Gaza play inspires audience

When up-and-coming director Dariusz Korbiel took on the ambitious project of producing the controversial play ‘My name is Rachel Corrie' nine months ago, he set out to provoke people and make them think.

It is just coincidence that by opening night, everyone's mind was already on Gaza, which had recently been in the news on a daily basis.

This might be why the play, which has been met with protests by far-right zionist groups in other cities in the past, attracted little to no resistance this time around. What it did attract was many people outraged by Israels recent actions in Gaza, hoping to learn more about Gaza's reality in a way that statistics and pictures can't provide.

Art, especially live theatre, has a way of humanizing the stories we read about, and immerses us in the reality of the story as we see it unfold. Theatre can open our hearts and minds and this production was very successful at doing this.

Brilliantly strewn together from Rachel's emails and journal entries, this play which started off somewhat comical, with Rachel waking up in Olympia as an energetic and eccentric young woman, slowly progressed into an intense build-up of emotion as the realities of Rachel's situation in Gaza set in. By the end of this intense one-woman show, Toronto actor Laura Burns who plays Rachel Corrie, had nearly the entire audience in tears.

Although she claims it's the hardest part she's ever played, Laura Burns really got in Rachel's shoes and played this part brilliantly, never slipping up on even one line during her 90 minute monologue. As she delivered every line with conviction, and the most sincere emotion, it was hard to remember that she was not actually Rachel Corrie.

I, like many other members of the audience, was so pulled into the drama unfolding in front of me that I lost myself in the act. This play was by far the most compelling, emotionally-charged, and inspiring I've ever seen. The entire audience not only applauded, but cried, hugged each other, and spoke to each other about plans for helping Palestinian people, including travelling there to do some of the same solidarity work Rachel Corrie died doing.

If all Dariusz set out to do was make people think, he has outdone himself. Because people were not just provoked to think, they were inspired to act.