It was the thud on the doormat that convinced me My Name Is Rachel Corrie was going to work, one way or another.
When the e-mails of peace activist Rachel Corrie appeared in the British press within days of her death beneath an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza, the actor and director Alan Rickman was certain that her words should be performed on stage—she wrote so powerfully about the experiences of ordinary life under occupation, and of her views on the Middle East. But for a while we weren't sure just what kind of theatrical piece it would be. I was to be his co-editor, and we played around with all sorts of ideas, including interviewing Rachel's friends in Gaza and her hometown of Olympia, Washington, and building a patchwork of quotes from Gaza residents, Israeli soldiers, government officials and others. We weren't getting very far.
But then there came that thud on the doormat: 184 closely typed pages of Rachel's diaries, journals and e-mails from the age of 10, which her family had unearthed for us. That's when we realized that Rachel's voice was enough. She could tell the story of her own life, in her own words.
From then on, Alan and I wrestled over just which of those thousands of words should be included in a 90-minute piece of theater. As a journalist involved in my first theatrical collaboration, I was pushing for more narrative, more context and more emotion; as a man with great experience in the theater, Alan had a finely tuned sense of the realities of life on stage, and what would actually work.
Rachel's writing from Gaza shows a different kind of intensity, an emotional and political engagement she conveys with great power. As she demonstrates, she was always a child who was very involved with the wider world; at 10, she wrote a poem about wanting to "stop hunger by the year 2000." But we took care to show Rachel's motivation for going to Gaza: She wanted to "meet people who are on the other end of the tax money that goes to fund the U.S. military" and how much she was affected by her trip.
We thought carefully about how to portray Rachel's death on stage. It is the only event in the play Rachel is not able to describe to us herself, which in itself provides considerable impact. In the end, the words of an eyewitness echo into a silent room.
The play was a big success in London, with runs in three theaters, but we always wanted it to be seen in the United States. It is an American play, packed with references to Mountain Dew commercials and Dairy Queen, and the story of an American woman who felt acutely aware of her country's place in the world. When a group of American teenagers came to see My Name Is Rachel Corrie at the Royal Court last year, they responded with extraordinary excitement and enthusiasm for Rachel. I think it was because, in a way, they saw themselves on stage, and who they might become.
Because at the beginning of the play, Rachel could be any American teenager—and by the end, she could only be Rachel Corrie.