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New London Play Fetes U.S. Activist Killed in Gaza
I believe it's called, "Guys and Dolls Crushed Flat by Bulldozers"...
Oh, I'll bet... The 23-year-old campaigner was killed in 2003 trying to stop an Israeli army bulldozer from demolishing a Palestinian home in the Rafah camp in the Gaza strip. A personal testimony, the show makes no pretense of impartiality. What a surprise. Corrie's death made her a hero of the four-year-old Palestinian uprising, while critics attacked her as naive, an idiot and a traitor. Yes, so I've heard... But far from being a political rant, "My Name is Rachel Corrie," directed by British actor Alan Rickman, paints a personal portrait, using Corrie's e-mails and diaries to reveal a poetic writer brimming with ideas, energy and quirky humor. ...who was stupid enough to get crushed flat by a bulldozer. "I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don't think it's an extremist thing to do anymore," Megan Dodds in the title role says -- words from the last e-mail Corrie wrote her mother. Sorry, Rachel. Gotta work for a living... LOOK OUT FOR THAT BULLDOZER!!! "We were just trying to show who she was and present her fairly, neither as a saint nor a traitor," Katharine Viner, a journalist at the Guardian newspaper who edited Corrie's writings with Rickman, told Reuters this week. Writer for the Guardian? Oh, I'm sure they won't have her up for sainthood... "Some of her writing is very poetic and profound and you think 'God this was a really good writer and she could've written lots of great stuff had she lived."' ...and not been crushed flat by a bulldozer. The show at London's Royal Court theater runs to the end of this month. So hurry and order now before it's too late! Reviews of "My Name is Rachel Corrie" were generally positive, although The Times broadsheet said some scenes offered only a one-sided portrayal of the Middle East conflict, calling them "unvarnished propaganda." The Guardian countered that "theater has no obligation to give a complete picture." The right-leaning Daily Telegraph's review hailed the "vigor and courage of youthful idealism." I laughed! I cried! I hurled! I wet myself! "I've got a fire in my belly," Corrie pronounces near the start of the show, which opens in her messy bedroom in the town of Olympia, Washington and ends among the bullet-pocked houses and rubble of Rafah. ...and a bulldozer parked on my head. That fire kept Corrie scribbling plans, dreams and opinions constantly in her diary and obsessively making lists. One reads: "Five people to hang out with in eternity: Rainer Maria Rilke, Jesus, ee cummings, Gertrude Stein, Zelda Fitzgerald." Say hello for us, Rachel. Tell'em your tale. They'll probably get a kick out of it... Her philosophical musings on death, faithless boyfriends and improving the world become urgent, intense dispatches to friends and family after she arrives in the Middle East in January 2003. Corrie's parents, in London to see Rickman's show, described it as an authentic portrait of their daughter. "It helps to explain what took her to Rafah, it very powerfully explains what she found there," Corrie's mother Cindy told Reuters. People with bulldozers who don't fuck around maybe? The Corries are suing Caterpillar Inc., the company which manufactures the type of bulldozer used by the Israeli army in Gaza, for damages, accusing Caterpillar of "war crimes." Yeah, good luck with that... Corrie had several prescient dreams about her death. In her last e-mail home she writes: "Mom. I have bad nightmares about tanks and bulldozers outside our house and you and me inside." Wow! She was psychic, too? Posted by: tu3031 2005-04-22 |
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