Related Information for
MY NAME IS RACHEL CORRIE
The following is the transcript of a Democracy Now! broadcast aired
October 20th, 2006. It contains interviews with Rachel Corrie's father
Craig, her sister Sarah, as well as with author Katherine Viner.
TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: This past Sunday, the play, My Name is Rachel
Corrie, finally opened in the United States, here in New York at the Minetta
Lane Theatre.
MEGAN DODDS, as RACHEL CORRIE: This realization that I will live my life
in a world where I have privileges. I can’t cool boiling waters in Russia.
I can’t be Picasso. I can’t be Jesus. I can’t save the planet
single-handedly.
AMY GOODMAN: Rachel Corrie was killed in Gaza on March 16,
2003, nearly three years ago, when she stood in front of an Israeli bulldozer
set to demolish a Palestinian home. The play is based on Rachel Corrie’s
writings before her death. My Name is Rachel Corrie was scheduled to open last
March at the New York Theatre Workshop, but six weeks before opening night the
theater announced it was indefinitely postponing production of the play. They
cited the current political climate as the reason for the cancellation,
pointing to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s coma and the election of Hamas.
The move was widely criticized by artists and activists around the world.
At the time, we had an exclusive debate on Democracy Now!, and I read a
letter written by Nobel laureate Harold Pinter to the artistic director of the
New York Theatre Workshop, James Nicola, and the theater’s managing
director, Lynn Moffat. The co-editor of the play, Katharine Viner, joined us
on the line from London.
AMY GOODMAN: There’s a letter today in The New York
Times. It’s written by Harold Pinter, who is the Pulitzer Prize-winning
writer, Gillian Slovo, Stephen Fry, and it’s dated March 20. The letter
was signed by 18 others, and it says, “We are Jewish writers who supported
the Royal Court production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie. We are dismayed by
the decision of the New York Theatre Workshop to cancel or postpone the
play’s production. We believe that this is an important play,
particularly, perhaps, for an American audience that too rarely has an
opportunity to see and judge for itself the material it contends with.
“In London it played to sell-out houses. Critics praised it. Audiences
found it intensely moving. So what is it about Rachel Corrie’s writings,
her thoughts, her feelings, her confusions, her idealism, her courage, her
search for meaning in life — what is it that New York audiences must be
protected from?”
The letter goes on to say, “The various reasons given by the workshop
— Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s coma, the election of Hamas, the
circumstances of Rachel Corrie’s death, the ‘symbolism’ of her tale
— make no sense in the context of this play and the crucial issues it
raises about Israeli military activity in the Occupied Territories.”
And the final line of the letter says, “Rachel Corrie gave her life
standing up against injustice. A theater with such a fine history should
have had the courage to give New York theatergoers the chance to experience
her story for themselves.” Signed Gillian Slovo, Harold Pinter, Stephen
Fry, London, March 20, 2006. Harold Pinter this year won the Nobel Prize for
Literature.
Our guests, Lynn Moffat is managing director of the New York Theatre
Workshop, in our studio with Jim Nicola, artistic director; and in the
London studio, Katharine Viner, co-editor and co-producer of My Name is
Rachel Corrie. Lynn Moffat, your response to the letter?
LYNN MOFFAT: To the letter? It’s a beautiful letter.
It actually addresses the issues that we were concerned about. We believe in
Rachel’s voice, as they believe in Rachel’s voice. We want it heard by a
New York audience, but we want the voice heard by the New York audience, not
the ancillary events that can pollute that voice. So that is the purpose of
the methodology that New York Theatre Workshop employs when it uses — when
it develops context for a play. I know “context” has become a much
maligned word in the last few weeks, but that is what we do, because
ultimately the purpose of the workshop in producing art is to foster
community dialogue, and to do that requires a lot of work just beyond the
play that is seen on stage.
AMY GOODMAN: But now, you did agree to produce the play,
and it was going to have its opening night tonight?
LYNN MOFFAT: And we still want to produce the play.
JAMES NICOLA: Yep.
LYNN MOFFAT: We still want to produce the play, and the
word “indefinite,” we don’t know where that word came from. We really
— and we never canceled the play. We were having a conversation with our
colleagues at the Royal Court about the difficulties that we were having,
not only just with the research that we were doing about the project and
about the play, but also about, you know, contracts and budgets and
fundraising, and all that sort of stuff.
JAMES NICOLA: Visas.
LYNN MOFFAT: Visas. We were having a conversation with
them, and then Katharine’s letter appeared in the Guardian.
AMY GOODMAN: Katharine Viner, your response.
KATHARINE VINER: Yeah. I mean, I’m actually not a
co-producer of the play. I was just the co-editor, so — but as I
understand it, we had everything set. Our tickets — our flight tickets
were booked. I was due to fly out yesterday to New York. The production
schedule was finalized. Both sides of the Atlantic had agreed on a press
release that was going to go out to the press, announcing the production of
My Name is Rachel Corrie, and then the Royal Court, as I was told, received
a telephone call saying that the play was to be postponed indefinitely.
That’s where the phrase came from.
AMY GOODMAN: Katharine Viner, speaking on Democracy Now!
in March. She joins us now in our firehouse studio. She is the co-editor of My
Name is Rachel Corrie, also an editor at the London newspaper, The Guardian,
also joined by Rachel’s father and sister, Craig and Sarah. We welcome you
all to Democracy Now! As you watch that, Katharine Viner, you were speaking to
us from London, had planned to be in New York at the time, and yet, here you
are, and the play is being shown now at the Minetta Lane Theatre. What
happened?
KATHARINE VINER: Well, we’re so delighted that it’s
finally on — the play is finally on in New York. We always said that it’s
an American play. Rachel was always just wholly American and should be heard
here, and I think it just shows that the whole controversy was needless. The
play has been very well received. Ticket sales are sort of through the roof.
Word of mouth is fantastic, and it just shows that New York wanted to see this
play all along.
AMY GOODMAN: Sarah, you’re a key part of this play. You
are [Rachel]’s older sister, and you’re the person who started this
process of collating your sister’s emails. Can you talk about that process?
SARAH CORRIE: Yes, actually we received an email from the
Royal Court Theatre shortly after Rachel was killed, asking if they could do
some sort of a work based off of Rachel’s emails. And at the time it was
just too emotional for us to be going through Rachel’s writing. We knew
there was a vast amount of material there, but it also felt very important to
us. Rachel was a writer. She had always wanted to be published. I think it was
one of the dreams that she had, and so I felt like it was something that I
could give back to my sister in order to sort of allow that part of her life
to still move forward.
So it was approximately a year after we first got the email from the Royal
Court Theatre that I sat down and was able to sit down with Rachel’s
journals. She was — in the play, she describes herself as a very messy girl,
so these journals were in tubs, they were in closets, they were in places all
over the house.
AMY GOODMAN: You live in and she grew up in Olympia,
Washington?
SARAH CORRIE: In Olympia, Washington, and we actually both
lived together. She had moved back into the house that we grew up in, with my
husband and I, and lived together for the last four months before she went
over to Rafah, so she was living in the home with my husband and I at that
time. So I was able to sit down with those journals. I’d take an evening to
just look at the journals, read them, gain sort of the emotional need that I
had for myself to understand the context, and then the next day, I sat down
with a glass of wine next to me and just typed them out without trying to edit
anything, sort of like a secretary would, just to get the words down on paper,
and that is what became the text that we then sent to the Royal Court for
editing at that time.
AMY GOODMAN: I watched the play last night at the Minetta
Lane Theatre, and afterwards you all spoke. You talked to the audience and
answered questions. And one of the key parts of this play is the list that
Rachel makes. Can you talk about the process of going through these and
deciding whether on earth the Royal Court Theatre would be interested in
Rachel’s lists, like when she’s going to do her laundry?
SARAH CORRIE: Yes. Rachel throughout all her writing had
these sort of what most people would look at, say these are odd little lists,
but interesting in a way, and I’d see this things within her writing and
look at them and say, “Well, what possibly could somebody do with these?”
But at the same time, they struck my interest. I don’t consider myself a
writer. I don’t consider myself someone that would be good at creating a
piece of theater, and I told myself, I don’t have the right to edit that
out. They were interesting to me, and so I ended up just typing them up along
with everything else, putting them in, and then that became sort of the piece
that wove the different aspects of the play together.
AMY GOODMAN: Katharine Viner, you are careful to say
you’re not the playwright here, but that you co-edited Rachel’s letters.
What about these lists? Can you talk about them, and for people who don’t
understand what we mean by lists? What’s on these lists?
KATHARINE VINER: Well, some of the lists are sort of
“five people I wish I’d met who are dead,” or “five people to hang out
with in eternity,” and that was very entertaining. Some lists are quite sort
of functional, but actually convey something very revealing. So there may be a
list about tasks to do in Gaza, which sort of showed you what life is like
under occupation, just from a list. And it was interesting when we were
editing the play, how they worked dramatically, these lists, because it became
a kind of recurring motif for, somehow, something you knew about Rachel, that
she loved making these lists, and you could chart her sort of psychological
progress through these lists and how they developed while she was there. They
also worked really well on stage, I think, and the audience gets very involved
in them.
AMY GOODMAN: So, the people she wanted to see who are
dead. Jesus?
KATHARINE VINER: Jesus, E.E. Cummings, Gertrude Stein,
Martin Luther King, Josephine — a selection of those anyway, wasn’t it?
AMY GOODMAN: Well, this is an excerpt from My Name is
Rachel Corrie. In this scene, Rachel sits down and reads an email from her
father.
MEGAN DODDS, as RACHEL CORRIE: Rachel, I find writing to
you hard, but not thinking about you impossible, so I don’t write, but I
do bore my friends at lunch, giving vent to my fear. I am afraid for you,
and I think I have reason to be, but I am also proud of you, very proud. But
as Don Remfert says, I’d just as soon be proud of somebody else’s
daughter.
AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt of the play, My Name is Rachel
Corrie. Craig, as you listen to that, your daughter, Rachel, reading your
letter. Do you remember writing that email?
CRAIG CORRIE: Oh, yes. Chills are going down me right now.
I had such a hard time. That’s the only email I wrote to Rachel while she
was in Rafah. I’m a Vietnam vet, and when I was in Vietnam, of course, Cindy
and I, my wife and I, were corresponding by mail, and that was easy for me,
but I think it was hard for her. And I was learning from Rachel being over
there that it was hard, because I didn’t know how she was. We were talking
by telephone, and so when she was on the telephone I knew that she was okay
for that period of time, but I was so worried about Rachel after she got over
there.
When she started reporting about what she saw, the bullet holes next to the
windows and stuff, I became extremely frightened for her, because I
recognized, this is a military that’s out of control, and I know how much
effort I spent in Vietnam to keep the people around me in control and
understanding that the other people there are human beings, and I didn’t see
anything about what Rachel was reporting that indicated that, so I became
frightened that somebody would just needlessly harm her or the people that she
was with.
And so, I finally got the nerve to write this email to her, and so it
always chokes me up, because I had not envisioned her reading this email until
I saw Megan doing it on the play, and then it’s — her reply is the last
thing that we ever heard from Rachel, and so her reply in an email back to me,
that’s our last contact with Rachel.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go now to another clip, to Rachel
Corrie in her own words. This is actually not from the play. This is an
excerpt of the documentary, Rachel Corrie: An American Conscience, which was
directed by Yahya Barakat. It includes excerpts of Rachel speaking in Gaza
about the plight of the Palestinian people.
RACHEL CORRIE: Sometimes it takes awhile for it to set
in what is happening here, because I think many of the people here, they try
to maintain what they can of their lives, and I think — I don’t know —
maybe it has to do with protecting their children, that they try to be
happy, joke with their children. So sometimes it takes time to — it’s
hard to hold in your mind, you know, the complete reality of what’s
happening here. Sometimes I’m sitting down to dinner with people, and I
just realize that there is a massive military machine surrounding them and
trying to kill these people that I’m having dinner with, these families
that I’m sitting down to eat with and who are being very generous and kind
to me, and their children here, who are incredibly threatened, living lives
that no child ever should have to live. And so, I feel a lot of horror.
Really, I feel a lot of horror about the situation.
AMY GOODMAN: Rachel Corrie being interviewed in Gaza.
Craig, when was this?
CRAIG CORRIE: That was two days before Rachel was killed,
and I’d just like to take people’s attention to the scene behind Rachel.
That used to be a neighborhood. She was on Abu Jamil’s house. Abu Jamil no
longer has a house, and, of course, Rachel is no longer alive. But that’s
the destruction that’s going on and was going on in Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: The Israeli military bulldozer that crushed
her — you are suing a U.S. company, Caterpillar, that made that bulldozer.
Where does that suit stand?
CRAIG CORRIE: Well, of course, in the first place, that
suit is predicated on the fact that Caterpillar knew that the bulldozers that
they were supplying to the Israeli military were used to aid and abet in human
rights violations. But at this point, the case actually has been dismissed,
and it was filed in Weston, Washington, in the U.S. Superior Court in Weston,
Washington, and the judge dismissed that and, I think, relied — I am not a
lawyer, but he relied on a misinterpretation of U.S. law, because essentially,
under this judge’s interpretation, unless the corporation, Caterpillar,
actually profited from the actual human rights violation, they can’t be held
accountable.
So if, for instance, I was in McDonald’s and somebody comes in and starts
shooting in McDonald’s, runs out of bullets, and I sell them more bullets, I
still wouldn’t be responsible for that person’s actions after they start
to shoot again. So, of course, we’ve appealed that to the Ninth Circuit. And
the appeals have been filed, but oral arguments in front of the Ninth Circuit
have not yet occurred.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Sarah, to see this play — I was
watching you. I was watching your family watch the play last night at the
Minetta Lane Theatre. Is it a little bit like your sister is brought back to
life?
SARAH CORRIE: No. It can never be Rachel up there on the
stage, and I think when we first saw the play, we realized that. We weren’t
expecting it to be Rachel on the play, but it’s a very accurate and honest
view, I think, of what Rachel was feeling at that time, I mean, the person
that she is. So, yes, I mean, it’s difficult as a family to watch. I think
every family member that’s been there to see that play says for exactly that
reason it’s difficult to watch the play, because Rachel’s not with us and
you’re seeing somebody up on the stage bringing her words back to life and
bringing her — a little bit of her personality and her humor back to life.
And those are the kinds of things that you miss so much on just a day-to-day
basis. So it is. It’s very difficult, but it’s also very warming at the
same time to just have those words, either reading them to ourselves or up
there on the stage. It — you know, it keeps Rachel with us just a little bit
longer.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you all for being with
us. Again, the play, My Name is Rachel Corrie, is now being performed at the
Minetta Lane Theatre in New York. Sarah and Craig Corrie, thank you. Katharine
Viner, thanks for joining us.
|
