two months.
Subsequent productions that had been scheduled for Toronto and Miami also were shelved after a barrage of complaints — though My Name Is Rachel Corrie recently finished a successful run at the Seattle Repertory Theatre in Corrie’s home state.
Cindy Corrie, Rachel’s mother, plans to be in the Shepherdstown audience on the show’s opening night.
“We think it’s wonderful that the Shepherdstown group held firm and is doing the play,” she says.
“I think the controversy has less to do with the play itself and more to do with the climate in this country about these issues. The play has become a lightning rod about all the strong feelings people have about what’s happening in the Middle East and our country’s role in it. But this is a discussion that needs to happen.”
Cindy Corrie and her husband, Craig, estimate that they have attended more than two dozen performances in England and the U.S. Seeing the play is a way to remain close to their beloved daughter.
“From the time Rachel was a tiny child, we enjoyed the gift of words that she had,” Cindy Corrie says. “She was able to look at the world and to express what she perceived in a way that was very unique to her. She was an artist. So for us, to hear Rachel’s words over and over again continues to be a gift.”
But, as the Corries would be the first to acknowledge, no family has a monopoly on pain.
Some of the play’s opponents in the Jewish community lost loved ones in the death camps. Others have contended with acts of anti-Semitism.
Husband and wife Richard A. Belle and Marie Pogozelski of Bethesda supported the Shepherdstown festival enthusiastically for a decade. In the past, they have marked the date of each coming festival on their calendar 51 weeks in advance. They have proselytized to friends and neighbors and made unsolicited financial contributions. They even confronted theater critics whose reviews they thought did an injustice to the Shepherdstown productions.
No more.
On Feb. 17, the couple wrote Herendeen, imploring him to withdraw Rachel Corrie from the festival lineup.
“Whether you agree to cancel the play or not, you have the moral obligation to look around and see the effect of this hate-mongering play,” they wrote.
“You will see it on the Web sites. You might see it on a swastika-smeared synagogue in West Virginia or perhaps on an attack on a Jewish student on the Shepherd University campus itself. This will be part of the legacy of you producing a play that explicitly endorses hatred of the Jews. Oops, Israelis. (You and I make that distinction; most purveyors of this slime do not.)”
Young, who resigned from the festival’s board of directors, finds Rachel Corrie’s interpretation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be prejudicial and deeply inaccurate.
He also objects to the inclusion of a play that he believes violates the festival’s mission to stage new works by American playwrights. (In his opinion, Viner and Rickman, both Britons, and not Corrie, are the play’s authors.)
“Unless Rachel Corrie had supernatural powers,” Young says, “she could not have written the account of her death with which the play ends. The account of her demise was written by another Englishman who was a colleague of Corrie’s, so that account is suspect.”
Those are some of the reasons Young resigned from the board. He also weighed other factors before making his decision: He believed the board was breaching its fiduciary duties to safeguard the festival’s financial well-being. In addition, he says the play can’t be considered “contemporary” because the situation on which it is based no longer exists. Israeli civilians and military forces have since left the Gaza Strip.
“The board should absolutely have superseded the producing director if they knew that putting on a particular play could have a detrimental impact on the festival’s financial outcome,” he says.
Young says he welcomes controversial and thought-provoking plays, “no matter what the subject matter. But I object when the plays are so offensive as to cause loss of significant funds. I also would expect them to present more than one point of view.”
Of course, not all Jews object to the show, and not everyone who dislikes the script dislikes it on principle.
“I’ve really stood by the producers,” says Ari Roth, artistic director of Theatre J, which is in residence at the Jewish Community Center in Washington. “They have every right to do this play.”
Roth spoke out this year at a town hall meeting in New York that he attended with other performing arts professionals, including Irene Lewis, artistic director of Center Stage; Tony-winning choreographer Bill T. Jones; and JoAnne Akalitis, the avant-garde New York director and writer.
Roth even considered mounting a production of Rachel Corrie at Theatre J but ultimately decided against it for artistic reasons.
“It’s poignant, to be sure, but it’s not well-argued as a play,” he says. “When you look at it aesthetically, there are many not-so-great artistic decisions. It’s a legitimate subject for a drama, and it asks questions that should be asked. But ultimately, it’s somewhat boring and somewhat biased.”
Herendeen said he can’t help but be impressed by the deep emotions the play has stirred weeks and months before the first scheduled performance.
“It was really moving to hear the depth of the passion expressed by my own, very generous trustees,” he says. “It was really moving to read all those eloquent e-mails and letters.
“But, isn’t this the response we seek from a work of art? In this world, we’re constantly divided. This play creates an opportunity for us to talk to one another.”
The 17th annual Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, W.Va., has a full slate of offerings in its four-week run.
In addition to four new works, there will be Under the Tent Lectures every Saturday afternoon on topics raised by the plays; a Peace Cafe, and actors’ labs in which non-Equity performers are showcased.
The festival is open Tuesdays through Sundays through July 29.
Tickets cost $30-$36 per performance; $26 for seniors and students. Subscriptions cost $100-$120; $81 for students and seniors.
Call 800-999-2283 or visit catf.org.
Here are the four mainstage productions:
• My Name Is Rachel Corrie. See accompanying article.
• 1001 by Jason Grote. This updating of the story of Scheherazade shuttles (via magic carpet, of course) from ancient Persia, where a new bride desperately weaves tales to bewitch a bloodthirsty king, to a modern love story set in Manhattan and on the Gaza Strip.
• The Pursuit of Happiness by Richard Dresser. This is the second part of Dresser’s Happiness trilogy, which examines the pervasive sense of unease underlying the American dream. An upper-middle-class family is thrown into turmoil when the brilliant teenage daughter decides not to go to college.
• Lonesome Hollow by Lee Blessing. In the future, the government has amassed extraordinary powers over private citizens. Lonesome Hollow, a penal colony for sex offenders, contains both a brutal pedophile and an artist punished for taking nude photographs.
