Katharine Viner: Channeling Rachel Corrie

About the author:
For her first theatrical endeavor, London newspaper editor Katharine Viner chose a heroine who would inevitably inspire headlines: Rachel Corrie, a young American activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza in March 2003. Viner, an award-winning features editor at the Guardian and board member at the Royal Court Theatre, was enlisted by actor/director Alan Rickman to turn Corrie's voluminous writing into a theatrical piece. The resulting show, My Name Is Rachel Corrie, was a huge success at the Royal Court and two subsequent theaters. The play became notorious in America before it was ever performed here when the New York Theatre Workshop cancelled a talked-about production last fall. Now Rachel Corrie has arrived off-Broadway at the Minetta Lane Theatre for a commercial run with its original star, American-born actress Megan Dodds. Below, Viner explains how Corrie's unique voice inspired this solo show.

It was the thud on the doormat that convinced me My Name Is Rachel Corrie was going to work, one way or another.

When the e-mails of peace activist Rachel Corrie appeared in the British press within days of her death beneath an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza, the actor and director Alan Rickman was certain that her words should be performed on stage—she wrote so powerfully about the experiences of ordinary life under occupation, and of her views on the Middle East. But for a while we weren't sure just what kind of theatrical piece it would be. I was to be his co-editor, and we played around with all sorts of ideas, including interviewing Rachel's friends in Gaza and her hometown of Olympia, Washington, and building a patchwork of quotes from Gaza residents, Israeli soldiers, government officials and others. We weren't getting very far.

But then there came that thud on the doormat: 184 closely typed pages of Rachel's diaries, journals and e-mails from the age of 10, which her family had unearthed for us. That's when we realized that Rachel's voice was enough. She could tell the story of her own life, in her own words.

From then on, Alan and I wrestled over just which of those thousands of words should be included in a 90-minute piece of theater. As a journalist involved in my first theatrical collaboration, I was pushing for more narrative, more context and more emotion; as a man with great experience in the theater, Alan had a finely tuned sense of the realities of life on stage, and what would actually work.

We were both staggered by the quality of Rachel's writing—she was just as evocative when writing about bumping into an ex-boyfriend with his "new, hoochie-ass girlfriend" as she was describing a typical Saturday morning with a family in Rafah, the poor refugee camp at the southern end of the Gaza strip where she made her home. This was a delight for us, and helped provide the structure for the piece; for at least a third of the time on stage, the actor playing Rachel the wonderful Megan Dodds, who was also heavily involved in developing the piece, is packing up her bedroom in Olympia before her trip to the Middle East, reminiscing about her teenage years.

Rachel's writing from Gaza shows a different kind of intensity, an emotional and political engagement she conveys with great power. As she demonstrates, she was always a child who was very involved with the wider world; at 10, she wrote a poem about wanting to "stop hunger by the year 2000." But we took care to show Rachel's motivation for going to Gaza: She wanted to "meet people who are on the other end of the tax money that goes to fund the U.S. military" and how much she was affected by her trip.

She was deeply shocked by the poverty and desperation she discovered there, and the difference between the lives of Palestinians and Americans. The section from the Middle East is political. Indeed, it seems clear that going to Gaza helped Rachel find political meaning in her short life. But we felt it was also important that we kept a connection with the other side of Rachel in the Gaza section, which is one of the reasons we show her reading e-mails sent from her mother and father, full of anxiety and parental concern. These always prove very affecting for the audience.

We thought carefully about how to portray Rachel's death on stage. It is the only event in the play Rachel is not able to describe to us herself, which in itself provides considerable impact. In the end, the words of an eyewitness echo into a silent room.

The play was a big success in London, with runs in three theaters, but we always wanted it to be seen in the United States. It is an American play, packed with references to Mountain Dew commercials and Dairy Queen, and the story of an American woman who felt acutely aware of her country's place in the world. When a group of American teenagers came to see My Name Is Rachel Corrie at the Royal Court last year, they responded with extraordinary excitement and enthusiasm for Rachel. I think it was because, in a way, they saw themselves on stage, and who they might become.

Because at the beginning of the play, Rachel could be any American teenager—and by the end, she could only be Rachel Corrie.