How can an Asian Canadian actor portray a real-life activist who described her political perspective in terms of her “white-person privilege”?

Adrienne Wong will play the title character in My Name Is Rachel Corrie, running January 24 to February 3 at the Havana Theatre, in a coproduction of neworldtheatre and Teesri Duniya Theatre. It’s part of this year’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival (being held at various venues from January 16 to February 3), the annual event that has established itself as the most adventuresome on Vancouver’s theatrical calendar.

Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old peace activist from Olympia, Washington, was crushed to death in March 2003 after placing herself in the path of an Israel Defense Forces bulldozer. She was in the town of Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, as part of the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian-led group dedicated to nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation. When she was killed, Corrie was trying to prevent the demolition of the home of a pharmacist and his family.

Speaking by phone from the Monument-National Theatre in Montreal, where she performed Rachel Corrie in December, Wong remembers the first time she read the play. “It’s about a young woman trying to figure out her place in the world—from a position of privilege,” she says. “That was something I immediately identified with. We have had some reaction: ‘She’s Asian Canadian, so she can’t have white-person privilege.’ But if we think that western privilege is limited to colour, then we’re being naive. It’s about class.”

Corrie’s story became famous when, shortly after her death, several of her e-mail messages home were published by the press. British actor and director Alan Rickman saw the material in England’s Guardian newspaper and asked Cindy and Craig Corrie, Rachel’s parents, for permission to dramatize their daughter’s story. They agreed and sent Rickman 184 pages of Rachel’s writing, including her private journals. Except for a description of her death, the entire play is drawn from Corrie’s own words. Rickman built the script with the help of Guardian journalist Katharine Viner and directed the original production, which was a hit in London in 2005.

“I immediately identified with the tone of her writing,” Wong remembers. “This is a weird thing to say, but I felt like I was speaking to myself. There’s playfulness to it, and real honesty—I guess because a lot of it was never meant to be public, never meant to be read by anyone other than her. And there’s a drive inside of it towards fairness.”

Many of us believe in fairness—theoretically—but few stand in front of bulldozers. When asked how Corrie translated her compassion into action, the performer says she thinks the activist took the path of imagination.

“Clearly she’s an imaginative human,” Wong begins. “You can see that in her writing. And beyond being a creative person, she has the capacity to imagine what it would be like to be somewhere else, to be a child in Rafah.

“I read interviews with one of her elementary-school teachers,” Wong adds. “She said that in Grade 4, Rachel would come up to her after recess and tell her about all of the injustices that were going on in the school grounds. I think there was just something in her nature: empathy and an optimism that the world could improve.”

Near the end of her life, Corrie had witnessed enough of the evil of war to write: “I’m really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature.” And Wong points out that, in the final analysis, Corrie’s supposed white-person privilege didn’t save her. “The U.S. government didn’t do anything,” Wong says. “There’s never been an investigation.”

Still, the performer’s point about Corrie’s empathetic imagination illuminates the political potential of the theatre. Because the theatre invites us to imagine ourselves as other people—as Corrie imagined being a child in Rafah, and Wong imagines herself as Corrie—it offers a first step toward compassion and potential solidarity.

In that sense, this year’s PuSh includes a number of shows that invite political engagement. Romeo Castellucci’s Hey Girl! (January 23 to 26 at the Frederic Wood Theatre) will take an approach heavily influenced by visual art to explore the female body and the violence and servitude it is often subjected to. Castellucci has been widely hailed as the European Robert Lepage.

For small metal objects from Australia’s Back to Back Theatre (January 30 to February 3 in the promenade of the Vancouver Public Library’s central branch), audience members will be given headphones so they can hear conversations among characters who will blend with the crowd in a public space. Some of the actors have what the company calls “perceived intellectual impairments”, so the piece is partly a meditation on visibility.

And The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets (starring Michael Scholar Jr., shown left) will use a style reminiscent of German cabaret to explore a folktale that speaks to the lure of heroin addiction. This thrilling production from November Theatre—a company formerly based in Edmonton that now calls Vancouver home—packed them in at PuSh in 2005. Tom Waits wrote the songs and William S. Burroughs did the book. The Arts Club is taking an admirable risk by putting this edgy work on its Granville Island Stage from January 16 to February 9.

Perhaps the real gift of theatre is that it allows us to recognize that we are neither alone nor powerless.