Who was Rachel Corrie? (Part III)

I suppose all plays are political, but to paraphrase Orwell, some are more political than others. Take, for example, My Name is Rachel Corrie (Ms. Corrie, at left) which repeatedly has threatened to unravel the liberal consensus that supports our current theatre - by alienating a substantial number of the Jewish members of said consensus. The show has been delayed and canceled in places like New York and Toronto due to protests, and when the New Repertory Theatre announced its production dates, the theatre packaged it with To Pay the Price, a patriotic meditation on the Entebbe raid drawn from the letters of Jonathan "Yoni" Netanyahu, older brother of the former Israeli prime minister, and the lone Israeli killed in that famous rescue. Only ironically enough, this time it was the pro-Israel play that got canceled - the Netanyahu family pulled the rights, with youngest brother Iddo Netanyahu stating that "there is an inherent incompatibility in the joining together, in one evening, of a play based on my brother Yoni's letters with the play 'My Name Is Rachel Corrie.' "

So the consensus remained unraveled. The New Rep, however, quickly announced a replacement production: Pieces, by Zohar Tirosh, which, due to its length, would be presented on alternating nights with Corrie - a small separation which may have ameliorated tensions around the project. But when both shows opened, the critics were none too pleased with the "balance" achieved. "It's a pity that New Rep found it necessary to create this kind of balance," sighed the Globe's Louise Kennedy. " . . . no two plays in the world can exactly balance each other . . . They're individual works of art, not position papers, and they must each be judged on their own merits - not just on how they connect to the real political issues they engage, but also on how they succeed as works of art."

Kennedy continued: "Neither is a perfect play, but "Rachel Corrie" is more expertly crafted, more movingly written, and, at least in these productions, more essentially theatrical than "Pieces." Let me emphasize that that's an aesthetic judgment, not a political one . . . "Corrie" is ultimately more persuasive because it starts by allowing us to see its protagonist as a naive, self-absorbed flibbertigibbet . . . the experience of actually watching the play leaves us less interested in [political] questions, and more interested in the development of a specific, flawed, but fascinating human being. The almost giddy young girl we met at the outset has, by the end, grown into a far sadder, more complicated, and yet still resiliently optimistic woman."

Meanwhile over at the Phoenix, Carolyn Clay subtly struck a pro-Israel stance: "There is no doubt that Rachel Corrie . . . offers pro-Palestinian propaganda," she sniffed, but still quickly fell in line with Kennedy: "What makes each [play] compelling is its piquant personal journey, not its political agenda." Meanwhile, over at the Herald, Boston's youngest theatre lady, Jenna Scherer, declared "Art shouldn’t require even-handedness . . . Issues don’t get more hot-button than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a subject on which you’d be hard-pressed to find an objective account. But shouldn’t that be all the more reason to allow an individual voice to ring clear without apology? Isn’t theater supposed to incite people to think and react?"

Of course calls like these from people safely protected from their consequences always ring a bit hollow - "Uh, react how?" one might legitimately ask Jenna Scherer. In comparison to these critics, I was more sympathetic to the New Rep's efforts at "balance," if only because I knew a bit about the threatening edge of Zionist sentiment firsthand: years ago, I directed a production of Sophocles's Antigone which I set on the West Bank, with Antigone burying a fallen brother who had joined the Intifada. I received, of course, threatening phone calls and letters, warning that if I "knew what was good for me," I'd never open the show. Of course, I never do what's good for me - I opened it anyway, and nothing came of the threats. Still, said threats gave me (and the actors!) pause, as something tells me they would Louise Kennedy, Carolyn Clay, and Jenna Scherer.

So "balance" has a certain practical argument on its side - and after all, unlike Toronto, we got to see My Name is Rachel Corrie. But there's a more slippery problem slithering through the critics' declarations about "balance" - as well as what they clearly thought of as an escape hatch from the whole imbroglio, the idea that these plays were compelling not as political statements, but as "piquant personal journeys."

This, of course, is the kind of diversity boilerplate that Kennedy, and to a lesser extent Clay, are always deploying - I'm still waiting for the Kennedy review that concludes "the tragedy of Hamlet is that the prince dies before he has the chance to become the warm, wise woman he has the potential to be." The trouble with boomer boilerplate, of course, is that this time, decoupling the "personal journey" from its politics is trickier than it seems - for both Rachel Corrie and Zohar Tirosh.

As I've pointed out in earlier posts, My Name is Rachel Corrie goes heavy on the young Rachel's quirky, appealing idealism - we see her bouncing around in tank top and boxers (Stacy Fischer, at right), yearning for some purpose beyond corporate materialism - but then omits her most extreme statements and actions once she gets to Gaza: we never see Rachel burn a mock American flag, for instance, as she was photographed doing, nor does she ever actually thrill to the killing of Israeli soldiers, as she did in her journal. Likewise, the organization she joined to get to Gaza - the controversial International Solidarity Movement, which many Israelis claim (with some evidence) has ties to Palestinian terrorism - is barely mentioned, much less analyzed. And the possibility that the homes Rachel was defending might have been camouflage for a network of terrorist tunnels (again, there's some evidence, which provides a neat explanation for that bulldozer) is likewise never cited.

So what kind of a "piquant personal journey" is this - toward empowerment, or pawndom? We can't really tell, because it occurs in an echo chamber - and not merely the one within Rachel's head, but the political echo chamber constructed by Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner, who generated the piece. Let me say right here that I'm probably in sympathy with Rickman's and Viner's political aims - while I don't deny Israel's right to exist, I also support a Palestinian state, and view Israeli settlements in the occupied territories with skepticism (one very welcome aspect of My Name is Rachel Corrie is that it decouples opposition to Israeli policy from anti-Semitism). So I suppose I should love Rickman and Viner's play. But the actual artistic questions posed by Rachel's life, which might be illuminated by her writing, must include ones like, "Why didn't the idealistic young Rachel end up fighting hunger in Darfur rather than dodging bulldozers in Gaza? Why didn't this candid, talented kid, whose journals crackle with insight into her cozy, crunchy home, ever ponder what exactly she was getting into?"

There are a few poignant hints that Rachel knew she was in over her head - "I'm really new to talking about Israel/Palestine," she admits, after she arrives in Gaza - which, as one wag put it, is a bit like stepping off the plane and announcing, "Me llamo Rachel!" Yet at the same time Corrie can state, without irony or qualification, that “the vast majority of Palestinians right now, as far as I can tell, are engaging in Gandhian non-violent resistance." Ah, but what a difference a single suicide bomber makes! Essentially, Corrie never wonders whether the Palestinians are perhaps contributing to their own oppression; she only knows what she sees, and what she sees is admittedly terrible, and rarely contemplated by American audiences. But this gap in her awareness - which the authors refuse to illuminate - makes her death terribly sad, but not tragic, as she never reaches self-knowledge, or sees the possible flaws in her stance.

And thus, with apologies to Louise, Carolyn and Jenna, it's hard to applaud My Name is Rachel Corrie as a "piquant personal journey" - unless said journey is into the Stockholm Syndrome. On the other hand, it's also impossible for me to agree that Corrie and Pieces "are simply not balanced at all," because they are balanced in their respective blind spots. In Pieces, Zohar Tirosh as studiously avoids the political flip side of her actions as Rickman and Viner do Corrie's; Pieces does indeed "balance" My Name is Rachel Corrie; it just doesn't engage with it.



Pieces (with author/actress Zohar Tirosh, above) is a more gently pitched "personal journey" - in fact, it's the time-honored one through military service, here thoughtfully and gracefully enacted by Tirosh herself. The story sports the usual décor - the oppressive superior officers, the boyfriend who proves unfaithful, the brush with danger, etc., but the Palestinians, of course, are once again the elephant in the room. They're "over there," Tirosh often says, but she never goes there - so exactly what she's defending, and from whom, is never addressed. Of course her stint in the army occurred under Rabin, when rapprochement with Palestine still seemed possible, and her piece ends with his assassination (by an Israeli extremist sympathetic to the West Bank settlers). So in the talkback, the question inevitably arose - would Tirosh serve in the Israeli army today? Today, after the Second Intifada, and the advent of the suicide bomber, and the Wall? Today, when even as Israelis cry foul at the term "apartheid," they must face the fact that if current trends continue, they will soon be a Jewish minority governing a territory by force?

Would she serve? Would she want her daughter to? The actress, visibly distressed, slowly, sadly, shook her head "no." And several members of the audience immediately bristled.

The consensus, apparently, remains unraveled.

Who was Rachel Corrie? (Part II)

Corrie burns a mock American flag before Palestinian children.

This is the second in a series of three posts planned about the (recently closed) productions of My Name is Rachel Corrie and Pieces at the New Repertory Theatre. After seeing both performances, I found myself intrigued by the issues of personal-vs.-political presentation they seemed to raise. Below is a conversation (via email) I had with Meron Langsner, Playwright in Residence at the New Rep, and the coordinator of the talkbacks, readings and discussions that surrounded the performances, as well as co-editor of the printed companion piece to the event, "Supporting Voices/Dissenting Voices."

HR: Many people saw the pairing of Pieces with My Name is Rachel Corrie as an attempt to "balance" the polemic of Corrie. The Boston Globe critic felt that it was "a pity that the New Rep found it necessary to create this kind of balance" because "the two plays together force us to view them through a reductively binary lens" and "no two plays in the world can exactly balance each other." Do you have any thoughts on those criticisms, or a response?

ML: Though I understand the impulse to reduce these plays to a position of binary opposites, to do so is really to miss the point of the entire project. As I said in many talkbacks as well as in the New Rep newsletter, these plays were not intended to present opposite sides of the conflict. To reduce the situation to two points of view is an extremely dangerous oversimplification. The phrase that we took as our theme was one I borrowed from Shai Feldman of Brandeis University; we were looking to gain a "more sophisticated understanding" of the situation. The sort of sophistication we sought would imply far more than two sides, and, as the plays that we produced were NOT binary opposites in terms of political stance, that sort of reductionism really doesn't apply.

What I would have liked would have been for more people to take in the event as a whole. Not just the two productions, but also the readings and films and academic panels. And of course the essay booklet. By taking in the entirety of the project, an audience member could have taken in far more views of the situation and gained a greater understanding of the artistic response.

HR: I felt that Pieces, although it dealt with a young woman who chose to serve in the Israeli army, didn't offer a strong political response to the statements of Corrie. (And the other play which had to be withdrawn dealt not with the Palestinian conflict but the raid on Entebbe.) In effect, the pairing amounted to a double bill about the life choices of two young "American" women (although Tirosh was Israeli, she returned to Israel from living in New York City). The Boston Globe explicitly reacted to the plays in this way ("The almost giddy young girl we met at the outset [of Corrie] has, by the end, grown into a far sadder, more complicated, and yet still resiliently optimistic woman."). Do you feel that implicit frame helped mute the reaction to Rachel Corrie (it seemed there was far less protest than the play has seen elsewhere), and do you think that, intentionally or no, the evening ended up re-framed as a tale about the political choices of two “American” girls, rather than about Israelis and Palestinians?

ML: I have to say that "the political choices of two ‘American’ girls" isn't really an appropriate frame. Zohar is an Israeli citizen who was doing her mandatory service and really did not have a choice in the matter. It would be like an American teenager's "choice" to go to high school.

In truth I really don't find Pieces to be overtly political. I found it to be more of a slice-of-life play that happened to take place at a crossroads in history. The talkbacks ended up being far more politically oriented than the play itself.

I also wonder about the idea of reframing because I believe that My
Name is Rachel Corrie (though I do not have box office numbers in front of me) had larger audiences than Pieces. The frame of two young women's choices implies that everyone saw both plays.

As for the idea that the plays served as proxies for political statements, that was something we did not intend at all. I know that My Name is Rachel Corrie is in fact a strong political statement, and perhaps the controversy around it caused the impression of polarized opinions, but once more, the entire event - talkbacks, panels, readings, and screenings - is really what I would want to have remembered, not just the two plays.

I don't know if the reaction was really muted. We were criticized by people who were strongly pro-Palestinian for not presenting the Corrie piece by itself, and there was an occasional leafleter outside the theater handing out anti-Israeli material. There were voices raised against the Corrie piece as well, and occasionally talkback sessions did get heated.

Also, I would add that we met with several community leaders who had a stake in the issues that these plays were about. On the whole they seemed to understand what we were trying to do with this event.

HR: In your essay on the two plays, you mention that "poetic license is in effect" in the structure of My Name is Rachel Corrie, and you (bravely, I thought) point out that her journals, emails, and statements have been "edited," and that the play has political "blind spots" - Rachel (at left, in Gaza) never burns a mock American flag, for instance, as she was photographed doing (above). You justify this "blind spot" by stating "the character arc of their [i.e., Alan Rickman's and Katherine Viner's] Rachel would be broken by including such an event." Your argument, of course, would be quite strong if the "blind spots" didn't feel so politically coordinated. But they do feel politically coordinated - which could be interpreted as an artistic flaw. That is, shouldn't a true work of art about a political agitator consider its central character's politics fully, rather than simply from the character's perspective? Especially since Rachel's statements do offer a chance for such a consideration, which her editors have avoided?

ML: This question is perhaps the most difficult. I can't know or fully understand the motivations of the plays' editors. I agree that the edits appear politically motivated, and I disagree with the position that those edits appear to espouse. But if the dramaturgical task they set themselves was to create a sympathetic Rachel, they succeeded. I would in fact argue that they were not trying to create a play about a political agitator. We never experience the character of Rachel as aggressive, because the structure of the play would not support it.

I think that Stacy Fisher (at right, as Rachel) gave an outstanding performance and I was highly impressed with David Gammon's directing. Their artistic choices added to the sympathetic nature of the character, and put theatricality into the script where it was not inherently present. I cannot see the character that Stacy created burning a mock American flag.

As for the relationship between art and politics, that is a far longer discussion.

HR: I was intrigued by the attitude toward "the other side" in the opposing pieces. Zohar Tirosh, although never treating the Palestinians directly, nevertheless seemed to yearn for peace with them and regretted their situation, and seemed to imply that Rabin's assassination was a setback for Israel in moral terms. Meanwhile Rachel Corrie made no attempt to dramatize the Israeli position, or its possible justification. Do you feel, therefore, that the evening was politically "balanced" at all? Or could it ever be, given that, ironically enough, a dramatization of Palestinian terrorism might be even more controversial than My Name is Rachel Corrie?

ML: Again, I want to repeat that "balance" is not necessarily an appropriate frame for this project.

As for dramatizing terrorism, two of the plays that were given readings, Nitzan Halpern's Sow and Weep and my own b'Shalom had suicide bombing as central topics. In both cases that subject created very strong negative reaction in certain audience members.

So I agree that a dramatization of suicide bombing would have created controversy. There is a sort of apologist attitude towards terrorism against Israeli civilians that I find is all too common.

HR: I'm also curious how the talkbacks and other programs around the plays worked out. Did you feel a "dialogue" was indeed generated, or did participants seem more or less entrenched in their respective positions? Any thoughts, based on your experiences, on how other theatres might approach such "live wire" political plays in the future?

ML: The greatest forums for dialogue in my opinion were the panel discussions that we set up. I believe that those expanded people's points of views the most. In terms of the talkbacks for the plays, those varied night by night. I found that many interesting comments came from people who had already seen one play and had just experienced the other. There were also nights when most of the discussion was (rather surprisingly) not politically motivated at all.

As for how other theaters might approach such plays - I think New Rep did a very brave thing with this event, and not something that I have heard of any other theater doing. By creating a forum for multiple points of view we actually opened ourselves up to criticism from every side, and yet, once people understood what we were trying to do, they seemed more willing to listen to representations of opinions that they might disagree with.

That said, on a practical level I found the essay booklets to be a wonderful intellectual addition to the program. The spectrum of ideas represented in them side by side was a great example of what we were trying to do with the entire series, and that the booklet can stand alone as a lasting document can really only help further a greater dialogue.

Who was Rachel Corrie?

The interview above, with the actual Rachel Corrie, occurred just two days prior to her death after being crushed by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003. That tragedy inspired, of course, My Name is Rachel Corrie, the monologue culled from her diary, emails, and statements by Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner. The script just finished a joint run at the New Rep with Pieces, a one-woman show by Zohar Tirosh about her own service in the Israeli Defense Forces (Corrie's nemesis). This pairing, with the issues of political and artistic "balance" it raises, has deeply interested me, although I decided not to write about it until I had the chance to see both plays (Corrie was sold out until late in its run). I'm currently discussing my thoughts and concerns with Meron Langsner, Playwright in Residence at the New Rep and one of the coordinators of the talkbacks, discussions, and readings which occurred around the performances to foster a dialogue with the theatre's audience. More to come about the questions posed by this controversial event.