Who will stand up for Rachel Corrie’s voice?

The award winning London production of of “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” will not be coming to NY after producers succumbed to political pressure. Given the current discussions here, I want to make clear that to my mind this isn’t a free speech issue, or even an instance of “censorship,” but a business decision that offers a clear-cut example of the cultural struggles here in the US to give the voices of dissent a role on the stage — literally in this case — of public discourse.
According to one of the playwrights, in “A Message Crushed Again,” the play is:

[c]reated from the journals and e-mails of American activist Rachel Corrie, telling of her journey from her adolescence in Olympia, Wash., to her death under an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza at the age of 23, we considered it a unique American story that would have a particular relevance for audiences in Rachel’s home country. After all, she had made her journey to the Middle East in order “to meet the people who are on the receiving end of our [American] tax dollars,” and she was killed by a U.S.-made bulldozer while protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes.

But last week the New York Theatre Workshop canceled the production — or, in its words, “postponed it indefinitely.” The political climate, we were told, had changed dramatically since the play was booked. As James Nicola, the theater’s ‘s artistic director, said Monday, “Listening in our communities in New York, what we heard was that after Ariel Sharon’s illness and the election of Hamas in the recent Palestinian elections, we had a very edgy situation.” Three years after being silenced for good, Rachel was to be censored for political reasons.

. . . Here was personal proof that the political climate is continuing to shift disturbingly, narrowing the scope of free debate and artistic expression, in only a matter of weeks. By its own admission the theater’s management had caved in to political pressure. Rickman, who also directed the show in London, called it “censorship born out of fear, and the New York Theatre Workshop, the Royal Court, New York audiences — all of us are the losers.”

It makes you wonder. Rachel was a young, middle-class, scrupulously fair-minded American woman, writing about ex-boyfriends, troublesome parents and a journey of political and personal discovery that took her to Gaza. She worked with Palestinians and protested alongside them when she felt their rights were denied. But the play is not agitprop; it’s a complicated look at a woman who was neither a saint nor a traitor, both serious and funny, messy and talented and human. Or, in her own words, “scattered and deviant and too loud.” If a voice like this cannot be heard on a New York stage, what hope is there for anyone else? The non-American, the nonwhite, the oppressed, the truly other?

Rachel’s words from Gaza are a bridge between these two worlds — and now that bridge is being severed. After the Hamas victory, the need for understanding is surely greater than ever, and I refuse to believe that most Americans want to live in isolation. One night in London, an Israeli couple, members of the right-wing Likud party on holiday in Britain, came up after the show, impressed. “The play wasn’t against Israel; it was against violence,” they told Cindy Corrie, Rachel’s mother.

The cancellation of the play corresponds, to me, to the disconnect between theory & praxis that I tried to point to in an earlier comment today, the main premise of which is “that difficulties will arise when one party compares its principles with the other’s practices. This creates a flawed dialogue, not least because it causes the former party to flatter itself and to antagonise the other unnecessarily” and that our first priority ought to be “comparing our principles with our own practices.”

I would suggest that the cancellation of this play isn’t a bad place to begin to look, and that the New York Theatre Workshop needs to hear some other voices, whose director is quoted as saying:

“I don’t think we were worried about the audience,” he said. “I think we were more worried that those who had never encountered her writing, never encountered the piece, would be using this as an opportunity to position their arguments.”

Since when did theater come to be about those who don’t go to see it? If the play itself, as Nicola clearly concedes, is not the problem, then isn’t the answer to get people in to watch it, rather than exercising prior censorship? George Clooney’s outstanding movie “Good Night, and Good Luck” recently reminded us of the importance of standing up to witch hunts; one way to carry on that tradition would be to insist on hearing Rachel Corrie’s words — words that only two weeks ago were deemed acceptable.

       of words:

what weight
a bridge’ll bear

what awkward reply