The play that Americans cant handle.

last updated 8 January 2015

United Kingdom

Katharine Viner

A play about an American peace activist is too controversial to be shown in the U.S., said Katharine Viner in the London Guardian. The award-winning British play My Name Is Rachel Corrie was booked and ready to run last month at the New York Theater Workshop when it was suddenly canceled. “The political climate, we were told, had changed dramatically since the play was booked.” The play, you see, is based on the journals of Rachel Corrie, an activist for Palestinian rights who was killed at age 23, run over by an Israeli bulldozer as she lay in front of a Palestinian house in Gaza, trying to protect it from demolition. The theater owners said they feared that New York audiences would find the story anti-Israel or even anti-Semitic, and would protest. But it’s nothing of the sort. Hardly a “piece of alienating agitprop,” the play is actually a powerful plea for nonviolence. Rachel Corrie was a passionate, idealistic American who died for her beliefs. “If a voice like this cannot be heard on a New York stage, what hope is there for anyone else? The non-American, the nonwhite, the nondead, the oppressed?” Sadly, the theater “has caved in to political pressure, and the reputation of the arts in New York is the poorer for it.”