"My Name Is Rachel Corrie" | Play brings words of Olympia woman, activist to life

How does one portray a symbol?

More specifically, how does one portray Rachel Corrie — who in an anguished political and moral tug-of-war has become a heroine to some for her fatal activism against Israel's policies toward Palestinians, and a symbol of dangerous, wrong-headed naÃÆ'¯veté to others?

If you are Seattle actress Marya Sea Kaminski, you play this world-famous but largely unknown figure as a complete human being: young and impassioned, funny and fallible.

Kaminski's Rachel, the sole character in the Seattle Repertory Theatre's West Coast debut of the controversial script "My Name Is Rachel Corrie," is introduced first as a bright, arty kid from a middle-class Olympia, Wash., family.

She leaves her room in a mess. She wishes her mother wasn't so doting. She has crushes on fickle boys. She writes poetry, and fantasizes about hanging out in eternity with Jesus and Charlie Chaplin.

Nothing strange about all of that, for an intellectually precocious Northwest adolescent who has a way with words and a vivid imagination.

Kaminski later also conveys the fear, the sorrow, the angry disappointment and didactic idealism of someone who put her life on the line in one of the globe's most volatile conflicts — and lost it.

It is Kaminski's potently mercurial and poignant solo performance that gives "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" (cobbled together from Corrie's e-mails and journal entries, by actor-director Alan Rickman and journalist Katharine Viner) its humanity and heart.

This actor may make you care about Corrie even if you don't share her politics. And even if you consider her 2003 death — after being run over by an Israeli bulldozer during an anti-demolition protest in Gaza — foolhardy and futile.

The script Kaminski and director Braden Abraham have to work with is more a roughly assembled scrapbook than a developed narrative. Delivered on Jennifer Zeyl's evocative single setting, which morphs from an Olympia bedroom into a bullet-pocked stone hut in Gaza, Corrie's words are not always arranged for maximum impact. And their chronology can get confusing.

Abraham tries to smooth out the monologue's choppiness by giving Kaminski a lot of busy work — packing a trunk, sorting through clothes, putting together a makeshift table. More helpful in this respect are L.B. Morse's lighting and Obadiah Eaves' excellent sound design.

As for the controversy over Corrie's impassioned defense of Palestinian civilians, and her scathing criticism of the Israeli government, anyone looking for a balanced treatise on this Mideast political quagmire should look elsewhere.

This play is Corrie's story, from her vantage point.

Writing home during her fateful, increasingly frightening protest trip to the Mideast, she employs the rhetoric of those staunchly opposed to Israel's policies in Gaza. Her eyewitness accounts of random shootings, rampant poverty and displaced families are harrowing. And her nightmares about dying and ruminations on mortality are eerily prescient.

"My Name Is Rachel Corrie" certainly invites political debate. (People on different sides of the issue are having their say by handing out leaflets to Rep patrons entering the theater.) Yet earlier controversies over its production in New York and Toronto seem misguided, given that the piece isn't so much a manifesto as a requiem for a vibrant, gifted young person who died while her beliefs and identity were still very much in flux.

In Kaminski's hands, Rachel is no plaster saint or wild-eyed insurgent. She is a youth whose bravado is peppered with fear and self-doubt, whose humor is largely self-deprecatory and whose burning desire to act on her principles by putting herself in harm's way is rare in one so young.

Ultimately it is Rachel's innocence and youth that give the show its symbolic resonance, not her ideology. Whatever else you think about her, Rachel Corrie is one of far too many young people, Jews and Arabs, lost to a mutually tragic struggle that shows no signs of abating.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com