Rachel’s Words

The making of an activist
by John Lahr, New Yorker

In a one-person show, the most important question is not where to start the story but why to tell it. The actor needs a compelling reason, beyond vanity, to step from the wings onto th stage. There has to be both need and news; there rarely is. One exception is the riveting “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” (at the Minetta Lane, under the deft direction of Alan Rickman, who also co-edited the play, with the journalist Katharine Viner). “Rachel Corrie” is a ventriloquist’s act in which the bright, fine-boned Megan Dodds, who radiates a sense of both privilege and pluck, resuscitates from diary entries and e-mails the voice and being of the American pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie, who died at the age of twenty-three. For most of her life Corrie was haunted by the suffering in the world. In the play, which is a kind of ghost story, she returns to haunt us.

By Sarah Hemming
Published by the Financial Times
4 out of 5 stars

In a sense, this production shouldn’t be here. It should be in New York, at the off-Broadway Theater Workshop. But that showing has been withdrawn, so here it is in the West End instead. Good news for London, but this is a piece that should still be seen in New York, whether it ruffles feathers or not.

Rachel Corrie was a 23-year-old American student who joined the International Solidarity Movement in Gaza in 2003. She was run down and killed by an Israeli bulldozer. This piece for theatre (first shown at the Royal Court last April) is composed from her writing – journals, jottings, e-mails – edited and shaped by Katharine Viner and Alan Rickman (who also directs). Every word in it is Rachel’s and so carries the force of authentic experience.

It does not pretend to be impartial – Rachel points out that she has deliberately chosen to help the Palestinian people and it is their perspective she encounters. But the power of the piece arises from its honesty. It presents a shocked, first-hand account of conditions in Gaza, and it offers a portrait of a young woman who left her safe, liberal home to put herself in the line of fire.

By Laura Potts
Published by The Arab American News

It is fleeting and seemingly unremarkable, but a brief snapshot of life in Hi Salam says everything about American peace activist Rachel Corrie’s passion for Palestinian justice.

In an e-mail to her mother, the 23-year-old recounts “being in this big puddle of blankets with this family watching … Saturday morning cartoons.” She and the entire family had slept in one bedroom, bullet holes rendering the rest of the house uninhabitable. But for a few minutes, watching an American cartoon dubbed into Arabic, the children had a taste of the kind of carefree adolescence Ms. Corrie had enjoyed in Olympia, Washington. It may have been one of Ms. Corrie’s last moments of true bliss, but it represented her lifelong desire for all children to have safe, happy, and fear-free lives.

More than three years after Ms. Corrie was killed when an Israeli bulldozer ran over her as she stood between it and a Palestinian home, the writings of the waifish, blonde idealist have been turned into a provocative one-woman play in London’s West End.

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.

When our daughter Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza strip on March 16 2003, an immediate impulse was to get her words out to the world. She had been working in Rafah with a nonviolent resistance organisation, the International Solidarity Movement, trying to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes and wells. Her emails home had had a powerful impact on our family, making us think about the situation in the Middle East in ways we had never done before. Without a direct connection to Israel and Palestine, we had not understood the devastating nature of the Palestinians’ situation. Coming from the US, our allegiance and empathy had always been with the people of Israel.

After Rachel died we realised that her words were having a similar effect on others whose lives were being changed, as ours have been – not just by Rachel’s death, but by the window her writing provided on the Palestinian experience and by her call to action.

by Michael Billington
Published in The Guardian
4 out of 5 stars

Political theatre takes many forms. It can be an engrossing judicial inquiry like Bloody Sunday. It can be a family saga like Wesker’s Chicken Soup With Barley. Or it can be a deeply moving personal testimony like this selection from the writings of Rachel Corrie, edited by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner, editor of Guardian Weekend Magazine, and performed by Megan Dodds.

In the course of 90 minutes you feel you have not just had a night at the theatre: you have encountered an extraordinary woman.

Most readers will know the bare facts about Rachel Corrie: that she was a 23-year-old American who went to aid Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and in March 2003 was killed by an Israeli bulldozer. But what comes as a shock is realising that she combined an activist’s passion with an artist’s sensibility. Louis MacNeice once yearned for a poet who was “informed in economics, actively interested in politics”. Rachel Corrie emerges as just such a person.