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<DIV><STRONG><FONT color=#800000 size=5>Caution: This Op/ED piece is
posted as a comment on free expression and does not necessarily represent the
political/ethnic views of the poster.</FONT></STRONG></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT size=4>W.</FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><A
href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-viner1mar01,0,4597888.story?track=tothtml">http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-viner1mar01,0,4597888.story?track=tothtml</A><BR>
<DIV class=body><I>From the Los Angeles Times</I></DIV>
<H1>A message crushed again</H1>By Katharine Viner<BR><BR>March 1,
2006<BR><BR>THE FLIGHTS for cast and crew had been booked; the production
schedule delivered; there were tickets advertised on the Internet. The Royal
Court Theatre production of "My Name Is Rachel Corrie," the play I co-edited
with Alan Rickman, was transferring later this month to the New York Theatre
Workshop, home of the musical "Rent," following two sold-out runs in London and
several awards.<BR><BR>We always felt passionately that it was a piece of work
that needed to be seen in the United States. Created from the journals and
e-mails of American activist Rachel Corrie, telling of her journey from her
adolescence in Olympia, Wash., to her death under an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza
at the age of 23, we considered it a unique American story that would have a
particular relevance for audiences in Rachel's home country. After all, she had
made her journey to the Middle East in order "to meet the people who are on the
receiving end of our [American] tax dollars," and she was killed by a U.S.-made
bulldozer while protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes.<BR><BR>But last
week the New York Theatre Workshop canceled the production — or, in its words,
"postponed it indefinitely." The political climate, we were told, had changed
dramatically since the play was booked. As James Nicola, the theater's 's
artistic director, said Monday, "Listening in our communities in New York, what
we heard was that after Ariel Sharon's illness and the election of Hamas in the
recent Palestinian elections, we had a very edgy situation." Three years after
being silenced for good, Rachel was to be censored for political
reasons.<BR><BR>I'd heard from American friends that life for dissenters had
been getting worse — wiretapping scandals, arrests for wearing antiwar T-shirts,
Muslim professors denied visas. But it's hard to tell from afar how bad things
really are. Here was personal proof that the political climate is continuing to
shift disturbingly, narrowing the scope of free debate and artistic expression,
in only a matter of weeks. By its own admission the theater's management had
caved in to political pressure. Rickman, who also directed the show in London,
called it "censorship born out of fear, and the New York Theatre Workshop, the
Royal Court, New York audiences — all of us are the losers."<BR><BR>It makes you
wonder. Rachel was a young, middle-class, scrupulously fair-minded American
woman, writing about ex-boyfriends, troublesome parents and a journey of
political and personal discovery that took her to Gaza. She worked with
Palestinians and protested alongside them when she felt their rights were
denied. But the play is not agitprop; it's a complicated look at a woman who was
neither a saint nor a traitor, both serious and funny, messy and talented and
human. Or, in her own words, "scattered and deviant and too loud." 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 oppressed, the truly
other?<BR><BR>Rachel's words from Gaza are a bridge between these two worlds —
and now that bridge is being severed. After the Hamas victory, the need for
understanding is surely greater than ever, and I refuse to believe that most
Americans want to live in isolation. One night in London, an Israeli couple,
members of the right-wing Likud party on holiday in Britain, came up after the
show, impressed. "The play wasn't against Israel; it was against violence," they
told Cindy Corrie, Rachel's mother.<BR><BR>I was particularly touched by a young
Jewish New Yorker from an Orthodox family who said he had been nervous about
coming to see "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" because he had been told that both she
and the play were viciously anti-Israel. But he had been powerfully moved by
Rachel's words and realized that he had, to his alarm, been dangerously
misled.<BR><BR>The director of the New York theater told the New York Times on
Monday that it wasn't the people who actually saw the play he was concerned
about.<BR><BR>"I don't think we were worried about the audience," he said. "I
think we were more worried that those who had never encountered her writing,
never encountered the piece, would be using this as an opportunity to position
their arguments."<BR><BR>Since when did theater come to be about those who don't
go to see it? If the play itself, as Nicola clearly concedes, is not the
problem, then isn't the answer to get people in to watch it, rather than
exercising prior censorship? George Clooney's outstanding movie "Good Night, and
Good Luck" recently reminded us of the importance of standing up to witch hunts;
one way to carry on that tradition would be to insist on hearing Rachel Corrie's
words — words that only two weeks ago were deemed
acceptable.<BR></DIV></BODY></HTML>