First Week of Rehearsal...

Director Jessica Finney talks about the first week of rehearsals...

We wrapped up our first week of rehearsals for Rachel Corrie on Sunday. It's been a good week, and I am grateful for many things, but here are two to share with you now:

Working at Homewood Studios. We're working on art whilst surrounded by art, which is truly a blessing. In addition, Rachel Corrie was always sketching in her journals and collecting images that resonated with her to make collages on her bedroom walls:

Each time I move, I spend weeks painting, gluing things to my walls, choosing the precise pictures of goddesses and art postcards. This is a labour of love, and I become completely immersed in it.

Working with Emily- I would be hard pressed to find an actor as open as Emily. I cast her without an audition simply because I could sense the fire in her belly, just like Rachel Corrie describes. Tuesday night we met with most of the production team (Jason Brown, Geoff Wold, Mike Hallenbeck, Sarah Bauer, Matt Di Cintio), so we were seven in total then. Other than that night, it's just been the two of us. I think we both had a sigh of relief after the first night on our own- we were able to relax into just figuring it out as a team.

We share information and insight: about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, about what made Rachel Corrie tick, about how this script taken from writings works on the stage in a theatrical way. We pore over books that Rachel might have used as source material (the Let's Go Israel guidebook, Chomsky's Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians), we talk about our own forays into activism and we work to unravel the investigation of self and humanity that is My Name is Rachel Corrie. As Rachel Corrie wrote:

We are all born and someday we'll all die. Most likely to some degree alone. What if our aloneness isn't a tragedy? What if our aloneness is what allows us to speak the truth without being afraid? What if our aloneness is what allows us to adventure- to experience the world as a dynamic presence - as a changeable, interactive thing?