Speak Ill of the Dead: "Rachel Corrie" @ Seattle Rep

On the other hand, critics of the play have pursued it with an almost religious fervor. Seattle Rep Artistic Director David Esbjorn comments in the program that, "Buying ads in our theatre publication to denounce the work on our stage is unprecedented..." Indeed, the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle bought an extremely tasteful ad titled "All the Rachels," picturing six young Israeli women around Corrie's own age killed by Palestinian terrorists. It's not a surprising move--after all, the Jewish Federation was the victim of terrorism here in Seattle when, on July 28, 2006, Naveed Afzal Haq shot six people (including a pregnant woman), shouting, "I'm a Muslim-American; I'm angry at Israel."

Still, watching the play, Corrie starts to win you over. That is in no small part due to the performance by Marya Sea Kaminski. For good reason was she on the short-list for The Stranger's genius award and voted Seattle Weekly's "best performing artist" in 2006. As Rachel Corrie, she seduces the audience with a disarmingly personal performance. It's perhaps inevitable, giving the extremely personal nature of the text, culled from diaries and emails, but from the moment she emerges from under a pile of blankets, Kaminski endearingly re-creates the world of an idealistic young college student, untidily packing books, absent-mindedly draping scarves around her neck, fiddling with the various crude pieces of art and tacked up photos with which she's made a crappy apartment her home.

But once she's followed Corrie to Israel and then to the Palestinian territories, Kaminski navigates more treacherous ground. It's hard to express innocence and idealism when Corrie's dictating to her mother over the phone how to stay on message with the press. Corrie was a little too knowing, a little too adept at repeating truisms about "the right to armed resistance" like mantras for the narrow characterization to carry. Still, that's an issue with the text: edited to be fairly didactic, the real Corrie keeps peeking through in those uncomfortable moments when the trajectory of innocence getting lost and children coming of age starts falling apart and the viewer is reminded that Corrie wasn't all that innocent; she was 23 years old, an adult, and had learned a good deal about how to be a human shield and play that up for the press.

The play gets back on track once the day-in, day-out violence and destruction starts wearing Corrie down. Kaminski works the few props she's given well. When Corrie takes up smoking to deal with stress, Kaminski gives the act an uncoordinated awkwardness, and plays the nervous striking of a match for all its punch. (BTW, to all the nonsmokers attending plays: just because smoking's banned indoors does not mean you should all start coughing uncontrollably when an actor lights an herbal cigarette onstage.)

Yet when all's said and done, and Corrie--defiantly standing before a Caterpillar prepared to level a Palestinian home--meets her untimely fate off-stage and outside the bounds of email and journal to document, we're left to contemplate the seductive power of the story and the performance, all the more uncertain about what to make of Corrie and the play's political statement. The play's denouement is a video of the real Corrie as a child, pledging to help end global poverty--a sweet, saccharine moment that really digs in a heavy-handed point about wanting to do better for a cruel world. But there is, as the Jewish Federation's ad makes patently clear, another side to this story, the story of normal Israelis terrorized by suicide bombings and rocket attacks, and there's not a lot of appreciation for that in the play, a fact that forms the crutch of critics' ire.

"Corrie at 23 was just like Corrie at ten," writes Kirchick. "And that is what's so tragic and so telling about those who wish to change the world without really trying to understand it."

If the play were to stand on its own as a political statement, we'd probably have been swayed to Kirchick's position. Unfortunately for politicos like him, where My Name is Rachel Corrie fails to spur audience members to go to Gaza and stand in front of Caterpillar tractors, it succeeds in that the vehement response of its detractors belies their seemingly casual dismissal. Whatever Corrie's faults, however ignorant or unappreciative of the vicissitudes of the conflict she was, there is a real moral and ethical reason to oppose the demolition of Palestinian homes, the unnecessary destruction of water sources, and repressive curfews foisted upon ordinary Palestinians by the Israeli Defense Forces. Corrie's harping about the evils of America's foreign policy and military support of Israel may be beating a dead horse, but it was only this last January that the Bush administration--normally an unquestioning supporter of Israel--was reporting to Congress that Israel likely violated arms trade agreements with the US when it used American-supplied anti-personnel bombs on civilians during its brief occupation of southern Lebanon in 2006.

And only last Sunday, New York Times columnist and Pacific Northwest native Nicholas D. Kristof was exhorting his readers that, "There is no serious political debate among either Democrats or Republicans about our policy toward Israelis and Palestinians. And that silence harms America, Middle East peace prospects and Israel itself."

"Three years ago," he notes, "Israel’s minister of justice spoke publicly of photos of an elderly Palestinian woman beside the ruins of her home, after it had been destroyed by the Israeli army. He said that they reminded him of his own grandmother, who had been dispossessed by the Nazis. Can you imagine an American cabinet secretary ever saying such a thing?"

In fact, not only would a cabinet secretary never make such a gauche and loaded comparison, even liberal American Jews are liable to labeled anti-Semites for less critical statements about Israel. In January, the American Jewish Committee released a report titled "'Progressive' Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism," labeling liberal Jewish Americans such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner and the respected historian Tony Judt anti-Semites.

Such rabid responses to criticisms of Israel by American organizations that are purportedly anti-hate groups has fueled controversy around an essay by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that appeared a year ago in the London Review of Books about the "the Israel lobby." Although widely denounced for treating pro-Israeli groups as an almost conspiratorial monolith bent on subverting America's interests for Israel's benefit, the essay broached a touchy subject--that some prominent Jewish organizations have conflated their mission of promoting Jewish culture in America with promoting the interests of the state of Israel.

One needn't engage is the dismal arithmetic of moral equivalency between Hamas's terrorist tactics and the IDF's heavy-handed responses to posit that Israel may not be entirely innocent of abuses itself. Israeli politicians and journalists do so regularly; it's Americans who aren't having that conversation, and if the awkward didacticism of My Name is Rachel Corrie overcomes the censoring of criticisms of Israeli policies and makes people start talking about whether we're doing right by the innocent victims of the conflict vis-a-vis our relationship with Israel, it will perhaps have served a purpose after all.

"My Name is Rachel Corrie" plays at Seattle Repertory Theatre through April 22. Tickets available online.