Hopkins Students for Justice in Palestine (HSJP) hosted a performance of My Name is Rachel Corrie, a one-woman, one-act play based on the true story of an American who was killed in Palestine. The show took place in the Arellano Theater on Friday.
The play, which was performed by recent Central Connecticut State University graduate Ashley Malloy, details the life of Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old artist and peace activist from Olympia, Wash. Corrie traveled to the West Bank to join the International Solidarity Movement, a small task force dedicated to defending Palestinian families against Israeli occupation.
In 2003, Corrie was killed acting as a human shield, crushed beneath a bulldozer as she tried to stop a Palestinian family’s home from being razed in Rafah, Gaza.
The script is comprised of Corrie’s own letters and diary entries and was edited by actor Alan Rickman.
“I am in awe of [Malloy’s] work,” Mutasem Al Dmour, HSJP’s president, said. “It was humanizing.”
Malloy said she was drawn to My Name is Rachel Corrie through her converging interests in activism and acting.
Josh Perlstein, the play’s director and one of Malloy’s professors, introduced her to Palestinian actors from the Freedom Theatre, a West Bank-based organization.
The organization’s website states, “[We aim] to empower youth and women in the community and to explore the potential of arts as an important catalyst for social change.”
Perlstein said, “[The Freedom Theater’s actors] are literally kids who were taken off the streets, who used to be fighters, who would say things like, ‘I figure, if I throw a bomb, I’ll be dead in a year. If I write a play, I’ll be alive in 100 years.’”
After meeting the Freedom Theater actors in class, Malloy joined Perlstein and two actors from the Freedom Theatre for dinner. Malloy said that hearing their accounts of life in Palestinian refugee camps sparked a desire to spread awareness of their situation through performance.
“That was a pivotal moment for me,” Malloy said. “Hearing their stories and knowing that I want to do something with theater to ultimately create social change, I [thought,] ‘I have to do something about this,’” Malloy said. “Through doing Rachel Corrie, I became more of a Palestinian activist than I had anticipated I would. But once you know what goes on, I don’t see how you couldn’t be, to be honest.”
Malloy began work on My Name is Rachel Corrie in May 2013 and has been touring with Perlstein throughout the U.S. since September 2013.
“This tour [started]... at the Occupation Conference in Washington, D.C., where Ashley performed for Rachel’s parents, who subsequently asked her to come out to Olympia... to perform it for the first time on the anniversary of Rachel’s death in March of last year,” Perlstein said.
Malloy also performed the one-act at the 2013 Rochester Fringe Festival and won a “Best of Fringe” award for her performance.
Malloy and Perlstein give the majority of the proceeds from ticket sales and donations to the Freedom Theatre. According to Perlstein, they have raised about $3,000 on the tour so far and plan to continue the tour through April 2015.
“Pretty much everywhere we’ve gone, we’ve have great people hosting us,” Malloy said.
However, Perlstein said that some theaters and colleges have reached out to him to arrange performances of the play only to rescind their interest on vague terms regarding the play’s subject matter.
“I think in the long run people are going to try to keep... this story from getting out. It’s going to be hard,” Perlstein said.
Correction: This article previously stated that Corrie was killed in Rafah, Egypt. Rafah is a city in the Gaza Strip, not Egypt.
