Monday, March 6, 2006
It's that horrid production again, the one about the ISM activist, Rachel Corrie, who put herself (and was put) in the way of an oversized bulldozer and wound up the worse for it. The New York production has been postponed...or cancelled...or something. This piece by Edward Rothstein in the New York Times makes some interesting points well: Too Hot to Handle, Too Hot to Not Handle [emphasis mine]
But there is something disingenuous here. In an apparent effort to camouflage Corrie's radicalism and broaden the play's appeal, its creators elided phrases that suggested her more contentious view of things — cutting, for example, her reference to the "chronic, insidious genocide" she says she is witnessing, or her justification of the "somewhat violent means" used by Palestinians.
But while she fails to see things fully, the play wants us to think she ultimately does. We are not meant to doubt the thoroughness of her account or to think too much about what she notices but does not explain. Though Corrie went to Gaza with the Palestinian-led organization the International Solidarity Movement to act as a human shield and to prevent Israel from destroying Palestinian homes, and though she died while trying to stop a bulldozer, there is no hint about why such demolitions were taking place.
But dozens of tunnels leading from Egypt under the border into homes in Gaza were being used to smuggle guns, rocket launchers and explosives to wield against Israel. These demolitions often caused controversy, even in Israel, but the play's omissions make them seem acts of systematic evil, rather than acts that were, at the very least, part of a more complicated and contested series of confrontations...
...It would have been more interesting to imagine an activist's growing awareness of nuance, particularly given what is at stake. Is it possible that a growing awareness might also have been behind the postponement? When the directors of the New York Theater Workshop began to hear from staff members and outsiders that the play invoked issues it did not explain, and when the election of Hamas provided proof that all was not simple, perhaps that was when the play became more clearly understood. The company discussed staging other plays about the conflict alongside this one; attempts were made to arrange post-performance discussions, too. But that required time. So, awkwardly, the company betrayed aesthetic orthodoxy — declining, for now, to give offense, and in the process doing just that.
It's too bad they didn't do their due-diligence and figure out that this play wasn't something they should be touching in the first place, so it's a bit difficult to feel very sorry for them, but better late than never I suppose. Hopefully the postponement becomes long-term. Very long term.
[This is not to be confused with another misguided effort known as the Rachel Corrie Cantata -- "The Skies Are Weeping" -- see here, here, and here. Also this post that comments on both play and cantata.]
To emphasize the obvious, Rachel Corrie is something of a microcosm of the highly fevered ideological religionists of the Left in general. (And "microcosm," or micro-cosmos, is a strikingly apt term applied to many, perhaps most, on the Left, as so many reflect a mere egoism which they nonetheless imagine - and they are certainly great imaginers, if often little else - to be not an egoism, but a cosmos. Such is the solipsistic quality they far too often bring to bear.)
Corrie was eminently human, and we are all made of clay, so I don't intend any of that too harshly, but she did personify so many of the pretentious, over-leveraged and over-imagined qualities of the ideological religionists of the Left in general and the additional vainglory which others have attached to her death only exacerbates those severe distortions and excesses.