Literary Verbatim Theatre between Actuality and Creativity: Reading of My Name is Rachel Corrie (2005)

Abstract

It is historically known that many dramatists were sort of adaptors. Playwrights have often used myths, poems, historical events or even earlier stories as their source material but with literary verbatim theatre (the most text-based of all verbatim subcategories), the audience deals with facts found in the original words of a real figure who wrote privately and not for publication. Consequently, some have accused verbatim theatre growing in popularity of lacking creativity claiming that it is not even produced by a playwright while others have disagreed since it undergoes a selective editing process indicating that it is ultimately a creative process. This way the play is filtered by a playwright who goes by the name of an “editor”. Selecting the archives and arranging the given material, is a very subjective process that owes as much to an artist's predilections as to any rule of dramaturgy. Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner's My Name is Rachel Corrie (2005) was developed from one hundred eighty-four pages of a young American activist's unpublished writings, including diaries and e-mails, that were given with her parent's permission. The twenty-three year old American was killed in the Gaza Strip by an Israeli defense bulldozer as she attempted to prevent destruction of a Palestinian family's home. The play with its unresolved conflict over Palestine in addition to its cancelled production in the United States a number of times has made it a true controversial literary verbatim play. My paper aims at expounding the abovementioned points of view shedding the light over where they meet leading to the understanding of what John Grierson defined as “the creative treatment of actuality”.