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With our official chroniclers being so generous these days in dispensing the mantle of "hero" (the title is now
bestowed upon the tragic legacy of virtually every uniformed American man or woman who dies following senseless orders), the
story of Rachel Corrie serves, like an ice-water dunking, to shock us back into understanding the meaning of the word.
You might remember her: the 23-year-old activist from Olympia, Washington who was crushed to death in 2003 by an Israeli
military bulldozer as she stood with outstretched arms, wearing an orange vest, attempting to block the demolition of the
home of a Palestinian family amid Israel's campaign to clear-cut Palestinian border neighborhoods in the name of security.
As it turns out, Corrie was a writer of some ability as well as an activist, and her copious and revealing journals were
edited into a play, a one-woman show titled "My Name is Rachel Corrie," which took London by storm last year. The
play was the biggest sellout in 50 years at London's Royal Court Theatre, and has since moved to the West End, London's equivalent
of Broadway, where it is expected to be a smash.
This year, New Yorkers were also expecting to be able to see the play until, weeks before its scheduled March 22 opening
at the New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW), the theater suddenly announced an open-ended postponement of the play's debut amid
intense pressure from groups not pleased with the dramatic message of a blue-eyed blond American pro-Palestinian activist.
It seems that in an age of quisling liberals diving for cover from post-9/11 political vigilantism, these tickets were, in
the words of a cover story in The Nation, "too hot for New York."
The outrage from theatrical luminaries was deservedly swift and widespread. The play's co-creator, Alan Rickman, proclaimed
in the Guardian of London, "This is censorship born out of fear." Nobel literary laureate Harold Pinter, in a letter
to the New York Times signed by nearly 20 other well-known self-described Jewish playwrights and writers, said that NYTW's
claims of recent Mideast developments making the Corrie play too controversial "make no sense," and asked, "what
is it about Rachel Corrie's writings... that New York audiences must be protected from?" Actress Vanessa Redgrave declared
to Pacifica Radio that NYTW's failure of will is "an act of catastrophic cowardice." Famed playwright Tony Kushner,
whose own work has been featured at NYTW, wrote in a letter to the New York Observer that he is "disappointed and disheartened
by this decision and... baffled by the subsequent attempts to justify it."
The record, sadly, illustrates NYTW's willing surgical removal of its own spine in this matter. In response to early opposition
to the play from some quarters, the theater's leadership, by its own admission in a March 22 interview on Pacifica's Democracy
Now!, began a community "dialogue" process that involved pro-Israel partisans but no Arab-Americans. It began backing
away from previously-agreed commitments to stage the play. It started to suggest, after the fact, to the play's British creators
the need for audience "discussions" including pro-Israel scholars after each performance to place the play in "context."
Most damningly, NYTW revealed its own lack of stomach for defense of artistic and political principle in the face of politically
and financially influential opposition.
It is to their credit that, after the compost hit the fan, NYTW Artistic Director James Nicola and Managing Director Lynn
Moffat agreed to do the Pacifica interview at all; the broadcast was a debate between them on the one side and the play's
co-editor, Katherine Viner, whose sense of offense at NYTW's moral cave-in reflects the feelings of the play's other British
creators and backers as well as of Corrie's parents themselves [full transcript of the debate is at http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/22/1435259].
Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman is not known for lobbing softballs, and Nicola and Moffat, clearly no more morally steady
on their feet than when they first took on the Corrie play, were out of their league. One might feel sorry for them but for
the fact that the political cost of their cowardice is, for the broader artistic community, much greater than its personal
cost for the two of them. Throughout the interview Nicola and Moffat betrayed, to their lasting shame, a feckless aversion
to fighting back against the currently intimidating forces of cultural censorship.
I suggest that you go and hear (or read) Nicola's and Moffat's remarks for yourself. It wasn't pretty: Nicola stumbled,
whimpered and equivocated through tortured attempts at self-justification by reiterating how very, very hard it is to try
to mount a play when people get mad. And Moffat, for her part, stuck to a steely script of utter nonsense about the play's
unique incorrigibility and the awful practical problems it posed. The British co-writer Viner, admirably restraining her likely
desire to knock Nicola's and Moffat's squishy heads together, dispatched their hopeless arguments with civil precision. She
also left them flat-footed by refusing, on the air, their plaintive offer to try to find some way for NYTW to stage the play;
NYTW no longer merits any trust, she replied, and the play's creators have been inundated with offers from other American
theaters to put on the play, one of which they hope to accept.
The heart of the matter, I think, is that theater people like Nicola and Moffat have been accepting toasts at cocktail
parties and bowing for applauding trustees at board meetings for so long that they have forgotten how to take a flurry of
punishing shots to the chops (or to the gut) for the sake of their mission. In the Pacifica interview, both Nicola and Moffat
recited, like a mantra, that it was their Herculean task with the Corrie play to, in Nicola's words, make it "safe"
for Corrie's message to be heard without its being "polluted" by the raging political argument surrounding the Israeli
occupation. It is as if Nicola and Moffat hoped to shuffle mute audiences in and out of this political fireball of a play
-- in Manhattan, no less -- with no muss, no fuss, and no need to take a fighting stance in the face of irate theater funders
and infuriated political zealots. The essential and unavoidable need to stand up and fight in public for a work such as the
Corrie play seems to have entirely taken these two by surprise. Even on the radio, one could sense their blinking disorientation.
I think they are still in shock at having had such demands made of them.
Nicola's blubbering, in fact, reached its absurd peak in the interview when he cited, as if pointing to a newly-uncovered
neutron bomb, a friend's having told him of an online claim that Rachel Corrie was a registered member of Hamas. People are
out to slander Corrie and my play! he gasped. Well, duh. A lot of people hate the cause that Corrie supported, and some of
them lie on the Internet, and a few are flat-out wacko, and others will go all-out with their financial and political clout
against a theater that takes a stand for a Palestinian-sympathetic production. Hello? Earth to Jim. This is part of the job
description for a theater artistic director who has principles. It is high time more artists posed dramatic challenges to
the orthodoxy of American support for the amoral militarism and self-excusing atrocities of the current Israeli regime.
Welcome to the new McCarthyism: an era of contagious and officially-mongered fear that, like the 1950s, separates the
heroes from the, er, James Nicolas.
© 2006 Bruce A. Jacobs (Posted 3/27/06)
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