Hot-button drama

Actress Adrienne Smook plays a young American activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Calgary's Sage Theatre production of My Name is Rachel Corrie. (Sage Theatre)

In the U.K. these days, political plays are commonplace, with institutions like the National Theatre regularly staging provocative work about current events by well-known playwrights. In North America, by contrast, the bigger theatre companies are known to shy away from anything that might inflame their patrons’ political sensibilities. That disparity was glaringly evident last year when My Name is Rachel Corrie, a hit in London, was dropped from the playbills of theatres in New York and Toronto.

The play, about the young American activist who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza Strip in 2003, was originally presented at London’s venerable Royal Court Theatre in 2005, where it garnered critical acclaim and caused barely a ripple of protest. But when it was due to transfer to New York in early 2006, its would-be producers got cold feet. Nine months later, its planned Canadian debut at Canadian Stage, Toronto’s flagship public theatre, was also scuttled.

Canadian Stage artistic producer Martin Bragg explained to CBCNews.ca that he’d seen the play in New York — where, following a backlash from the international theatre community, it eventually ran off-Broadway — and felt it “didn’t work onstage.” But Toronto theatre critic Richard Ouzounian, writing in Daily Variety, reported that CanStage board members were opposed to having it produced, while patron Bluma Appel said she’d “react very badly to a play that was offensive to Jews.”

Ian Prinsloo, former artistic director of Theatre Calgary, that city’s largest public theatre, isn’t surprised. If he’d tried to program the play there, he’d have met with resistance from his board of directors, too. “Trying to get it done would have been nothing but a fight,” he says.

Instead, Prinsloo, now a freelancer, is directing the Canadian premiere of My Name is Rachel Corrie this month at Calgary’s much smaller Sage Theatre. Sage is the first of several plucky little companies who will be performing the play across Canada this season; neworldtheatre and Teesri Duniya Theatre are doing a co-production in Montreal and Vancouver, Theatre Yes and Catalyst Theatre are presenting it in Edmonton, and Theatre PANIK will finally bring it to Toronto next spring.

The reason the play makes producers skittish is that its sole political viewpoint comes from Corrie, a member of the nonviolent International Solidarity Movement, who was in Gaza to protest the Israeli treatment of Palestinians when she died in March 2003, at the age of 23. The one-woman show, created by British actor Alan Rickman and Guardian newspaper editor Katharine Viner, is constructed almost entirely out of Corrie’s e-mails and diary entries, and makes no pretense at objectivity.

Activist Rachel Corrie burns a mock U.S. flag during a rally in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah in Feb. 2003. (Khalil Hamra/Associated Press)

“It doesn’t put the policies of the Israeli government in a kind light at all,” Prinsloo acknowledges. “It looks at the conditions under which the Palestinians of Gaza live, and those aren’t pleasant in any way.” As a pre-emptive move, Prinsloo and Sage’s artistic director, Kelly Reay, have already met with representatives of Calgary’s Jewish community to allay concerns about the play’s partisan view. The company, which in the past has staged political works like Jason Sherman’s Reading Hebron and Tony Kushner’s Slavs!, will be offering audience talk-back sessions after each performance. “We want to bring in other viewpoints,” Prinsloo says.

The play shows the precarious day-to-day lives of Palestinians through Corrie’s eyes, but it’s more than a piece of theatrical journalism. Her writings, dating back to her childhood, also trace the personal journey that took her from a comfortable middle-class home in Olympia, Wash., to beleaguered Rafah, where she died while trying to stop the Israeli army’s demolition operations. Along the way, the real Rachel emerges from behind the headlines, the “messy, skinny, Dali-loving, list-making chain-smoker, with a passion for the music of Pat Benatar,” to quote Viner. And also revealed is a remarkable young woman, whose fierce desire to make a difference in the world was allied with a sharp intelligence and a writer’s gift of observation.

“It reminds me of the diary of Anne Frank,” says actress Adrienne Smook, making a loaded comparison with the famous Holocaust victim. “They both documented their lives in such a beautiful way.” Smook, who plays Corrie in Sage’s production, says when she first read the script, she was impressed with how articulate and poetic the activist could be. “There’s poetry all through [her writings]. Once she goes to Gaza, her writing is a lot more fact-driven reporting, but every once in a while she writes a little poem – poetry flows out of her, it seems, despite herself.”

Smook, 29, finds it easy to identify with Corrie. They were born in the same year, grew up on the West Coast (Smook on Vancouver Island) and come from white, middle-class families in which they were the only artists. The production emphasizes the similarities, with backdrop projections that use Smook’s childhood and family photos rather than Corrie’s. The actress says it makes for “an incredible emotional connection” with Corrie. “It sounds really Method actor-y, but it is actually a really good way of telling this story in an honest and truthful way.”

Where the role offers a challenge, says Smook, is in “finding the emotional place that a person has gotten to that makes them stand in front of a bulldozer instead of running away. That’s a pretty big sacrifice,” she adds. “And she was a human shield many times while she was over there – that wasn’t the first time she’d used her body to shield Palestinian people or Palestinian homes.” Corrie has been viewed both as fearless and foolhardy in the protest that led to her death. Attempting to block an Israeli military Caterpillar apparently headed in the direction of a house, Corrie climbed on top of the pile of rubble it had scooped up and was pulled under when the bulldozer moved forward. An Israeli government inquiry concluded that her death was an accident; Corrie’s activist colleagues claimed the driver deliberately drove over her, despite their attempts to make him stop.

Megan Dodds as Rachel Corrie in a production at the Minetta Lane Theatre in New York. (Stephen Cumminskey/Associated Press)

Corrie was an ardent critic of Israel’s actions in Gaza, but her e-mail dispatches to her family show that she was an opponent of Israeli government policy, not the Israelis themselves. “Midway through the play, she asks, at what point did condemnation of the Israeli government become condemnation of all Jewish people?” says Prinsloo. “The Jewish people have had a huge history of devastation and repression, and that cannot be ignored in any way,” he adds. “But at the same time, it can’t be something that prevents us from having a discussion about what is occurring [in the Palestinian territories].”

Prinsloo admits it’s not a subject Israelis and Palestinians can debate calmly, given the horrific casualties on both sides. “The discussion is so raw, so open to personal feelings, personal histories, that it doesn’t start with ideas, but with emotions.”

Smook, however, hopes audiences come away from My Name is Rachel Corrie doing more than just arguing about its politics.

“Her story makes you think, ‘What am I doing with my life?’” Smook says. “She did so much with her short 23 years on the planet, working so hard to make a difference. She said that searching for how she fits into the world forced her out into her community. I hope this play will make people say, ‘Well, what can I do in my community?’ I hope it inspires other people the way it inspires me.”

My Name is Rachel Corrie runs Nov. 15-24 in Calgary. It will also be presented Dec. 6-22 in Montreal, Jan. 24-Feb. 3, 2008 in Vancouver, March 28-April 12 in Edmonton and May 29-June 22 in Toronto.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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