Photo: Megan Dodds
Courtesy Royal Court Theatre
Photography by Stephen Cummiskey

Play Reveals Many Dimensions of Rachel

Working from Rachel Corrie’s diaries, letters and e-mails, the acclaimed actor Alan Rickman and the Guardian journalist Katharine Viner distilled the essence of Rachel’s life into a powerful one-woman play. Performed by actress Megan Dodds, the play had two sold-out runs at the London Royal Court Theater in 2005. Craig and Cindy Corrie wrote the following after attending the opening night of My Name is Rachel Corrie.

When our daughter Rachel was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza strip on March 16 2003, an immediate impulse was to get her words out to the world. Her emails home had had a powerful impact on our family, making us think about the situation in the Middle East in ways we had never done before.

After Rachel died we realized that her words were having a similar effect on others whose lives were being changed, as ours have been – not just by Rachel’s death, but by the window her writing provided on the Palestinian experience and by her call to action.

In spring of 2005, when a play created entirely from Rachel’s emails and journals first opened in London, we saw in a very immediate way the impact that Rachel’s words can have on others. Theater can reach people in a different and deeper place than reading a news article or listening to a speech: there is an emotional aspect that for some people can be more long-lasting and motivating.

The play, My Name Is Rachel Corrie, is not just about how Rachel died, even if that is why she is known and remembered. It also illuminates her humanity, tracing her evolution from typical teenage self-exploration through to her search for a political voice. The play includes some of her writing that might be considered uncomplimentary to us, and even to her. Far better that, though, than being a symbol of one dimension.

It is disconcerting, but also comforting, to watch an actor who looks much like Rachel – Megan Dodds – play our daughter on stage. In the opening scene, when Rachel awakens in her messy bedroom, the resemblance is almost too much. But Megan lives Rachel’s words in ways that are sometimes familiar but also sometimes surprising, so that we learn from her what Rachel may have been thinking. At several points in the play, Megan enacts receiving emails from us – real emails that we actually sent to Rachel. We had never before imagined our daughter’s reactions to receiving our messages until we saw them on stage.

Rachel was a real human being. Sometimes, when people idealize her, we feel vulnerable for her. Knowing the complete human being, would they feel the same? Through My Name is Rachel Corrie, people can know a more complete Rachel.

Clearly, our daughter has become a positive symbol for people. Her story and her words seem to motivate others to do something, not just sit and talk about the world’s situation in their living rooms and feel unhappy. The weekend after Rachel was killed, we discussed with old friends what we should do. We needed to find a response. In some ways we may have been more fortunate than other parents who have lost children, for the response in our situation was apparent. With her efforts to educate and to build permanent connections with Palestinians in Rafah, Rachel provided us with a path.
In an email from Rachel to her friend Todd, she tells him 10 times over that he must come to Gaza. “Come here!” she repeats over and over. That is what Rachel would have wanted us to do, too: to try to carry on what she started.

The recent disengagement may provide some relief for Gazans at the most obvious level. But what has been happening in the West Bank under cover of the disengagement – the building of the wall and the expansion of settlements – is very worrying. And when the Israeli prime minister’s close aide Dov Weisglass said that the real intent of the Gaza disengagement was to place the peace process in formaldehyde, we have to take him at his word. We must keep insisting on a peace process and work towards a viable Palestinian state that will benefit Palestinians, Israelis and the rest of the world.

The month before she was killed, Rachel wrote the following in an email to us: “I look forward to seeing more and more people willing to resist the direction the world is moving in, a direction where our personal experiences are irrelevant, that we are defective, that our communities are not important, that we are powerless, that our future is determined, and that the highest level of humanity is expressed through what we choose to buy at the mall.” Action has already flowed from her words.

Website: weepingskies.blogspot.com
Photos: Hackney Empire - 1 November 2005

There was anticipation among the concert-goers who, weaving past protesters, gathered November 1st in London at The Hackney Empire, for “The Skies are Weeping, A Concert for Justice and Peace.” The concert included the worldwide premiere of a controversial cantata “The Skies are Weeping.” Written for soprano, chamber choir, and percussion ensemble, the work by Alaskan Philip Munger was inspired by Rachel Corrie and written as an expression of the political climate surrounding her death. The second movement, “Dance for Tom Hurndall,” memorializes the slain U.K. activist and photographer whose parents joined the Corrie family in the audience. Munger, whose music often reflects his humanitarian, environmental, and social concerns, had planned for the work’s premiere at the University of Anchorage in 2004, but was met with intense opposition from some in his own community. The Alaskan performance was cancelled after he and students received e-mail threats that raised concerns for their safety. Though Munger sought other U.S. venues for the premiere of his work, it was a young Londoner, Deborah Fink, a soprano and activist with Jews for Justice for Palestine, who took up the challenge.

The concert also featured the U.K. premiere of “The Singer of Wind and Rain—Five Songs on Palestinian Poems” set by Gregory Youtz, professor at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. Traditional Palestinian dance by the Al-Hurriyya Dabke group and Israeli, Palestinian, and Yemenite songs woven into jazz compositions by Israeli Tsivi Sharett and the TS Ensemble rounded out the evening. Conducted by Peter Crockford, the classical selections were performed by soprano Deborah Fink, pianist Dominic Saunders, the chorale ensemble Coro Cervantes, and the London Percussion Ensemble.

At the concert website, one listener wrote, “From the opening whispered lament of The Singer of Wind and Rain, through the excitingly different jazz fusion… the joyous exuberance of the Al Hurriyya Dance Group, to the atmospheric The Skies are Weeping cantata, we joined emotionally with singers and dancers from different cultures and backgrounds, in harmony and peace.” Munger described “The Skies Are Weeping” as “perhaps my most important composition.” An award-winning composer, his music has been performed at the Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Julliard Institute, National Gallery, National Cathredral, and other prominent venues.

The Rachel Corrie Foundation was proud to lend support to this brave undertaking and to those whose work on this project conveyed that censorship of the kind directed at Philip Munger and his Alaskan performers cannot stand.

The concert was further funded with grants from the Arts Council of England and the Holst Foundation. Patrons and supporters included professor Noam Chomsky, actress Julie Christie, Jeremy Corbyn MP, Moris Farhi MBE, Dr Jane Manning OBE, Miriam Margolyes OBE, Dr Ilan Pappe, John Pilger, playwright Harold Pinter CH, former Palestinian General Delegate to the UK Afif Safieh, Clare Short MP, The Corrie Family, Jocelyn Hurndall, Madison-Rafah Sister City Project, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Jewish Socialists’ Group, Just Peace UK, International Solidarity Movement, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and the Council for Arab-British Understanding.

Please take a moment (11 minutes) to watch this video of the Nasrallah family and their hope for a new home after the distruction of their home that was destroyed in Rafah, Palestine. (more…)