Adrienne Smook as Rachel Corrie
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Was Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old American activist killed by a bulldozer while defending a Palestinian home in Rafah in 2003, a hero or a fool? Sage Theatre’s brave Canadian debut of My Name is Rachel Corrie doesn’t provide a definitive answer to this question, unless it’s to say she was a little bit of both.
Or rather, the play doesn’t say it: Rachel herself does. Nearly every word in the play is Corrie’s own. The script was pieced together from her diaries, e-mails and letters, with Guardian journalist Katherine Viner and noted actor-director Alan Rickman functioning solely as editors. As such, it has been widely described as a “play without a playwright,” making a certain bagginess seem inevitable, even virtuous. But Corrie’s words are powerful enough to deserve the kind of careful cutting and shaping that good editors excel at. Too often in this one-woman play, the sheer volume of the words exceeds our limited human capacity to absorb them, and they crowd one another like the light-starved denizens of an untended garden.
Whatever you do or don’t decide about Corrie in the end, one thing should be clear: she was a writer. Her words reveal a remarkable, lively intelligence and a gift for concrete metaphor that is inherently theatrical. Of a boyfriend, for example, she wrote, “He pronounces his words like rubber bands stretched and snapping.” Even at her most self-absorbed, her writings are rarely without healthy doses of ironic self-awareness. In the first half or so of the play, a kind of portrait of the activist as a young woman, “Rachel” catches herself worrying about migratory salmon trapped beneath the streets of her city (Olympia, Washington), even as she walks those streets in her “slutty boots” on her way home from parties. “It’s hard to be extraordinarily vacuous when you have the salmon on your mind,” she wryly remarks.
But good words are only one-half of good writing. The other half is structure, and that’s where this play could have used more ruthless attention. I applaud the editors’ decision to include non-Palestine material — very few stories in any medium have managed to create engaging characters of radical activists, and this play, thanks to these early writings, largely succeeds. The trouble is, Corrie’s e-mail dispatches from Rafah are not given the same kind of artful, dramatic shaping as the material in the first half — a litany of long, seemingly unedited monologues make what should be the most powerful section of the play strangely flat. The days leading up to Corrie’s death are suddenly given dates, clearly an attempt to increase their importance in our minds. But the accumulated drama of her situation has already been swept away in the torrent of words, and when we arrive at March 16 — the day of Rachel’s death — it’s hard not to feel a whisper of guilty relief mingled with our horror.
The Sage production has done laudable things with this difficult material. Videographer Carla Ritchie’s home-movie-esque background visuals provide helpful context and plenty of pathos. The minimalist, spinnable-block set gives us some of the mental breathing space the script denies us, and allows Adrienne Smook’s Rachel to display a manic, restless energy that more literal-minded productions and actors might have chosen to illustrate with distracting, actorly twitches. One can easily imagine the long, narrow block that forms the set’s top tier swivelling to face Smook like the gun of a tank: the possibility haunts the play throughout.
One of this production’s most moving sequences involves Smook furiously scribbling a life-sized, journal-like chalk portrait onto one of the blocks: “This is my very poor drawing,” she tells us, “of the dead body we just carried.” She then washes it off with a clay bowl of water and a sponge. It’s a textured sequence that resonates long. On the other hand, a lengthy monologue that Smook delivers into a clinical white light, her back to the audience, is one of the very few times Ian Prinsloo’s otherwise assured direction stumbles. It’s perhaps meant to evoke Corrie’s markedly uncomfortable on-camera interviews, documents that have likely done little to win over her critics. But the last thing this production needs to do in its cold and wordy last third is anything that might alienate its audience further. The night I saw it, many of Smook’s words were inaudible during this sequence — it made it seem that even the production itself was following, by that point, only every third word.
That Smook may show the odd sign of fatigue during some of the later barrages of text should in no way diminish our awe of her truly outstanding performance. With her joyful, often sexy physicality, Smook gives this “skinny, messy, list-making chain-smoker” — to quote Billy Bragg’s homage to Corrie — palpable, complex life. Smook can turn from manically exuberant to tortuously introspective on a dime. Similarly, no matter whether she’s speaking the words of a Rachel at 10 or at 23 (she’s equally good at channelling Rachel’s mother and father, in the few welcome sequences when we hear their words), Smook’s cadences are never short of perfectly convincing. It is primarily through Smook’s constantly engaged and engaging performance that we can achieve at least some understanding of the rounded yet far, far from average girl and woman Rachel Corrie assuredly was.
