London headliner Megan Dodds will reprise her role in My Name is Rachel Corrie when the controversial play arrives in New York this fall. Dodds will play the title role six times a week when the drama starts at off-Broadway's Minetta Lane Theatre on October 5, with Bree Elrod performing the Saturday and Sunday matinee performances.
A graduate of Juilliard, Dodds appeared on Broadway in 1995 in the National Actors Theatre staging of School for Scandal at the Lyceum Theatre. On the West End, she's been seen in Popcorn, Up for Grabs opposite Madonna, Hamlet and My Name is Rachel Corrie. For her work as Rachel Corrie, Dodds received the 2006 London Theatregoers' Choice Award for Best Actress and was nominated for London's Time Out Award for Best Actress.
Directed by actor Alan Rickman, My Name is Rachel Corrie centers on the title character, a 23-year-old Evergreen College graduate and Olympia, Washington native who went to the Gaza Strip to aid Palestinians whose homes were being destroyed in the conflict with Israel. In March of 2003, she was killed by an Israeli bulldozer. The words in My Name is Rachel Corrie were taken from Corrie's own journals and letters. Rickman and journalist Katharine Viner assembled the text.
My Name is Rachel Corrie premiered at London's Royal Court Theatre in the spring of 2005 and returned there for another limited stint in the fall of 2005. It made press in America when off-Broadway's New York Theatre Workshop, which had never officially announced the play as part of its season, decided not to present the work. "In the less than two months we had to mount the proposed production of the Royal Court's My Name is Rachel Corrie, we found that there was a strong possibility that a number of factions, on all sides of a political conflict, could use the production as a platform for their own agendas. We were not confident that we had the time to create an environment where the art could be heard independent of the political issues associated with it," NYTW Artistic Director Jim Nicola said in a statement at the time. After it was confirmed the show would not play at NYTW, it again was seen in London, running for nine weeks at the West End's Playhouse Theatre this spring. Seattle Repertory Theatre previously announced it would mount the play from March 15, 2007 through April 22, 2007.
My Name is Rachel Corrie is scheduled to officially open off-Broadway on October 15 and run through November 19.
