'My Name Is Rachel Corrie' honors peacemaker
By Jen Pontzer, Staff Writer
March 14, 2008 | 11 a.m.
For her thesis project, senior Kat Primeau decided to perform a one-woman play that resonated with her. “My Name is Rachel Corrie” tells the story of an American peace activist in Palestine who was killed by a bulldozer in 2003.
The play was edited from Corrie’s own journals. This gives the play a first-person point of view. Some people have found the play to be anti-Semitic, even going as far as to say Corrie deserved what happened to her because she did not know what she was getting herself into.
Primeau stresses that people need to come to the show with an open mind and that the show is not an end-all, be-all story. Director senior Matt Cleaver agrees.
Cleaver said that with a conflict as convoluted as this, people cannot take one person’s experience as gospel. He also said that this story could have taken place during the Franco-Prussian War and that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is just a framework.
Primeau first learned about the play while studying abroad in London. She and some of her friends were lucky enough to see the original production of it directed by Alan Rickman (“Harry Potter”) two years ago.
Primeau has been passionate about the play ever since. She chose it for her thesis project because she wanted to investigate all of the information and misinformation about the conflict in Gaza.
“I’ve always felt close to [Corrie] because of the questions that she challenges,” Primeau said. “I think a lot of them are very universal and also specific to me as a privileged, middle-class female. You know, what does that privilege mean to me as a human in the global existence we have here? She was always a goofball, but she was always searching. I’m like that, too.”
Primeau is a co-founder and president of Up in Arms, a network for artists and activists in the greater Athens area working to promote dialogue, education and change through art and media. After seeing “My Name Is Rachel Corrie,” Primeau decided something needed to be established for similar projects, bringing art and activism together for Athens.
“Me and one of the other co-founders just felt so strongly about the message of hope within the play that we couldn’t let go of that, and we didn’t want to, and we needed to establish something so that we would have further responsibility to actually act on those feelings once we were back in Athens,” Primeau said.
As far as the actual production of the show goes, it has become a collaboration more than anything else. Primeau and Cleaver were in acting studio together and have found over the years that they have a similar way of thinking about and seeing things.
Cleaver is not a director by nature – he’s actually an actor. He was most recently seen as Moritz in “Spring Awakening.” Primeau said she picked Cleaver because she wanted someone responsible with keen eyes and a sharp mind to be her second eyes on the project.
“My production team is the most together people I could find,” Primeau said.
“This is a collaboration in the most perfect sense in that we are all equals and we all share an equal stake in this production,” Cleaver said.
Up in Arms presents “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” at 7p.m. March 14 and 15 at Virginia Hahne Theater in Kantner Hall.
The show’s March 16 performance, commemorating the fifth anniversary of Rachel Corrie's death, takes place at 7 p.m. at Stuart's Opera House in Nelsonville so that as many people as possible can see the show.
Admission is free, but donations to Up in Arms will be collected at the door. Guests will be seated on a first-come basis. A talkback dialogue will follow each performance to discuss the audience’s reaction and experience of the play.
“I think that students, and people in general, have a responsibility to know what’s going on in the world and to know how they fit into this network of humans,” Cleaver said. “This show is about a human, a girl, and how she’s trying to fit into this network of other humans in a positive way, and it’s about her taking responsibility for the welfare of other humans.”
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