The poignant, poetic voice of a young woman searching for her place in an embattled world.
Directed by Megan Kate Ward
Starring Amanda Jensen & Madeleine Rogers
PERFORMANCES: September 24 to October 30
Thursdays, Fridays & Saturdays at 7:30 p.m.
Sunday Matinees at 2:00 p.m.
TICKETS: $18 General Admission $15 Students, Seniors & Teachers.
For more information, please call: 503-293-3062 or email: bibiwalton@yahoo.com.
Peace Works is an annual project of the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice in the form of a lecture, conference, or other event that provides a forum for exploring the meaning and practice of justice and peace as they affect the social, economic, political, environmental, and spiritual aspects of people’s lives.
There is a Field
This October marks the ten-year anniversary of “Black October.” As the second Intifada erupted in the West Bank and Gaza, demon- strations also began in Arab villages and towns inside Israel. In October 2000, twelve Palestinian citizens of Israel were killed in these demonstrations by Israeli security forces.
One of those killed was a seventeen-year old boy named Aseel Asleh. Aseel was shot point blank in the neck by Israeli police at a demonstration outside his village. No eyewitnesses, including the Israeli policemen at the scene, claimed that Aseel had been violent in anyway. He was dead before reaching the hospital. Aseel had been a leading participant in a peace program called Seeds of Peace. He was wearing his Seeds of Peace t-shirt at the time of his killing and was buried in it.
A detailed and wise performance helps explain the activist’s psychic underpinnings.
Actor Emily Gunyou Halaas in My Name is Rachel Corrie.
Media shorthand feeds the impulse to consider activists on political terms — regardless of what those politics are.
“My Name is Rachel Corrie” allows actor Emily Gunyou Halaas to reveal the deeper, universal nature of an activist. Politics is but an implement selected by a person so driven by passion, sensitivity and awareness that activism becomes its own destiny.
“I don’t believe in fate,” Corrie says early in the 100-minute play, which was crafted by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner from her writings. But whether Corrie believes in fate or not is immaterial. Her actions and reactions — not her ideology — determined her path in life.
Corrie, who grew up in Washington State, was 12 when her consciousness drove her to speak out against hunger. Perhaps jealous of her siblings’ conventional success, she followed her instincts into social-justice causes. At 23, she traveled to live with Palestinian refugees in the Gaza, as part of the International Solidarity Movement. Her efforts might have been remained those of a single person, but in 2003 Corrie was killed when she knelt in front of a bulldozer driven by an Israeli soldier. As happens with martyrs who leave a written legacy, her efforts assumed mythic proportions.
