Review: Audiences ready to see something other than a standard musical
The role of Rachel Corrie — there are no other characters in this show — is split between Sarah Jane Spies, left, and Emily Ivory.
“My name is Rachel Corrie.”
With that, the opening night audience at the Little Theatre of Tuscarawas County for the play of the same name stepped off into a young diarist’s accounting of her fierce political beliefs and activism. Rachel Corrie is a woman who fully walks the walk and ultimately is prepared to risk her own personal safety in support of her cause.
The role of Rachel Corrie — there are no other characters in this show — is split between Sarah Jane Spies and Emily Ivory. Spies is often seen on stages around the area including Kent State Tuscarawas and at the Tuscarawas County Center for the Arts. Ivory has appeared in Little Theatre productions before and is a senior at Dover High School.
“My Name Is Rachel Corrie” is presented in what the LT calls its “experimental” or “black box” slot for the season. This is the spot in which the theater presents shows that are a bit off the wall, rarely seen or which offer topics or themes of a more serious or controversial nature.
I cannot praise this effort highly enough. The arts community in our area has blossomed and matured so much in the past few decades that lovers of all manner of the arts can find something to enjoy.
Theater audiences are ready and I think eager to see something different and outside the steady stream of safe, standard musicals.
The experimental slot allows directors, actors and technical staff to try new things, do something different, get out of their comfort zone and maybe shock us a little.
The show, “My Name Is Rachel Corrie,” is a script primed for such an experimental performance, written by Katherine Viner and the late Alan Rickman, who most audiences will remember as Professor Snape in the “Harry Potter” series.
It premiered in London in 2005 to good reviews and success. Attempts to move the show to New York were less successful, and initial stagings were cancelled due to the extremely touchy nature of the tale, tucked into the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It is a true story told from the diaries and emails of Corrie, who was born in Olympia, Washington and became an activist at an early age, taking a year off from studies at Evergreen State College to volunteer with Washington State Conservation Corp, where she visited mental patients.
She then worked for causes supporting international peace, notably the International Solidarity Movement. She made her way to Jerusalem, Israel and then Rafah, Palestine in the early 2000s.
The actors read from Corrie’s diaries. While I understand the show is about the content of the diaries, which is riveting stuff, staging a show, especially as an experimental piece, especially one with little physically happening, still requires movement and action of some kind.
The stage is very simple with a few cubes on two levels, and the actors sit on a cube, read the diary, move to another cube, read more diary and repeat. Spies at one point pushed it a bit, giving us an effective, impassioned moment.
This show is all dialogue straight through, no intermission. There’s simply too much dialogue to memorize completely, so the need to actually read from the diaries is evident.
But I wanted very much for the actors to break it up a bit, get their noses out of the book now and then, and fully engage the audience. The book is always in hand, always raised and read from.
The effect is of being read aloud to in a literature class. The show needs more out-of-the-box thinking in execution. Staged readings such as this still need, in my opinion, to be livened up. But don’t hesitate to go. It’s still a show worth seeing.
The show will run Aug. 25 and 26 at the Little Theatre. Call the box office for tickets at 330-308-6400.