Reviewed By Sheana Ochoa

The story of Rachel Corrie, in the form of a 70-minute performance at the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, an outdoor amphitheatre in Topanga, depicts the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation through the eyes of a young activist who seems to have been born to promote peace. The play closes with a video clip of the real Rachel Corrie, as a 5th grade student, imploring the world to end hunger. Rachel's dedication to ensuring basic human rights inspires as much as the production of the play disappoints.

Samara Frame as Rachel CorrieWhen the play premiered at the Royal Court in London, England in the spring of 2005, it played to sold-out houses and rave reviews. Despite this success, the New York Theatre Workshop put the planned U.S. premiere on hold in the face of public protests, including threats of violence. In the end, the play opened as a commercial production at the Minetta Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village in the fall of 2006, and has since seen productions throughout the U.S. and Canada. This is the first time Angelenos have had a chance to see it.

The script, edited from Rachel Corrie's emails and journals by actor Alan Rickman and Guardian journalist Katharine Viner, presents an immediate challenge: to portray a truthful character without the fourth wall of the theatre. It is impossible to watch the play without knowing it is a play. From the opening lines, Rachel, performed by Samara Frame, addresses the audience directly, describing her setting, her background and her intention to travel to Gaza with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) to promote peace and justice in the area. An expert narrator, Frame announces her ambitions and quirks. Director Susan Angelo successfully navigates the disappearance of the fourth wall by cleverly not pretending that Rachel is simply ruminating out loud as Hamlet in his "To Be or Not To Be" soliloquy. The actress physically connects with the audience with her eyes, her movements, and most obviously in a moment when she places hats on the heads of different audience members. This departure from Realism is successful because of its unapologetic transparency.

The drama's weakest link, however, derives from the mistake of choosing the narrator's voice over the character's. With few exceptions, Frame delivers the thoughts so fervently written by Rachel Corrie as a recitation, not an embodiment of the character. Some of the edited passages reflect Rachel Corrie's tendency to wax poetic. Frame mistakenly delivers them as such, emphasizing the flowery language by extending her vowels and using sweeping gestures, which resemble performance art rather than a three-dimensional character in a play.

The majority of the script, however, is a direct, prose-style account of Rachel's experiences in Gaza, which she expresses with impassioned investigative journalism and colloquial email correspondence, enumerating the details of the Palestinian daily struggle to pass check points, access water, escape having their homes bulldozed. These scenes fly from Frame's tongue without having been tasted and chewed, spitting out morsels without allowing herself or the audience to swallow or digest the previous piece. The legendary acting teacher Stella Adler used to quote Pushkin by telling actors: "The truth of art is the truth of the circumstances." Frame failed to consistently inhabit the circumstances of the play, leaving the audience with a diatribe of facts prohibiting an emotional connection with the character or the story she is telling. Although there were a few authentic moments, Frame is primarily reporting rather than acting, which lends a preachy pitch to a play that could otherwise be emotionally enriching as well as didactic.

Rachel Corrie's uncle Eugene Robbins: defends his niece during post-play debateAs much as the production failed to portray an authentic depiction of the woman it memorializes, it could not help but spawn a heated debate afterward. Voices, hands, and blood pressures were raised, and the hatred engendered by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict manifested in accusations of anti-Semitism, and even the supposition that Rachel Corrie had been exploited by her parents, the ISM, and later by the press as pro-Palestinian propaganda. Fortunately, Rachel's uncle happened to be in the audience to settle the issue. "Every word in this production was her word," he said. "Now that is not a person who was exploited. She was an observer and she told you what she observed." Despite the polarized perspectives, the discussion was a peaceful one in which the audience was allowed to voice its opinions and beliefs.

The Theatricum Botanicum, founded on the mission to "elevate, educate and entertain audiences by presenting thought provoking classics and socially relevant plays," can boast another successful dialogue about a controversial issue that Americans shy from discussing. As Amani Jabsheh, a Palestinian woman in the audience, who has lived half her life in America, shared: "Not everyone is educated about international law, but there is another law: the law that is in your heart which is to bring peace into this world. It has nothing to do with whether you're Jewish or Palestinian."

 
Sheana Ochoa is the author of a forthcoming biography of Stella Adler.