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My Name is Rachel Corrie
Edited from Rachel Corrie’s emails, letters and journals
By Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner
Directed by Emmy Kreilkamp
Produced by Purple Bench Productions
At The Artistic Home (formerly Live Bait Theatre)
3914 N. Clark Street
Chicago, IL
For tickets www.purplebenchproductions.com
Tickets $20
Thursdays thru Saturdays at 8 pm
Sundays at 3 pm
Running time is 90 minutes without intermission
Through October 5, 2008
Profile of idealistic college student whose tragic ends sparks debate
As a theatre piece, “My Name is Rachel Corrie,” is a one woman play mostly in Corrie’s own words from her emails, letters and journals. Jessie Fisher does a terrific job to portray Rachel as a pure idealistic free spirit bent on finding a cause, a purpose, an outlet for her idealistic activism and for her urge to travel. Much of the play is a whimsical look at a young precocious idealist coming to grips with a hostile world. At no place in this personal account of Corrie’s does she speak of working to earn money. I guess she had family support for school and for her travel to the Middle East? The first hour of this one person monologue grows tiresome as we hear a mixture of personal foibles and emerging left-wing political activism.
Finally, we hear Fisher describe Carrie’s time in Rafah, Gaza as she became part of the ant-Israeli International Solidarity Movement which required its American and European members to become human shields in an effort to protect Palestinian homes from Israeli bulldozers. She paints a stirring portrait of a Palestinian family’s struggles with war torn Gaza. The non-combatants always suffer in a war. Corrie never refers to the Israeli families who suffer from rockets attacks and suicide bombers from Gaza. To hear Corrie’s account, only the Israelis do nasty things.
The tragedy of Rachel Corrie’s death as she fell beneath an Israeli Army bulldozer as she was acting as a human shield on March 16, 2003. There is some controversy about whether or not the bulldozer driver saw Rachel or not. The play states that the driver indeed did see her before she fell beneath the bulldozer’s blade. The saddest thing about this story is that the entire blame seems to fall on the Israelis for Rachel Corrie’s death. Doesn’t Rachel share some of the blade for either being amazingly naïve or totally foolish for putting her life on the line for a cause she obviously didn’t understand. She was used by the Palestinian and the International Solidarity Movement when she became a martyr. It also doesn’t service Corrie for the play to become a polemic piece of anti-American, ant-Israeli and anti-Semitic propaganda. The play moves from a profile of a college co-ed to a fanatic mission of a zealot. The lack of balance and narrow focus of this play makes the work untruthfully narrow. No wonder a New York City production was indefinitely postponed. I believe this show should be able to be produced (as per the First Amendment)—BUT—I also believe its one sidedness makes it incomplete.
Not Recommended
Tom Williams
Tom99@chicagocritic.com for comments
Talk Theatre in Chicago podcast
Date Reviewed: September 12, 2008
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