My name is Rachel Corrie

This play explores the life of Rachel Corrie through a series of emails, diary entries, phone calls and testimonies. Rachel Corrie was an activist and diarist. After going to Gaza as part of her senior-year college project, she became a member of pro-Palestinian group the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). She joined other ISM activists in an attempt to stop the Israeli army’s demolition of Palestinian houses.

Less than two months after her arrival, on March 16, 2003, The Gaza Strip. 23 year old Rachel Corrie stands between a Palestinian house and an bulldozer. Corrie was killed during an Israeli military operation, after a three-hour confrontation between Israeli soldiers operating two bulldozers.

Meet the heroine behind the headlines. This play captures the idealism, the blazing eloquence, the sardonic wit in Rachel’s vivid diary entries.

This selection from the journals of Rachel Corrie – compiled by the late Alan Rickman and the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner – was first seen in 2005.

The play does not pretend to be an objective, in-depth study of the Israeli-Palestinian situation: what it offers is the vivid personal testimony of an acutely aware young woman and her journey from a local activist into one with a global awareness.

We will be using the combination of projections, live music and physical theatre to tell the story of Rachel Corrie. We plan to cast five females to play Rachel at different stages in her life. This will enable the actresses to work as an ensemble as well as individual roles and spread the lines within the play so that there aren’t too many to learn.