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.

Poem of the Day

Incantation

by Czeslaw Milosz

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.



Czeslaw Milosz (at left) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, at a time when his work was banned in his native Poland. "Incantation" was written in 1968, in Berkeley, California, where he was a Professor of Polish Literature. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mr. Milosz returned to his native country to live part-time in Kraków, where he died in 2004.

Above, a young climber ponders Poland's Tatras Mountains.

Swan Lake revisited - and revised

The swan maidens flock together in Act II. (Photo by Gene Schiavone.)

Only a few weeks ago, Boston Ballet announced it would be leaving Citi Center for good after next season - and last night, at the opening of Swan Lake, Citi Center struck back. The hijinx began with an opening announcement about cast changes that was so soft you couldn't hear it; but surely that was just an honest mistake. Then when the houselights went up during a "pause" between acts - inducing some patrons to head for the bar, then dash back as darkness fell - it seemed that, too, was perhaps just an oversight. But when the huge drop at the back of the set began to rise during Act III, revealing a scaffold and a nonplussed stagehand, you began to sense that something like malice aforethought might be afoot. (Could Josiah Spaulding be backstage, yanking at some hidden pulley like the Phantom?) Thank God there's no real chandelier at Citi Center - still, Act IV likewise saw more half-glimpsed antics in the wings, and then at the final bow, most of the cast had mysteriously gone missing. (No doubt they'd fled in panic.)

Not that this ruffled the Ballet's highly determined prima ballerinas and danseurs, or its cleanly aligned, beautifully synchronous corps (above). Indeed, the triumph of this Swan Lake was its bevy of leggy swan-maidens; long-forgotten was the blurry architecture of the avian choreography in the Ballet's last Lake. This time around, the corps rivaled the crystalline precision of the Kirov (which flew through town a year or two ago), and so nailed the piece's patented wonder - the ethereal beauty of all that synchronized feminine allure.

Alas, elsewhere the dancing was always vital, but sometimes a bit rough - and although Larissa Ponomarenko melted hearts (as always) as the somewhat blandly virtuous Odette, she didn't really disturb as evil twin Odile. I caught Lorna Feijóo in the Ballet's 2004 version, who brought a memorable inner perversity to the role, along with a lock on its technical challenges, and I couldn't help but feel a certain gap: Ponomarenko made a simple, but still affecting, Odette, but an almost childishly superficial Odile - all wicked glee rather than coiled malice. Still, she danced the role with spirit (even if she wobbled out of her famously fiendish 32 fouettes), and Roman Rykine, as the Prince taken in by her machinations, displayed the same sympathetic partnering he seems almost to fall into with Ponomarenko, and elsewhere essayed an appropriately aristocratic melancholy.

I wasn't as taken with all the other featured roles - as the dastardly Von Rothbart (who's enchanted the swan maidens), Pavel Gurevitch was more pesky forest sprite than threatening evil wizard, and the divertissements which open the first and third acts dragged slightly (at least on opening night). Still, Melissa Hough displayed a gorgeously supple technique in the first act's pas de trois (her delicate lands in particular where to die for), and James Whiteside shone with his usual glossy sexual energy. In the third act, the stand-outs were Joel Prouty and Misa Kuranaga, who brought a winking camaraderie to the sweet, silly Neapolitan Dance.

Alas, that very lightness dogged the rest of the ballet. Artistic Director Nissinen this time around has opted for an improbably happy ending, which seems to flout the traditional raison d'etre of the production - although I'm not sure, in the end, why we have to venerate the "original" moves (actually reconstructed from several early versions), which include some awkward lifts for Odette and some rather rote variations. Still, once you've taken that route, why revise the ending in a manner which simply doesn't scan that well to the doomy climax of Tchaikovsky's themes? With a bit of Disneyfied triumph at the finale, yes, Swan Lake is more a crowd-pleaser than ever, but it can be so much more: its admittedly daffy dream logic, with all those mysterious curses and lakes made of tears, can unlock a surprisingly deep emotional resonance and be quite moving even though it doesn't make much sense. Boston Ballet's new version, however, seems happy to be lovely eye-candy, but not much more.

Not for nothing, but . . .

Yesterday it was widely reported that the Bush administration had declared the economy grew .06% last quarter, so "technically," the country was still not in a recession. Now I'm not an economist, but I am able to balance my checkbook (most of the time). And it seems to me that if the inflation rate is roughly 4%, and the economy only grew .06%, then . . . hmmmm . . . in real (or inflation-adjusted) terms, the economy actually shrank. But then why the Bush administration's pronouncements are even covered as news anymore at all is a mystery - I mean, does anyone want to bet on whether or not that estimate will eventually be adjusted downward? And isn't there some sort of journalistic prohibition against repeating information from unreliable sources? (If not, there should be.)

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming . . .

Of Bartók, Brahms and Beethoven

For its final concert of the season, the Boston Philharmonic offered a curious pairing: a well-loved warhorse (Brahms's first symphony) rubbed shoulders with a prickly piece of modernism - Bartók's Second Violin Concerto, essayed by the virtuosic Japanese violinist Kyoko Takezawa (at left). It was hard to see precisely how these two pieces might illuminate each other, aside from their rather melancholy historical juxtaposition - in his much-delayed first symphony, the late Romantic Brahms raised, then put to rest, Beethoven's classicist ghost; while in the Second Violin Concerto, Bartók sent Romanticism careening into Modernism, against which it basically splintered. Not everyone would agree with that back-of-a-napkin summation, of course - and it was even harder to parse in this particular concert, given that the audience-pleasing Brahms wrapped up the program rather than beginning it. And perhaps not everyone would agree with my gut feeling that the Brahms succeeded, while the Bartók didn't - indeed, I'm hard pressed to explain precisely why I feel that way.

Certainly Ms. Takewaza is a force to be reckoned with, and could hold her own against the BSO or any other major orchestra (why she seems locked in a second-tier touring situation is probably a function of the classical-music political machine, which, well-oiled as it is, is careful to remain invisible to most concertgoers). Takewaza's sound is not particularly large, but it's clean, lean, and startlingly agile, and her attack can be ferocious. She clearly knew the Second through and through, although her Bartók was rather more a "classic" modernist than a late, late, late Romantic; the pensiveness of the music came through, and its sudden flashes of doom - but perhaps not its episodic lyricism; the music was driven by force rather than fire. And Ms. Takewaza appeared manifestly unhappy on the Jordan Hall stage - her personal pensiveness, in fact, offered an intriguingly meta comment on the music's. She seemed to have little connection with conductor Benjamin Zander, even though the orchestra provided her detailed, thoughtful support - the string section in particular followed her with something like a haunting shimmer. Still, one reason to catch a Boston Philharmonic concert is to see the interplay between Zander and his players, and here there was a curious void where often there's intense connection.

Said connection, however, was back with the Brahms - which offers the kind of big, rhetorical gestures at which Zander (right) excels. The orchestra played with enthusiasm, and while there was little in the way of interpretive innovation on display, the piece sounded glorious, and Zander did conjure some complexity in the famous last movement. Here principal horn player Kevin Owen brought an affecting, dying fall to the call which seems to summon Beethoven's ghost, and the ensuing theme - so close to the motifs of Ludwig van that some wags have dubbed the piece "Beethoven's Tenth" - rose in the strings and winds with just the right mix of warmth and sympathy: a reminder not only of Beethoven but also of what the Boston Philharmonic does best.

Borat outtakes across America

Off-topic, but still funny - in this video from ABC's "20/20," a public display of gay affection in Birmingham, Alabama, leads to a 911 call and a visit from the local cops. And keep watching for the Vegas cab rider who mentions how he would like to carry loaded weapons to defend kids against homosexuals . . .

Losing touch with reality

My favorite theatre critic distinguished herself again this weekend with this observation about the current New York productions of South Pacific and Passing Strange:

"You might not think that these two shows have anything in common, but ever since seeing them . . . I've been convinced that they do. And that shared quality, to reduce it to its essence, is one that at first sounds unlikely: They're both real."

Now I suppose that's a little better than "They're both good. Just really, really good," but it hardly counts as something worth publishing. It's not analysis - or even thought, frankly. It's just a kind of benighted self-reflection, a slight extrapolation of "Do I like this? Yes . . . yes, I do . . ."

There's nothing wrong with that, of course, if you're sitting at home sipping a cappuccino. "Mmmmm . . . rich and creamy . . . good feelings . . . this cappucino is really real"; who hasn't gone through something like that thought loop? Even a drowsy gastronome, however, often ends up bumping against reflections like, "Yes, but why does this particular cup of cappuccino taste better than so many others? Hmmmm! I must ponder this further, particularly before I publish my thoughts in a major daily!"

But the best Louise Kennedy seems to be able to manage in this vein amounts to lines like, "What seemed embarrassingly straight and square and fake just a few years ago now reappears as wonderfully straightforward, squarely built, and true. Did the times change? Did we? Probably both." Okay. This cappuccino was once not rich and creamy, but now it is. Did it change, or did I? Probably both. Mmmmm. Rich and creamy.

Of course, maybe it's better if Louise doesn't think about such issues too hard, because soon she's fielding deep thoughts like: "Nellie Forbush's story, like so many others in the native art form of this nation of immigrants, is the story of leaving home to find our true selves. That complicated, quintessentially American path - to move closer to ourselves by moving away - resonates throughout Nellie's encounters with her own "hick" self and with the strange new world she's landed in."

Wow. "To move closer to ourselves by moving away . . . that complicated, quintessentially American path." Mmmmmm. I just love that quintessentially American path. It's so rich and creamy. Meanwhile, of course, it occurs to the disinterested observer that perhaps something in South Pacific, and its naïvely self-affirming anti-racist message, appeals to many in an America facing its "Obama moment." But would Nellie Forbush vote for a black man for president? (Whatever the outcome in November, we'll certainly need a little cock-eyed optimism to heal the ravages of the Bush administration.) And is Louise even aware of that subtext - or is she simply cannily dancing around it in the manner of so many Globe writers?

Somehow I think I'm going to go with the "not even aware" option - if only because the rest of her review (of Passing Strange) is so similar in its cozily self-satisfied vacuity: the show is full of songs that "feel like the songs that Stew and his terrific ensemble simply have to sing in order to tell the story they want to tell." Then there's: "Like South Pacific, Passing Strange feels genuine - true to itself, not to someone else's idea of what a musical should be. . . .it feels fresh and right to see a show that simply wants to be what it is . . . Sure, it's wised-up enough to know that the musical is an artificial form - but it's wise enough to use that artificiality to say something real."

Louise does try to work up something like an argument - or at least a contrast - around the "irony" and "calculating fakery" of new musicals like Cry-Baby, but she doesn't seem to realize that this once again leads to the question, "But why does irony suddenly somehow feel dated?" That's where a review might actually begin. Instead she wraps up, by quoting Oscar Hammerstein II with the same awe Luke Skywalker reserved for Yoda: "There is only one absolutely indispensable element that a musical must have. It must have music. And there is only one thing that it has to be - it has to be good."

You see, little grasshopper, there is no why. There is only the real. The cappuccino simply is what it is. And it is rich and creamy. Mmmmmm.