It is here, however, that the fundamental problem of this work emerges.  For in trying to confer an underlying structure on their materials Rickman and Viner offer us not one play but three.  Each involves a distinct dramatic form with a distinct end or purpose.  Moreover, the three forms are incompatible and contradict one another.  This contradiction is what makes this play so interesting and revelatory—as a representation of the contradiction that defines the problem of serious theatre today. My Name Is Rachel Corrie stages the three distinct options open to us when we try to write serious drama or as audiences seek out theatres that will give us such fare.  It thus presents us with a unique opportunity to confront the hard choices we face both as playwrights and as theatre-goers.  I know that as good “pluralistic” Americans we think we can have it all.  But as I’ll show we can’t precisely because each of these  plays (i.e., dramatic structures organized to realize an informing purpose) rests on a fundamental choice that excludes the other two. Making a choice is here not something we can or should avoid because it constitutes more than the problem of theatre in our time.  It constitutes, as we’ll see, the possibility of our own freedom.

      One play is about Rachel’s political awakening from naďve idealist to one who  sees the truth about Israel’s actions against the Palestinian (and their connection to the larger geopolitical designs of the U.S.).  Her experience has made her a true radical who speaks her message in clear and unflinching terms.  All theatrical conventions and expectations that would soften the blow must be eradicated from such a theatre. Following Brecht’s example, the emotional appeals and manipulations that Rickman and Viner fall back on is the primary thing that such a theatre must eliminate if the audience is to respond the way they must--by thinking clearly and free of emotional needs.  The purpose of  political drama is to move us from emotional indulgence to historical thought.  A play must confront us with hard and inescapable historical choices.  The purpose of theatre is to engage us politically by refusing the appeal of every theatrical convention that would release us from that engagement. 

      There is, however, another play here.  It is about an idealistic woman who tempers her political awareness with the larger claims of a humanistic vision of human goodness that has the power to lift us above sectarian conflicts. The form of such a play follows the path blazed by Arthur Miller. Any historical conflict we care to dramatize must be subsumed under the universal humanistic truths we impose on it so that audiences can through drama have their faith in unchanging truths restored. The duty of theatre is to reaffirm our assurance (and pleasure) in a quasi-Platonic process that always triumphs over time and contingency.  Isn’t it pretty to be reminded, especially in dark times, that human nature is good, unchanging, something we all have that cannot be lost.   As indicated above, this is the dramatic form and ideology that wins out in this play.

      But there is also a third play here.  It is far more interesting than the other two and points toward the kind of truly radical and experimental drama that they cannot contain.  This play is about a consciousness awakening to a radical existential contingency that destroys all guarantees, both political and humanistic.  This Rachel sees through what the other two believe.  The form of a play dedicated to preserving this possibility would center itself in deepening the break with all guarantees that defines such a consciousness, cutting out of the monologue everything else. 

This Rachel would move in the directions of Beckett’s Not I or Sartre’s Roquentin; or to think of another young protagonist, Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  Monologue would become a voice that probes the depths of its own existential contingency.  Several such moments come like a thunderbolt in My Name Is Rachel Corrie to disrupt the tedium of the commonplace. They are not, however, sustained or developed and so the play described here dies aborning. Let the following quotation suffice for now to illustrate the incompatibility of this voice with the guarantees on which the dramatic structures and purposes described previously depend. Written by Rachel on Feb.6 after two of the 6 weeks (Jan.25-March16) she would spend in Palestine: “It’s just a shrug—the difference between Hitler and my mother, the difference between Whitney Houston and a Russian mother watching her son fall through the sidewalk and boil to death. 

There are no rules.  There is no fairness. There are no guarantees.  No warranties on anything.  It’s all just a shrug, the difference between ecstasy and misery is just a shrug.”  Admittedly this remains rough but it is also promising.  Center a play in the development of such a consciousness.  Give it 6 weeks to let the trauma of that shrug drown the stage and theatre will begin to recapture the promise of Artaud.

      But such a possibility is antithetical to the dramatic and editorial methods of Rickman and Viner.  And the fundamental confusion that defines their effort is evident at the very start of the play. It opens with Rachel lying in bed one morning in Olympia, Washington.  Age unspecified but prior to her trip to Rafah, perhaps even prior to her political “radicalization.”  Lying there Rachel is apparently seized by a panic as she imagines the ceiling trying to devour her.  This experience is developed for four paragraphs.

      What is this?  The  knock-out image sure to grab the audience and identify what will be thr through-line of the work. The perfect image to jump start the dreary work of characterization by giving us an immediate entry into the depth of Rachel’s consciousness?   What better way to establish the importance of a play that will be one long monologue.

      One suspects that Rachel knew better, knew why she wrote these paragraphs and what they signify.  Rachel, you see, wants to become a writer.  She has recently read, one gathers, Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and some Sylvia Plath and is eager to try her hand at imitating their example.   That’s why this image finds no sequel in the play.  It has none because none could be found in Rachel’s writings. (Had they found one Rickman and Viner would have used it.)  Rachel knows what Rickman and Viner don’t; that this is apprentice work, essentially about learning how to write and not indicative of any deep experience pivotal in the development of her consciousness.

      Rickman and Viner, in short, cannot create anything complex or coherent out of their materials because they are unable to comprehend those materials except in the most superficial ways.  As a result we get the three plays I mentioned before with all sorts of irrelevant asides thrown in to fill out the necessary time.  I want to develop this point further now in order to bring out what it teaches us about monologue as an art form and both the possibilities and the pitfalls of plays based, as so many are today, on an extended use of that form.

The Humanistic Rachel

       Despite many banal passages, Rachel Corrie emerges in the course of the play as an intelligent, sensitive, well-meaning person who sees the world and her place in it in ethical terms.  She is in the process of developing precisely the kind of political conscience that is needed in Bush’s Amerika.  Hers, however,  is a conscience and consciousness in statu nascendi that was interrupted by death long before it could develop into anything original, provocative or even politically informed and sophisticated.  (The signs here of the beginnings of a global Marxist understanding are only that—signs.) 

Rachel is no prophet possessed of some deep or original vision.  Nor is she a deeply conflicted or complex figure.  I suppose the very ordinariness of much that she says can be seen as a virtue. Here’s a child of privileged parents who is normal in so many ways and who yet makes the very privilege of her position the source of a conscience that is troubled by the massive injustices of the world and then acts on that perception. Is this not something we all want to believe slumbers in the bosom of Amerika?  Our young people are not mindless narcissists or fanatical jesusfreaks. 

As Bush the elder proclaimed, there are a thousand points of light.  Young people like Rachel Corrie are still possible.  What an uplifting drama to warm our hearts deep in the winter of our Bushian discontents.  But to claim more for Rachel is to burden her with a weight or significance she cannot bear.  Contra Mr. Rickman there is no assurance here of a future great writer or thinker. To know that all one need do is consult what Kafka was writing in his diary at age 23.  Rachel has her moments, but they are not part of a sustained awareness nor precursors of that uniquely original experience of the world that leads to great writing.  Saying this does not dishonor Rachel Corrie memory.  We fail to honor it when we make claims for her words that they cannot bear.  Or when we fail to admit that because Rachel is all potential a drama based on quoting her words is essentially about loss and the one thing such loss can produce—a sentimental nostalgia that trumps everything else.

The Political Rachel

      Rachel Corrie is not a political prophet nor was meant to be.  In the course of the play she articulates several important, though by no means original, political ideas, foremost among them perhaps that the term “terrorsim” is now the primary label ideology deploys to prohibit examination of historical situations such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (The word “progressive” serves as a similar Shibboleth in the current rallying of the “serious” New York theatre community around itself.  See below, section V.) But those who think My Name Is Rachel Corrie will offer a unique or compelling analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict don’t need to go to the theatre, they need to go to the Library.  Or what amounts to the same thing, to realize that their conception of serious theatre is nothing more than propaganda.  Even if its polemics speak the truth, such a theatre is unable to rise about the condition of agit-prop.  I.e., a preaching to the choir a message in which the complexities of historical awareness collapse under the pressure of ideological certitudes.

      Those who want to understand the Arab-Israeli conflict and why it has attained the rebarbative condition that now defines it should read Avi Shlaim’s The Iron Wall.(642 pp.) It’ll take you from 1907 to 2000.  One can then update things by reading Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilzation (1107pp.) which offers a overview of the geo-political conditions that define the Middle East.  When an issue is historical there’s no substitute for hard, long and dreary work.  To seek a quick fix by going to a play is to behave like those benighted souls who bow down every Sunday before what some moron or charlatan tells them the Bible demands of them.  One sign of the situation we’re now in, however, is that the conception of political theatre described here has achieved hegemony in the age of PC identity politics. Each group or cause—each subject position and multicultural identity formation-- gets to strut and fret its two hours message on the stage.  Exploration into the deep and dark places of the human soul is proscribed.  It can only lead to confusion—or worse.

The Existential Rachel

      And then almost out of nowhere Rachel discovers her voice and becomes a genuine writer for the first time.  Please read again the “shrug” passage quoted earlier.  Here is an experience that neither the humanist nor the political activist can contain. 

Experience often erupts in an existential contingency that eradicates all guarantees.  Authentic subjectivity is defined accordingly by anxiety and dread and through a deepening of the knowledge of the world that flows from those moods. [9] Their development thus issues in a Voice that shatters all extant dramatic forms by exposing the ontological fallacies on which they depend.  But for this to happen anguish must be sustained.  The beauty of the political choice is that it delivers us from that task.  The world seen in the indifference of the “shrug” is sacrificed to the calcifying clarity of political commitment.