Volunteer worker killed in Gaza Strip inspires play

Controversial work based on Rachel Corrie's writings will be staged at World Urban Festival

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"A little more than three years ago, a young woman named Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer while defending a Palestinian home from destruction in the Gaza Strip.

Corrie, a 23-year-old from Olympia, Wash., was a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian-led group dedicated to resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land through non-violent direct action.

Her death could have been nothing more than a tragic but fleeting news story in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it became much more lasting and significant because of the powerful writing Corrie left behind, which has been turned into a controversial play being staged during Earth: The World Urban Festival, the cultural and artistic component to the UN's World Urban Forum in Vancouver.

Called My Name is Rachel Corrie, the work will receive two staged readings at the festival by 10 non-professional actors. The cast includes two 11-year-olds, a Japanese-Canadian in his 60s, a former International Solidarity Movement activist and Canadians of Christian, Jewish and Muslim heritage."

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June 22, 2006
Play About Gaza Death to Reach New York
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

After an Off Broadway production was derailed, resulting in a theatrical uproar, "My Name Is Rachel Corrie," the solo show about an American demonstrator for Palestinian rights who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza Strip, has found another New York theater.

Pam Pariseau and Dena Hammerstein, partners in James Hammerstein Productions, are bringing the play, critically acclaimed in London, to the Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village. Previews are to begin on Oct. 5, with an opening scheduled for Oct. 15. The play is to run for 48 performances, closing on Nov. 19.

"We both saw the play and both responded to it very strongly," Ms. Hammerstein said in a telephone interview yesterday. "We identified with the material in terms of being mothers and were struck by the production and the theatricality."

Ms. Hammerstein, a daughter-in-law of Oscar Hammerstein II, is a longtime friend of the actor Alan Rickman, who created the play with Katharine Viner, an editor for The Guardian, the London newspaper. They put the play together from Ms. Corrie's journal entries and e-mail messages before her death in March 2003. It ran for two seasons at the Royal Court Theater in London.

"I'm just really looking forward to engaging people on it, an engagement which can only happen, obviously, if the play is on," Ms. Viner said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/theater/22corr.html?pagewanted=print

Theatre
My Name is Rachel Corrie

Royal Court, London

Michael Billington
Thursday April 14, 2005
The Guardian

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.

Writing was clearly in her blood. She started a diary when she was 12 and the first third of the evening shows her, at high school and at college in Olympia, Washington, using it to discover who she was. As a compulsive listmaker, she itemises the people she would like to hang out with in eternity; significantly, they are mainly writers, including Rilke, ee cummings, Gertrude Stein and Zelda Fitzgerald.

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/reviews/story/0,,1459252,00.html