"Rachel Corrie, A Message Crushed Again"

Katharine Viner, Los Angeles Times

Three years after American activist Rachel Corrie died under an
Israeli bulldozer in Gaza, her words are being censored for political
reasons.

The flights for cast and crew had been booked; the production
schedule delivered; there were tickets advertised on the Internet.
The Royal Court Theatre production of "My Name Is Rachel Corrie," the
play I co-edited with Alan Rickman, was transferring later this month
to the New York Theatre Workshop, home of the musical "Rent,"
following two sold-out runs in London and several awards.

We always felt passionately that it was a piece of work that needed
to be seen in the United States. Created 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.I'd heard from American friends that life for dissenters had been
getting worse — wiretapping scandals, arrests for wearing antiwar
T-shirts, Muslim professors denied visas. But it's hard to tell from
afar how bad things really are. 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.

I was particularly touched by a young Jewish New Yorker from an
Orthodox family who said he had been nervous about coming to see "My
Name Is Rachel Corrie" because he had been told that both she and the
play were viciously anti-Israel. But he had been powerfully moved by
Rachel's words and realized that he had, to his alarm, been
dangerously misled.

The director of the New York theater told the New York Times on
Monday that it wasn't the people who actually saw the play he was
concerned about.

"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.

[Katherine Viner is the features editor at the Guardian] in London and
the editor, with Alan Rickman, of "My Name is Rachel Corrie," which
premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in April 2005. Because of the
cancellation of the New York run, the play is transferring to the
Playhouse Theatre in London's West End.]