A few pages into the script of My Name Is Rachel Corrie, a play drawn from the writings of the young American activist crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003, the titular character meditates on the urban journey of salmon.
“The salmon talked me into a lifestyle change,” Corrie writes, describing how she learned that salmon sometimes find their way into underground channels in her home of the Pacific Northwest, where they must struggle upstream. “Once you know there are salmon down there, it’s hard to forget. You imagine their moony eyes while you walk home from the bar in your slutty boots. It’s hard to be extraordinarily vacuous when you always have the salmon in the back of your mind: in that pipe down there—on their way to daylight at Watershed Park.”
Passages like this position Corrie as both a gifted writer and a young person with a remarkable capacity for empathy. At the time of her death, Corrie was standing in front of a Palestinian home, trying to protect it from being demolished. That house was one of three thousand Palestinian homes destroyed by Israeli forces between 2001 and 2003. A January 2025 report from Doctors Without Borders found that 92 percent of housing units in Gaza had been destroyed by Israeli forces, alongside more than 1,000 structures destroyed in the West Bank, according to a United Nations report.
In September, Burning Coal Theatre launched a special series of ten staged readings, spanning ten months, of My Name Is Rachel Corrie. The next reading is October 15; check the Burning Coal website for the full schedule.
“I think she had a career in front of her, whether it would have been journalism or fiction or, you know, who knows?” says Jeff Zinn, the director of the series, reflecting on Corrie’s voice. “I mean, she was 23, for God’s sake, when she died. She had her whole life ahead of her.”
The play was written by the late actor Alan Rickman and journalist Katherine Viner, drawing text directly from 184 pages of Corrie’s emails and diaries, and premiered at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2005. Formatted as a one-person play, this rendition engages multiple cohorts of readers; the first production was done by local artistic directors; a January reading will feature military members. Events are free with a suggested donation of $10, with all proceeds going to Doctors Without Borders and other international aid organizations working in Gaza, per the Burning Coal website.
Rachel Corrie’s parents, who have been outspoken activists in the wake of their daughter’s death two decades ago, are expected to attend one of the readings this year.
Since her death, Corrie has often been venerated as a kind of modern-day saint. Throughout My Name Is Rachel Corrie, though, her words anchor her in earthly dimensions as a person with strong moral convictions, normal twenty-something instincts, and perhaps the occasional penchant for being overly flowery. Her character rattles off idiosyncratic lists, debates with her parents, and earnestly describes what she sees around her.
At one point, she tells her parents in an email, “I still really want to dance around to Pat Benatar and have boyfriends and make comics for my co-workers.” At another, she writes of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. “I can’t believe that something like this can happen in the world without a bigger outcry. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop.”
Jerome M. Davis, artistic director at Burning Coal, says he felt moved to put the production on after watching the massive humanitarian crisis caused by Israel’s offensive on Gaza.
“I just wanted to do something, and I felt like this would be a good way to give people a chance to do it with me,” Davis says. “You know, not just post something online, right?”
Zinn, former artistic director of the celebrated Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater on Cape Cod, echoes similar thoughts on the relevance.
“The conditions in Gaza now are so much worse than they were when she was there,” Zinn says. “I don’t think a Rachel Corrie would even be allowed to insert herself into the middle of the situation in Gaza today.”
“I think [Davis] is very brave to do this now, because I can only imagine that he will be drawing fire for producing this,” Zinn continues. “And to do it in such a high-profile way—to not do it just once, but again and again and again and again, right? I think that’s incredibly brave.”
While Triangle locals have multiple chances to see this play reading, My Name is Rachel Corrie initially had a bumpy road to reaching American audiences. In 2006, following two sold-out runs in London, the play was scheduled to premiere at New York Theatre Workshop.
Opening night never happened: Several weeks before the premiere, the theater got cold feet and postponed the play, citing the need for more “contextualizing” of the material, a move that drew criticism from the likes of Tony Kushner and Vanessa Redgrave. More cancellations across the country followed, and even when the play did open, it’s painful to read the sneering words from American reviewers. One, from New Yorker critic John Lahr, described Corrie at once as “manipulative” and “porous, a vessel for the projections of others.” Had no one ever met a headstrong twenty-something?
On the flip side, a groundswell of readings arose in protest of a cancellation that many felt was political censorship. Years later, the play has been staged many times internationally, including a previous run at Burning Coal, and Corrie’s words still feel electric, as if they could’ve been written yesterday.
The suffering that Corrie touches on pre-dates the war and famine happening today, the atrocities of October 7, and even the election of Hamas, which occurred three years after Corrie’s death. They also predate the ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel, signed into place on October 9.
As both a portrait of an idealistic young woman and a snapshot of a horrific international conflict, these readings are well worth making time for. One takes away from Corrie’s writing a renewed desire to better consider the lives of others and the ripple effects of individual things—jobs, Amazon purchases, tax dollars—we participate in. To imagine, maybe, salmon swimming beneath us.
Follow Culture Editor Sarah Edwards on Bluesky or email [email protected].
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