Rachel Corrie Is No Anne Frank

Terry Teachout reviews "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" for The Wall Street Journal:

Politics makes artists stupid. Take "My Name Is Rachel Corrie," the one-woman play cobbled together from the diaries, emails and miscellaneous scribblings of the 23-year-old left-wing activist who was run over by an Israeli Army bulldozer in 2003 while protesting the demolition of a Palestinian house in the Gaza Strip. Co-written and directed by Alan Rickman, one of England's best actors, "Rachel Corrie" just opened off-Broadway after a successful London run. It's an ill-crafted piece of goopy give-peace-a-chance agitprop--yet it's being performed to cheers and tears before admiring crowds of theater-savvy New Yorkers who, like Mr. Rickman himself, ought to know better.

So why don't they? Because Palestine is the new Cuba, a political cause whose invocation has the effect of instantaneously anesthetizing the upper brain functions of those who believe in it. Take Mr. Rickman, who evidently intended "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" to be a pro-Palestinian equivalent of "The Diary of Anne Frank." Alas, wishful thinking is not the stuff of exciting theater. The script is disjointed to the point of incoherence, the staging crude and blatant, while Megan Dodds's performance as Rachel Corrie is frankly cartoonish.

Part of Ms. Dodds's problem, however, is that the real-life character she is portraying was unattractive in the extreme, albeit pathetically so. Whimsical, humorless and--above all--immature, Corrie burbles on about her feelings ("The salmon talked me into a lifestyle change") without ever troubling to test them against reality. When she finally does so by thrusting herself into the middle of the Israeli-Palestinian blood feud, she sees only what she passionately longs to see: "The vast majority of Palestinians right now, as far as I can tell, are engaging in Gandhian nonviolent resistance."

In an act of unintended self-revelation, "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" ends with a film clip of the 10-year-old Corrie prattling away like a baby robot at her elementary school's Fifth Grade Press Conference on World Hunger: "My dream is to give the poor a chance. . . . My dream can and will come true if we all look into the future and see the light that shines there." She grew older but no wiser, and in the end died a martyr to her own naiveté.

Read the entire review.

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