This is Rachel Corrie

We open on Thursday at 8. I love the invitation inherent in that little throwaway theater phrase, ‘we open’, ‘opening night’, because for months now we have been working on something quiet and hidden, something that needs careful incubation away from prying eyes but that, in the end, ultimately exists in the sharing. 

And this is Hell Week, a thousand shifting points of victory and irritation sunk into despair, where the high that is slotting perfectly into the resonance of a scene that hadn’t worked before can be undone by the nagging frustration of costume changes that refuse to live up to their name, lines erased from an exhausted memory, missing props. 

The structure of the play is there, as is much of the covering. Just some patchwork to fix things up a bit, and keep everything homey. 

The moment I put the script away is always a fresh paradox. 

With the written words beyond my reach I improve markedly, as though the text were something I’ve been quietly digesting, something slow and small and seeping through neurons until it’s something I’m speaking straight out. 

I’m not thinking about the next line or the next ten. I’m talking as it comes to me. 

When Clark and I first started working on Rachel Corrie, we agreed to play it as a memory piece as opposed to presenting it as real time.

So much of Rachel is in her head, and of course the play itself is constructed from her own writings. Early on in the play, she worries about her imagination: “If you have an overactive fantasy life you just start making things up. You can remember just enough unrelated pieces of trivia to hold up coffee-table conversation and never have to think about anything disturbing or demanding of action.”

As the play progresses, as she deals with the tanks and the shells and the explosions, she takes shelter in her overactive fantasy life. Ironically, it’s this life that allows her to think about the disturbing. 

Just a few thoughts to wrap up the weekend. 

It would be more truthful to call this the middle, since we’re just now about halfway through  laying down the bones of blocking and interpretation, but writers do tend to start in the middle. Anything earlier and you run the risk of death by exposition, which is the literary equivalent of death by overexposure. 

I’d like to avoid that, so this is my beginning. I’m Kathryn, and people call me Katie, Kate, and sometimes Ryn because I ask them to. I’m really quiet until you listen because I’m New York Neurotic and I’m always moving, and sometimes I can tell that what I read bleeds into my writing because it’s only been two paragraphs but I already sound a little like Rachel. 

I’ve been thinking a lot the last two weeks about how My Name is Rachel Corrie is structured as a play; how it’s a frame tale within a frame tale and just how much Rachel herself thought in terms of narrative and the relationship between form and content. 

Rachel is someone who wanted to leave a mark more permanent than writing on her world, and yet so much of what she does is surprisingly happenstance and coincidence. She’s never entirely sure how she gets from any one point in her life to any other, and yet what happened to her seems inevitable simply because we know it happened. 

There’s a danger in sentimentalizing the text by drawing what we know about Rachel’s story and infusing our own ideas about her symbolic meaning into her representation. I don’t want my interpretation of Rachel to be symbolic, nor do I want to weigh her down with heavy-handed attempts at hyperrealism. I want to let the text speak for itself.