This Wednesday, on March 22nd, there will be a reading at Riverside Church, commemorating the memory of Rachel Corrie, who died on March 16th three years ago. Maya Angelou, Patti Smith and Eve Ensler will be participating by video. Amy Goodman and James Zogby will host the event and there's an ever-growing list of other personalities scheduled to show up.
March 22nd is also the day the play, "My Name is Rachel Corrie," was supposed to open at the New York Theater Workshop (NYTW) for a nearly two month-long run. But it has been cancelled. The title of Philip Weiss's Nation article("Too Hot for New York") seems appropriate, given the situation. Brief backgrounder from the article:
When she died on March 16, 2003, Rachel Corrie had been in the Middle East for fifty days as a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a group recruiting Westerners to serve as "human shields" against Israeli aggression -- including the policy of bulldozing Palestinian houses to create a wider no man's land between Egypt and then-occupied Gaza. Corrie was crushed to death when she stood in front of a bulldozer that was proceeding toward a Palestinian pharmacist's house. By witnesses' accounts, Corrie, wearing a bright orange vest, was clearly visible to the bulldozer's driver. An Israeli army investigation held no one accountable.
Last year, the play, put together by Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner from journal entries and emails of the 23-year-old Corrie, ran at the Royal Court Theatre in London for four sold-out weeks. It then ran again last fall. The Royal Court got bids from around the world, including a theater in Israel, but they felt that bringing it to America was most important, especially since that was Rachel's homeland. And the NYTW seemed willing and able.
What's happened since then has been labeled censorship. According to a statement made to the New York Times in late February, James Nicola, the artistic director of NYTW, "decided to postpone the show after polling local Jewish religious and community leaders as to their feelings about the work."
Naturally, there has been much shock over this revelation. The idea that a play might have been censored simply because of its pro-Palestinian stance is, as Tony Kushner puts it, "ghastly." According to the Village Voice, an online petition asking Nicola to make good on his commitment to the play got over 350 signatories in three days, including Gloria Steinem and Eve Ensler.
In his final analysis, Weiss says:
Who will tell Americans the Middle East story? For generations that story has been one of Israelis as victims, and it has been crucial to Israeli policy inasmuch as Israel has been able to defy its neighbors' opinions by relying on a highly sympathetic superpower. Israel's supporters have always feared that if Americans started to conduct the same frank discussion of issues that takes place in Tel Aviv, we might become more evenhanded in our approach to the Middle East. That pressure is what has stifled a play that portrays the Palestinians as victims.
If that's true, then shame on America for trying to claim freedom of expression. When has a different point of view ever hurt anyone?
