The beauty of humanism is that it offers an even more thorough deliverance from experience.  Contingency and existence are mere moments, mere illusions and no more than the vaguest of memories dissolving into insignificance once we remind ourselves of “the goodness of human nature.”  That, after all, is what made the play about Anne Frank such a success.  The audience got to be horrified by the Holocaust and then comforted by a transcendent essentialistic humanism.  Because Rickman and Viner are playing the same game there is no way for the Voice that erupts from time to time in their play to sustain or realize itself.  That Rachel is consigned to the ashes.  And with it the possibility that defines and haunts the method that Rickman and Viner employ.

IV. The Art of Monologue

“The purpose of acting is to drip acid on the nerves.”
Jack Nicholson

For here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.
Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo” 

      Monologue is employed in My Name Is Rachel Corrie to warrant a chatty, diffuse procedure wedded to digression and condemned to frequent bathos.  Anything Rachel ever wrote is grist for Rickman and Viner’s mill.

This is not the inevitable way of things with monologue and all we need do to realize that is to recall what Shakespeare did in Hamlet when he saw that exploring the inner conflicts of a psyche at war with itself provided a way to renew and redefine the very nature of drama.  One achievement of that master-work was the discovery of how to dramatize the depth of human inwardness. Hamlet’s soliloquies open up places within our own subjectivity that transform our understanding of what it means to be human. 

Monologue or soliloquy in Hamlet transforms the stage into a place of breathless discovery, the kind of discovery that is only possible when anxiety and dread become the driving forces of an attempt by a psyche to probe the darkest registers of its experience.  (It would not be going too far to say that it is Shakespeare not Descartes who first discovered and explored the interiority of the cogito.)  Unfortunately today monologue in theatre has become for the most part a travesty rather than a recovery of Shakespeare’s example. 

The bearers of different ideologically fixed “subject positions” assure themselves of a phantom identity as “selves” by rehearsing a bundle of PC platitudes.  The complex and conflicted inwardness that defines the psyche is shunned in favor of the kind of cutsey assurances one finds exemplified in Eve Ensler.  Monologue isn’t a way of exploring oneself but of declaring oneself and thereby putting an end to all doubts and fears. 

Think how different everything would be if a monologue situated itself within a subjectivity traumatized by the “shrug” Rachel briefly discerns or, say, by the trauma of childhood sexual abuse.  Such a monologue would permit entry only to passages derived from the depths of suffering. The traumatic development of that order of human character would be the through-line of the action.

Such a voice would terrify and amaze us because it would constantly take us deeper into the heart of everything we refuse and fear to know about ourselves.  The theatre would become a traumatic space because Augustine’s founding insight would now be the medium in which it lives and moves and has its being.  “I am become a problem to myself.” (The Confessions)   Once that happens none of the forms of traditional theatre any longer avail.  Monologue has become instead exploration, possibility, discovery—the deepening of depth eradicating all the assurances of the surface.

      Such a possibility is, of course, a far cry from what happens in My Name is Rachel Corrie.  The beginnings of such a consciousness only occur in isolated moments that are not sustained. Rickman and Viner would of course reply that their commitment to the quasi-naturalistic qualities of docu-drama precluded such a possibility as did the reluctance of Rachel Corrie to pursue what was probably only a passing moment of her awareness. 

She is primarily a speaker not a traumatized existential subject and with Rickman and Viner remains true to her rhetorical task. To preach messages.  How different a play we’d have had Rickman and Viner taken Rachel Corrie’s writing as but overture to the truly imaginative act: the creation of a consciousness that would speak from the depth of a struggle to probe and endure its own inwardness through a play that would take us far beyond the bare beginnings found in Rachel writings.  (What, for example, if she became a nihilating voice interrogating her experience from beyond the grave.)  But Rickman and Viner are not up to such an effort.  They don’t know how to interrogate either their materials or the dramatic forms they employ. 

      The result is what may in the present climate remain the unspoken truth about this play.  It is a slight piece, worthy enough for a minor night of theatre if seen in terms of its considerable limitations but profoundly unsatisfying, even retrograde, if regarded as a complex realization of either the art of monologue or the mission of “progressive” etc. theater.  

V. Follow the Money [10]

“Sometimes the bullshit comes down so hard you need an umbrella.”
Ned Racine in Body Heat

      But of course this conclusion is no longer warranted.  And the foregoing analysis is supremely irrelevant. My Name Is Rachel Corrie is no longer the play it was.  It is now the cultural event it has become.  It is what it will “signify” for the Theatre that produces it and the audiences who attend it prepared by the current controversy to experience My Name Is Rachel Corrie as the epitome of progressive, challenging, politically relevant, and experimental theatre. 

Such is the power of ideology as that great a priori mediator that establishes the beliefs and expectations that lead us to regard as our own the experiences it programs us to have.  My Name Is Rachel Corrie is now the Pavlovian stimulus before which vast audiences will salivate on cue so that they can leave the theatre congratulating themselves on how liberal, progressive and daring they are.  A minor play will thereby further a process of commodification that makes it exceeding different for actually bold plays to gain a hearing. 

What caused Mr. Nicola to back off from this play has now become the very thing that will lead others to produce, imitate, and applaud it.  For the contradictions of My Name Is Rachel Corrie as a play mirror the contradictions of the progressive left liberal theatre community.  Neither has a true vision of what serious theatre should be.  As a result all we get is a further reification of our collective blinding by ideological assumptions that go undetected and therefore unopposed. But there is a deeper reason why this is so.  It is time it came forward and took a bow. 

      On January 11th of this year Mayor Bloomberg presented the keys to six building formerly owned by the City to 10 cultural organizations that comprise part of the Fourth Arts Block.  (NYTW was among the beneficiaries as their website proudly notes.)  The Mayor’s Office, the City Council and the Manhattan Borough President’s Office also invested over 3 million to assist in the renovation of the building and an additional 1 million has been pledged by the City. [11]  Let’s imagine a fresh production of King Lear starring the Mayor in the title role and with the parts of the three daughters to be determined later based on auditions by the Artistic Directors of our progressive theatres.

      It now turns out the “cancellation” began when two members of the Board of Directors at NYTW relayed to Mr. Nicola concerns about the wisdom of producing My Name is Rachel Corrie.   The infamous polling of select members of the (local) non-theatre community followed.  Theatres that want to succeed while carrying out the mission of exploring the “political and historical events and institutions that shape contemporary life” depend, as we all know, on the “advice” and support of Boards that are largely composed of financially prodigious figures. [12]  When all goes well the moneyed class lets the “artists” think they’re running things.  After all, it’s useful to have places where the theatre-goers of the Big Apple can go to assure themselves how liberal, progressive, even radical they are and how the most richly endowed theatres in town attest to that fact. With commodification in charge everything becomes a matter of sign-exchange value. But once in a while the truth makes a brief appearance and we see that Theatre is yet another one of the things that the capitalists own and control.

      A curious circumstance has emerged in the current controversy that reveals the extent and nature of this control.  The other leading representatives of “progressive” theatre have been quick to condemn or express regret over Nicola’s decision (thus reasserting their “leftist” bona fides) but just as quick to remind us how “progressive” and daring the NYTW has been under Nicola’s long leadership.  There is apparently one thing above all that we must all believe. 

That a theatre such as the NYTW (and other similarly self-described theatres in Manhattan) are,in fact, progressive, liberal, cutting-edge, daring, experimental etc. Such was the assurance offered by Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director of The Public Theatre and others at the end of a recent forum on theatre that The Public held at the New School.[13]  Talk went on for the better part of two hours before a member of the audience had the temerity to refer to the Corrie controversy as the white elephant in the room.  The panelists then tripped over one another with the excuse that they couldn’t comment on the matter not yet having had time to read the play.  Mr. Eustis then brought things into the necessary perspective with his encomium of the progressive credentials of Mr. Nicola and the NYTW.

      A similar reassurance followed when Tony Kushner finally broke his silence with the statement long awaited by those who were certain that what he said would prove definitive—at least in helping them know what they thought. Following party line Kushner bewailed Nicola’s decision while reminding all of us (lest we doubt it) that “his [Nicola’s] is one of the two most important theatres in this area—politically engaged, unapologetic, unafraid and formally experimental.” [14] (Want to guess what the other one is? Or is Tony letting us all play mirror mirror on the wall? ) And so it goes.  The theatrical powers that be must rally around one another and lest we take seriously the question raised recently by a Dr. Cashmere on Garrett Eisler’s playgoer blog:  “Are there worthy plays out there that can’t get a production because theatres are afraid they’ll catch hell for staging them?” [15]  One hopes this was a rhetorical question.  As such it points to the most distressing and important lesson we can gain from this controversy.

      My Name is Rachel Corrie will soon gain production in New York.  (At The Public?)   It will then come to us trailing clouds of progressive glory, serving as a model of what daring, controversial theatre is.  The model that led to the original selection of this play under that banner will thus extend its hegemony.  The run of the play will serve something far more important than sparking talk about the actions of Israel in bulldozing Palestinian homes and callously justifying the killing of a young woman.  The run will serve as training in teaching audiences what progressive theatre is.  Bad money will continue to drive out good.