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‘My Name Is Rachel Corrie’ @ Synchronicity
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” Grade: B - 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays. 7 p.m. Sundays. Through Oct. 7. $15-$20. Synchronicity Performance Group, 7 Stages Back Stage Theatre, 1105 Euclid Ave., Little Five Points. 404-484-8636, synchrotheatre.com
Rachel Corrie never lived to see her 24th birthday. But based on the trove of journal entries and emails she left behind, the peace activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer on the Gaza Strip had a profound and penetrating spirit. She was also a wonderful writer and precocious observer of human nature.
The young American’s brief but purposeful life is now being celebrated in “My Name Is Rachel Corrie,” a one-woman show produced by Synchronicity Performance Group and starring Atlanta actress Courtney Patterson.
Directed by Rachel May, “Rachel Corrie” is a moving evening of theater, even if it’s a little preachy and a little padded. The opening scenes — in which Corrie relates material about her family, her boyfriend and her messy hovel of a room — are stronger than the second half, when Corrie travels to the Middle East. Here the material founders, as is often the case when the polemical subsumes the poetic.
There’s a kind of brutal beauty and symmetry in the way Corrie looks at the blood-red ceiling of her apartment and prophesies: “It is going to rip me to pieces.”
And there’s great good humor in the way the Washington state native comments that watching salmon swim upriver caused her to make a lifestyle change. “You imagine their moony eyes as you walk home from the bar in your slutty boots,” she says of her conversion from free spirit to freedom fighter.
Inspired by a trip to Russia, Corrie feels “awake for the first time.” Flying home to Washington, she knows that even the beauty of Puget Sound is not enough to satisfy her wandering soul. She wants to make a difference in the world.
With her ebullient personality and abundant talent, Patterson captures the quirky vitality of her subject. Is the actress too bright eyed and Lucy-like for this role? Is she a credible 20-something? Can she hold the stage alone for 100 minutes? These are legitimate questions, with no easy answers.
“Rachel Corrie” works better as a portrait of a regular kid than a martyr for a complex cause. To reduce her to an agenda, as this play too often does, is an easy out.
At a young age, Corrie had a sophisticated understanding of how time alters history and reshapes our own truth. Little did she know how time would change the way the world looks at her.
Bottom Line: Works better as a portrait of an regular girl than a political
Comments
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By Loved It!
September 14, 2007 10:12 PM | Link to this
Spot on review. Incredible 100 minute monologue that flies by while painting a picture of an incredible 23 year old. Must see.
By Hazem Ziada
September 15, 2007 3:06 PM | Link to this
Interesting review, yet sadly typical of a bourgeois mentality which refuses to be moved by direct descriptions of reality. Perhaps it is the fear of being called to action and to sacrificing privilege. In any case, Poetics is not entertainment.
By Stationary Dave
September 20, 2007 11:22 PM | Link to this
Rachael Corrie is a hero. I’ve written a song partly about her that I will play Oct. 1 at Eddie’s Attic. See you there, Dave