Reviews

My Name is Rachel Corrie

Carrie Villeneuve

The Havana restaurant on Commercial Drive was an appropriate choice of venue for My Name is Rachel Corrie, an intimate one-woman show adapted by Alan Rickman from the correspondence and journals of activist Rachel Corrie and presented by Teesri Duniya Theatre in association with neworldtheatre. The theatre space at Havana is a small black box, yet the show was too slight to fill it. Adrienne Wong’s performance was fine, but the directing choices were weak—for the first half of the seventy-minute show, Corrie sits in a chair composing emails or musing into her journal—and so was the characterization. I had braced myself for some heavy-handed activist self-righteousness, delivered by an engaging, thoughtful young woman frustrated by U.S. involvement in the Middle East. Instead, I was frustrated by the amount of apologizing Corrie did and how incidental her beliefs seemed. Perhaps the show’s aim is to return Corrie to the human realm, to temper the controversy around her death and to counter the claims of martyrdom, but this portrayal is too one-dimensional to succeed. I left feeling more let down by the play than uplifted by anything Corrie had to say.

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