There’s a hypothetical question that I enjoy. I got it from a Car Seat Headrest song, with lead singer Will Toledo borrowing it from a comic by his friend. It’s this: Imagine you wake up and it’s still dark out—two in the morning. And a bright, shining star has entered another room through the window. Somehow you know it’s there. Somehow you know if you touch it you will experience the most unimaginable pain you could ever know, but only for a split second. Somehow you know this pain star appears on Earth once every several thousand years. So then I ask: Would you touch it?
My Name is Rachel Corrie is a play written from the letters and emails of American activist Rachel Corrie before and during her time in the Gaza Strip in 2003. Originally edited by Katharine Viner and Alan Rickman before going on in London and being cancelled in New York, it depicts Rachel’s journey to the region with the International Solidarity Movement in the Middle East in a well-held ninety-minute production, with Rachel the only character and the audience her witness.
A good play grips the brutal fullness of life and experience, cuts this into a lance of pure light, and squeezes it through the prism of the stage and its players. Each refracted beam landing in the audience’s eyes is writing made colour, distinct yet supplementary to the whole. To this end, Courtney Miller played the role incredibly, her buoyant portrayal of Rachel Corrie as uncertain, morally-eyed, and optimistic. Miller’s Corrie is true to life, her feet always resting a centimetre above the ground, constantly doubting herself, constantly aware of how deeply she feels about injustice. Via Paris Burrows’ well-suited set, the audience watches as Corrie drifts between the rubble of Gaza and the clutter of her American bedroom, trapped in two places at once.
If you ask Google, it would appear that grief is the hardest emotion to manage, how absence leaves the largest ripples. My Name is Rachel Corrie shows us that empathy is far less bearable. Loss eats at you like a tide, empathy is the ocean itself. We see Miller in one instant, draping her words over the time she met her crush, then, she’s watching bullets fly through her tent and hearing homes get knocked down. We see her agonised over how to help others. Miller and director Serhat Caradee have formulated a play that pulses like raw nerves, an entangled knot of vulnerability, curiosity, fear, honesty, insecurity, and youth. This combination bound me to my seat so rooted that at the end of the play, I felt it was kind of fucked up to clap. In ninety minutes I had watched someone’s entire life open and close. I was in that room with twenty or so other people, but we did not exist. We were voyeurs. When Miller went through the door at the back, no longer Corrie, I felt a little bit hurt. It was like I had been duped, and of course, I had, this was all an act. The skill required from Miller to pull that off is incredible.
This play simmers like a fuse. It begins with a loud rhythmic chopping, possibly the blades of a helicopter. A night patrol interrupting our sleep, we are brought into the world bleakly. Gillian Kayrooz’ music and sound effects are solid attributes to the atmosphere. Employed sparsely, they bring credibility to what we witness. There could have been more space for sound to sit in this play, that it could have been taken further. Some of it sat too snug, but it did not lack at all.
Years after Corrie’s death, Billy Bragg released The Lonesome Death of Rachel Corrie on his compilation album titled Fight Songs. There is something deep in ourselves to be criticised that we grieve Corrie so much, and otherwise shrug at the blood spilled from non-white bodies, but I get it. We are all tribalists, and Corrie, in life and in death, shows us tribalism’s inanity. The song following The Lonesome Death of Rachel Corrie is titled We’re Following the Wrong Star, with Bragg singing “If we hope to get there in the end / This is not the way to Bethlehem, oh no.” Humanity has had a long, painful trajectory tracing the cosmos for meaning, with every life drop spilled forgotten like footsteps in the desert.
Rachel Corrie died at the age of twenty-three, trampled by an IDF soldier in a bulldozer while protesting the destruction of the home of the Palestinian family she had been staying with. The work of Courtney Miller, Serhat Caradee, Jordan Wellard, Gillian Kayrooz, and Paris Burrows is a testament to the beauty and misery of sacrifice.
Most of the people I ask about the pain star decline from touching it. For many, pain is a burden, an element of life that can and should be avoided, even if it only lasts a moment.
For Rachel Corrie, pain was necessary for love. Her anger radiates as the other side of kindness. I know that because I saw it. Courtney Miller was Rachel Corrie, I saw the doubles of her pupils as her eyes welled with tears, I saw her debate between going to France or Sweden after her money ran out, I saw her plan her life as those around her lost theirs. I saw her turn around and exit the stage.
Rachel Corrie crawled into the pain star and lived there for three months, and then it left and she went with it.
It might be a very, very long time until we see someone like her again.
My Name is Rachel Corrie is playing at Sydney Acting Studio until September 8th.
