NYC: Theater

My Name Is Rachel Corrie

The Battle Over My Name Is Rachel Corrie

Rachel Corrie Photo:La Guerra di Rachel

On NYTW website: Regarding My Name is Rachel Corrie March 14, 2006 I have heard from many of you in the past few weeks about the Workshop's decision to request a postponement in producing My Name is Rachel Corrie. This moving, first-person play was given to us because of our reputation for presenting difficult subjects in a thoughtful manner. And rightfully so--a first reading inspired our collective commitment-which we still hold to-to sharing Rachel's voice. In the weeks that followed, we carried out our routine pre-production research that includes exploring the social, political, and cultural issues raised by the play. This is our standard operating procedure. Six months before producing Homebody/Kabul, for example, a play in which an English woman disappears in Afghanistan, we discussed the text, together with the playwright, with an Islamic scholar at NYU and with members of the local Afghan community. Before presenting The Seven, our most recent production, we spent several months developing a Greek and hip-hop glossary for the program that would enable a diverse, multigenerational audience to appreciate the play. In researching My Name is Rachel Corrie, we found many distorted accounts of the actual circumstances of Rachel's death that had resulted in a highly charged, vituperative, and passionate controversy. While our commitment to the play did not waver, our responsibility was not just to produce it, but to produce it in such a way as to prevent false and tangential back-and-forth arguments from interfering with Rachel's voice. We spoke to friends and colleagues in the artistic community and to religious leaders as well as to representatives of the Jewish community, because the play involved Israeli action. It was this piece of our research that has attracted attention and led some of you to conclude that we sought to postpone the production based solely on their response. This was not the case. No outside group has ever or will ever participate in the artistic decision-making process at NYTW. As we listened to various opinions and read thousands of entries on websites and blogs, we realized we needed to find ways to let Rachel's words rise above the polemics. We regret that requesting more time to achieve that goal was interpreted as failing to fulfill a commitment and, worse, as censorship. If we have erred, it was on the side of trying to be sensitive to all communities, in order to keep a public dialogue open and civil. I also regret any pain or confusion we have caused in trying to fulfill our responsibility to the art itself and to the community we serve. I can only say we were trying to do whatever we could to help Rachel's voice be heard. James C. Nicola, Artistic Director New York Theatre Workshop

A couple weeks ago the New York Times reported the disturbing news that the New York Theater Workshop (NYTW) was postponing, for political reasons, a production of the play My Name Is Rachel Corrie. The text of the play is based on some extraordinary letters from a young American woman written to her parents in the days and weeks before she was bulldozed to death by the Israeli Defense Force while trying to prevent the destruction of a Palestinian family’s home. The letters convey in an undiluted and specific and deeply moving way the unspeakable things being done to the Palestinian people by the Israeli government, backed by the U.S.

The battle over the play is causing an uproar in the theater world in both the U.S. and in London where My Name Is RACHEL CORRIE was originally produced to great acclaim by the Royal Court Theater. In the U.S., the controversy takes place in an atmosphere in which any mention of the legitimate demands of the Palestinian people has been ruled out of order in the public discourse. This has been the case for years, but these days it’s commonplace to hear about Arab academics being spied on and harassed, even prevented from entering the country, and Palestinian speakers banned from high school assemblies and college art galleries.

New York Theater Workshop, the theater slated to bring the play to the U.S., is a prominent New York City institution known for daring to present artistically powerful work from playwrights who tell the stories of the banned and oppressed. The decision to produce this play followed in that tradition. But shortly before it was to open (March 22), NYTW artistic director Jim Nicola backed away, saying that after talking to “members of the Jewish community” and finding “there was a strong possibility that a number of factions, on all sides of a political conflict, would use the play as a platform to promote their own agendas,” the theater needed more time to better “contextualize” the play.

To be blunt, here’s the “context”: whatever their intentions, NYTW’S postponement of the play for these political reasons objectively accedes to the very unfavorable terms being relentlessly enforced by the U.S. government today: namely that the only two political choices available to the people of the planet are “McCrusade” or “Jihad.” In that losing and false paradigm, the just demands of the Palestinian people get conflated with the agenda of Islamic fundamentalists. Even worse, the resistance by Palestinians to six decades of ethnic cleansing is assigned the moral equivalence of the towering crimes of an Israeli government acting as outpost and attack dog for the U.S. imperialists’ agenda of world conquest.

The rapid unraveling of the staging of the play occurred in January against a backdrop of the recent election in Palestine of Hamas, a party whose reactionary theocratic program offers a horrible future for the Palestinian people, even as they present themselves as more “militant” opponents of Israel and the U.S. Rachel deals with none of this, but in an implicit way her letters blow a hole in the idea that people must settle for either accommodating U.S. imperialists or blindly taking up Islamic fundamentalism. First, she reveals the truth of what it is like to live in a country that is being turned into an open-air prison for every man, woman and child:

“Nothing could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You just can't imagine it unless you see it—and even then you are always well aware that your experience of it is not at all the reality: what with the difficulties the Israeli army would face if they shot an unarmed U.S. citizen, the fact that I have money to buy water when the army destroys wells, and the fact, of course, that I have the option of leaving. I am allowed to see the ocean. If I feel outrage at entering briefly into the world in which these children exist, I wonder how it would be for them to arrive in my world. Once you have seen the ocean and lived in a silent place where water is taken for granted and not stolen in the night by bulldozers, spent an evening when you didn't wonder if the walls of your home might suddenly fall inward, aren't surrounded by towers, tanks, and now a giant metal wall, I wonder if you can forgive the world for all the years spent existing—just existing—in resistance to the constant attempt to erase you from your home. That is something I wonder about these children. I wonder what would happen if they really knew."

- My Name Is Rachel Corrie

Then, her emails introduce us to ordinary people who erase all caricatures:

“Nidal's English gets better every day. He's the one who calls me, ‘My sister.’ He started teaching Grandmother how to say, ‘Hello. How are you?’ In English. You can always hear the tanks and bulldozers passing by, but all of these people are genuinely cheerful with each other, and with me. When I am with Palestinian friends I tend to be somewhat less horrified than when I am trying to act in a role of human rights observer, documenter, or direct-action resister. They are a good example of how to be in it for the long haul. I know that the situation gets to them—and may ultimately get them—on all kinds of levels, but I am nevertheless amazed at their strength in being able to defend such a large degree of their humanity—laughter, generosity, family-time—against the incredible horror occurring in their lives and against the constant presence of death… I am discovering a degree of strength and of basic ability for humans to remain human in the direst of circumstances—which I also haven't seen before. I think the word is dignity. I wish you could meet these people...”

* * *

The effect of the NYTW’s decision has been bad all-around:

• The play is currently not scheduled for production in New York City and it is a play people in the U.S. need to see
• A progressive theater is (justifiably) under attack from many in the theater community exactly at a time when the unorthodox resistance art they have produced in the past is needed more than ever.

This is a terrible dynamic that must be reversed. There are undoubtedly significant pressures on NYTW as there are on anyone in the arts who seeks to speak the truth and go against the tide in these dire times. But there are gigantic stakes for the people embodied in this episode, which is why no one can or should accept apologies about procedural misunderstandings. What is needed is a clear repudiation by the theater of their political stance to “contextualize” the play—which means, let’s be honest, surrounding Rachel’s heroic voice in support of the just struggle of the Palestinians with excuses and a rationale for what Israel is doing.

It would also help if others put the interests of the people of world ahead of more petty concerns. Wouldn’t it be the best thing for everyone if those involved struggled with NYTW to do the right thing, for the right reasons, and the play got mounted very quickly in New York City on their stage—or, failing that, at a theater that does not allow it to be marginalized?

Here’s another lesson we should take to heart: Once you start accommodating the forces of reaction, you will find yourself feeding a monster that cannot be satisfied. In these times, as every sphere of American life and politics is being remade in a fascist direction, it is simply a fact that “that which you will not resist, you will learn—or be forced—to accept.” (from the World Can’t Wait call)

People can also learn to resist, and courageous individuals can affect history. Everyone will be put to the test, under circumstances rarely of one’s own choosing, and sometimes people will be called upon to act heroically when they are not fully prepared. That’s maybe the most important thing to learn from Rachel’s life. She traveled halfway around the world to bear witness to what her government was doing, and ultimately gave her life to stop these crimes against humanity. But she didn’t start out brave and knowing what to do.

After her death, Rachel’s mother recounted, "I remember distinctly her voice when she first called from Gaza. I believe she was in the house that she died in front of. Her voice was trembling, and she was saying, ‘Can you hear that? Can you hear that?’ It was the shelling that was coming from the border. And then I remember talking to her for the last time, about five days before she was killed. Her confidence had grown along with her conviction that she was doing absolutely the right thing. I think about the courage that she drew from just being among the Palestinian people who are living with that situation."

On the third anniversary of Rachel’s death, March 16, there were readings commemorating Rachel Corrie in cities all over the world, including Basra, London, Brussels, Jenin, Jerusalem, New York, San Francisco, Abuja, Paris, Kabul, and Cairo. March 16 was inspired by readings of the play Lysistrata in over a thousand cities in March 2003, an effort described as “an act of theatrical dissent against the impending war.”

A public reading, “RACHEL’S WORDS,” will take place at Riverside Church in New York City on March 22.

[original article]

Here is an email we received from a reader in response:

I wasn't surprised when "New York Theatre workshop" postponed "My name is...." for "political reasons"! How many "notable"!! theatre companies in the U.S. would really read and approve plays which present political views? They'd reject them for their "difficult" or "serious" contents!

It's obvious that the original values of the majority of theatre companies is based on entertainment in a sense of alienating the audience from the essence of the truth! (although the truth is a relative matter)

A society which lethargically suffers from amnesia, (as Gore Vidal describes it) needs to learn from Rachel's tragedy, the art of seeing, hearing, and understanding....the art of being human.

E.G.
Playwright