| My Name is Rachel Corrie
CONTROVERSIAL PLAY PREMIERE IN CANADA AT THE MONUMENT NATIONAL December 4, 2007 -Teesri Duniya Theatre and neworldtheatre join forces for a cross-national co-production of a play which has become a flashpoint for North American's opposing feelings about the Israeli Occupation of Palestinian land. My Name is Rachel Corriepremieres in Quebec at the Monument National, from Dec 6 - 22, 2007, featuring a team of nationally acclaimed, award winning artists: Adrienne Wong (Performer), Sarah Stanley (Director), Marcus Youssef (Collaborating director), Ana Cappelluto (Set and Costume Design), Peter Cerone (Sound), Itai Erdal (Lighting Design) and Candelario Andrade (Video Design) Jesse Ash (Sound and Video Systems Designer). The play premiered at the Royal Court in London, England in the spring of 2005, to sell-out houses and rave reviews. Despite this success, theatres in New York and Toronto either cancelled productions or declined to produce it after publicly announcing their intentions to do so. In March, 2003, 23 year old Rachel Corrie, of Olympia, Washington, was crushed to death by an Israeli Defense Forces bulldozer in the Gaza strip. A volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement, Corrie was protesting the destruction of Palestinian homes. With the permission of the Corrie family, actor Alan Rickman and Guardian journalist Katharine Viner accessed Rachel Corrie's diaries and emails and edited a huge volume of written material into a 90 minute stage play. Passionate, sometimes irreverent and always intelligent My Name is Rachel Corrie explores an extraordinary young woman’s singular experience in a region most of us only know from the news. Rachel Corrie sought to discover for herself the human impact of her own country's foreign policies on people thousands of miles from her home, a small city a few hundred kilometers from Vancouver, BC. Her words bear witness to the deracinating madness of war, a hysteria that infects not only those doing the fighting but also those ambitious to do the saving. – John Lahr, The New Yorker
QUEBEC PREMIERE
DECEMBER 6 – 22, 2007
WESTCOAST PREMIERE ABOUT THE PLAY Rachel Corrie was a 23-year-old American peace activist from Olympia, Washington, who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer on 16 March 2003, while undertaking nonviolent direct action to protect the home of a Palestinian family from demolition. Shortly after her death, several of her e-mails home from Gaza were published in a number of media outlets, including in the Guardian UK. British actor and director Alan Rickman was so moved by them that he approached the Royal Court Theatre about finding a way to tell Rachel's story onstage. A year after her death, Corrie's family sent the theatre 184 pages of documents: copies of Rachel's letters, e-mails and journals-some dating back to her childhood. Guardian journalist Katharine Viner was brought on board to work with Rickman at editing the material into a play. The two decided to let Rachel's story be told in her own words. In April 2005, My Name is Rachel Corrie, directed by Rickman and performed by Megan Dodds, opened at the Royal Court Theatre, and became the fastest-selling play in the theatre's history, selling out two complete runs before transferring to the West End the following year. The play was critically acclaimed and won the Theatregoers' Choice Awards for Best Director, Best New Play and Best Solo Performance. The production was slated for transfer to the New York Theatre Workshop in March 2006, but six weeks before it was scheduled to open, the New York producers decided to postpone the production indefinitely, fearing political reprisals. Artistic Director James Nicola told the Guardian of London: “In our pre-production planning and our talking around and listening in our communities in New York, what we heard was that after Ariel Sharon's illness and the election of Hamas, we had a very edgy situation.” Nicola went on to say, “We found that our plan to present a work of art would be seen as us taking a stand in a political conflict, that we didn't want to take.” The Royal Court felt that the postponement was in effect a cancellation, and withdrew the rights. The British production eventually made it to New York's Off-Broadway Minetta Lane Theatre in October 2006. The play has since had US productions in Seattle and Shepherdstown, West Virginia. In Canada, Toronto's CanStage had originally announced plans to include the play in its 2007-08 season, but in December 2006, Artistic Director Martin Bragg announced that he had removed the play from the lineup. Bragg cited artistic reasons, saying that he had been moved by reading the play, but that after seeing it in New York, “It just didn't seem as powerful on the stage as it did on the page.” neworldtheatre presented the play as a staged reading at the World Urban Festival in June 2006, in conjunction with Judith Marcuse Projects.
Artistic Director’s Statement My Name is Rachel Corrieis the second play in our season series “Staging Peace in Times of War.” The play recounts the experiences of 23-year-old Rachel Corrie who was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home. Who was Rachel Corrie to draw attention to the lives of people whose experience is so different from her own? Palestinians called her an “Angel of Peace” for defending against the demolition of their homes. The Israeli military argued that the demolition of Palestinian homes was a necessary measure to destroy terrorist cells, and that Corrie brought about her own death by putting herself in harm’s way. While the opposing sides accuse each other of lies surrounding the circumstances of Rachel’s death, there is no lie in the fact that a young life of great potential was lost. The truth about the circumstances under which Rachel Corrie died must be brought to public notice – and theatre has a role to play in it. In producing this play we are well aware that we are stepping into the eye of a storm of controversy that, depending on who is speaking, elicits charges of conservatism, betrayal, or anti-Semitism. The controversy gained force when two notable companies – one in the USA and the other in Canada -- first committed to producing the show, then backed out. The New York Theatre Workshop’s artistic director James Nicola publicly justified his company’s decision saying he felt unable to present the play “simply as a work of art without appearing to take a position." Martin Bragg, artistic director of Toronto’s Canadian Stage Company said, “It just didn't seem as powerful on the stage as it did on the page.” We disagree in the strongest terms. While we consider censorship odious, we consider self-censorship more so. There is an insidious practice of avoiding critical issues and the search for truth among those theatres that would pretend that it isn’t the role of theatre to engage in historically contested issues. Truth cannot be found without engagement and critical examination. While acknowledging that truth in drama is forever elusive, we believe the search for truth is a primary task of theatres. Her private diaries show that Rachel Corrie was an exceptionally gifted writer. She reminds me of Anne Frank whose personal writings about a heinous reality made her an international symbol of lost human potential. Yet, while no one has contested Anne Frank’s right to write against Nazi cruelty, many would suppress Rachel Corrie’s right to point fingers at the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians -- in spite of the fact that Corrie made clear distinctions between the behavior of the Israeli state and that of the Jewish people. There are those who would hurl charges of anti-Semitism against anyone who desires to hear what Rachel Corrie had to say. This distasteful tactic of invoking a fear of anti-Semitism to suppress discourse on contentious difference is, in my opinion, tantamount to a second slaughter of Rachel Corrie. In the words of our co-producer Camyar Chai of Neworldtheatre, “what is at the heart of our two companies’ co-production is the freedom to tell a human story with honesty and compassion … and uncensored.” |
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An Interview with Directors Sarah Stanley & Marcus Youssef |
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About the Artists | |
About Teesri Duniya Theatre Teesri Duniya Theatre is dedicated to producing socially and politically relevant theatre that supports a multicultural vision of society, promoting interculturalism through works of theatre, and creating theatrical styles based on the cultural experiences of visible minorities living in Canada..The company is committed to multiethnic casting and stories. Teesri Duniya began as a South Asian theatre company in 1981. Today it is one of the few theatre companies in Canada, and the only one in Quebec, where artists of every culture, color, language and background work together. In the early eighties, the company produced plays in Hindi dealing with issues affecting the lives of South Asian immigrants in Quebec (Julus, Ek the Gadha, Bhanumati ka Pitara, Ghar Ghar Ki Kahani, Ahsaas and Darwaze Khol Do). Then, in 1985, the company began producing English-language productions with plays such as The Great Celestial Cow, Job Stealer , Isolated Incident, Equal Wages, Land Where the Trees Talk, No Man’s Land and Divided We Stand. We choose to produce cutting-edge avant-garde plays on difficult yet relevant subjects. We have produced such plays as Counter Offence, Reading Hebron, Bhopal, Zahreeli Hawa, Noah’s Arc 747, Ali & Ali And The Axis of Evil, Ms. Oriented to name a few. Counter Offence was Mirror critic Gaëtan Charlebois’s top pick of the 10 best plays of the decade. In 1999, we produced L’Affaire Farhadi, a French translation of Counter Offence, earning the distinction of being the first culturally diverse company to produce a French-language play. The Gazette declared: “L’Affaire Farhadi could be the vanguard of the revolution in French-language theatre.” The company is rooted in the community. Our most recent community project was Rights Here!, which involved community-engaged theatrical productions bringing together artists and the community, exploring issues related to human rights. The project was carried out in India and in Canada. This year, we broke new ground by producing A Leaf in the Whirlwind, a new form of dance-theatre that combines story-telling, elements of theatre with a contemporary interpretation of Indian classical dance Bharatnatyam. The company produces a range of plays reflecting diverse cultures, perspectives, themes, and aesthetics. These are united by our common concern with issues of social justice, cultural relevance, and artistic quality. We are proud to have produced works in English, French, Hindi, and Tamil, and we look forward to expanding our linguistic repertoire in the future.
About neworldtheatre We also work with numerous community-based groups, giving non-professional artists creative tools with which to examine and express their self-defined aspirations and concerns. Philosophically, we are driven by a commitment to a broad, integrated and artistically cogent mix of diverse artists and arts-practice and a commitment to the artist's vision as the primary engine of artistic creation. We believe that Canada's artistic ecology is as culturally, economically and stylistically “diverse” as the country it emerges from. It is the inherent strengths of this ecology that we strive to reflect, and at the heart of all our work we believe in the triumph of compassion over all forms of oppression. Since 1992, Vancouver-based neworld has produced 17 original shows, including Adrift on the Nile, Ali and Ali and the Axes of Evil, Crime and Punishment, and Asylum of the Universe, and received 17 Jessie Richardson Awards, The Canada Council TYA Award and the Alcan Performing Arts Award. neworldtheatre productions tour across Canada and have been presented by major national festivals, including the PuSh Festival, the Vancouver International Children's Festival and the National Arts Centre's Magnetic North Theatre Festival. Cited by both the National Post and the Globe and Mail as one of the companies driving the nationally recognized renaissance in independent Vancouver theatre, neworld produces work that is passionate, entertaining and thought-provoking. We consistently reach audiences that cross traditional cultural and demographic boundaries. Further Reading The Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice The Foundation was founded by members of Rachel Corrie's family and community in order to carry on the type of work that Rachel began and hoped to accomplish. The site features information about Rachel and an extensive reading list, as well as a very informative “myths and facts” sheet about Rachel's work and her death. www.rachelcorriefoundation.org
Rachel's Words
Democracy Now
“Let Me Fight My Monsters” back to the press releases page |
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