L&S America Online   Subscribe
Advertise
Home Lighting Sound AmericaIndustry News Contacts
NewsNews
NewsNews

-Today's News

-Last 7 Days

-Theatre in Review

-Business News + Industry Support

-People News

-Product News

-Subscribe to News

-Subscribe to LSA Mag

-News Archive

-Media Kit

Theatre in Review: Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski (Theatre for a New Audience)

David Strathairn. Photo: Hollis King

As Cassandra could have told you, prophets of doom rarely get a welcome reception; when faced with the worst, most people reflexively look away, or change the subject, or deny the irrefutable evidence in front of them. (Ask any scientist who has been sounding the alarm about climate change lo these many years.) This is the central point of Clark Young and Derek Goldman's play about the real-life Polish patriot who, defying the most appalling tortures and repeatedly escaping death, delivered to the world the forbidding facts of the in-progress Holocaust, only to be greeted by a bureaucratic wall of indifference. It's a ghastly and important tale, filled with true accounts of humanity at its most obscene, and it runs the risk of being shut out by us as we struggle to digest its bleak conclusions. In a strange and terrible way, history threatens to repeat itself.

In this solo piece, David Strathairn is Karski, who kept silent about his wartime experiences until the early 1980s, when he was contacted by Claude Lanzmann about appearing in his epic Holocaust documentary Shoah. (Karski spent most of his postwar life in the US, teaching government affairs at Georgetown University.) We see a brief clip from that film, in which a dapper-looking Karski, asked to look back thirty-five years, bursts into tears, and exits the room. Half a lifetime later, even he could barely handle the truth of his story.

Indeed, he offers a testament guaranteed to rattle anyone's faith in humanity. Raised in a Catholic family, Karski (the last named is assumed, taken during the war) was taught by his mother to defend his Jewish neighbors. Still, he was a young man of his time; at university, he notes, "Some Polish students are trying to force the Jewish students out, brutally attacking anyone who protests. Professors stay silent" -- and so does he. Nor is he immune to the trends roiling Europe in the 1930s. Impressed by one of Hermann Göring's rants about German superiority, he muses, "To me, at this moment, they represent Western civilization." But then the Blitzkrieg is launched: "Everything I have believed in up till now no longer applies," he says, stunned. "Poland loses the war in twenty minutes."

Joining the Polish Army, Karski is captured by the Soviets and, later, is traded to the Nazis. Following a terrifying escape from a moving train, he is tasked by the Polish underground with reporting on conditions in the countryside. ("I become a tape recorder. A camera. A messenger.") Captured by the Nazis and subjected to savage beatings, he attempts suicide; transferred to a hospital -- the Germans, who believe he has valuable information to impart, want him alive -- he is smuggled out in a maneuver that costs dozens of his compatriots' lives. Reunited with the resistance, he continues taking down the details of German oppression, visiting the Warsaw ghetto, where dead bodies are left in the street, and a Nazi camp, where the floors of arriving railroad cars are lined with quicklime to disinfect the corpses contained within.

It's a procession of unimaginable horrors and one struggles to keep up as Karski, facing multiple perils, witnesses fresh degradations, all of them delivered at a breathless pace in Goldman's production and accompanied by Roc Lee's sometimes overbearing movie-music underscoring. Then comes the trips to London -- where he delivers his findings to Szmul Zygielbojm, of the Polish government in exile, and Anthony Eden -- and Washington, where he meets with Felix Frankfurter and Franklin D. Roosevelt. None of these encounters is satisfactory, but perhaps the most disheartening is with Frankfurter; the most prominent Jewish-American jurist of his day, his sense of a moral universe is so threatened that he simply shuts Karski down.

And, maybe, by this point, we have, too. Remember This is a vital slice of history, delivered by an extremely accomplished actor (it is a thrill to have Strathairn back onstage) but, just as Karski admits repressing his emotions to keep going, it's hard to not do the same. Before one can take in any of the script's atrocities, it is replaced by something worse, causing one to feel overwhelmed. The climax, detailing with brutal honesty the futility of Karski's mission, offers no relief; a kind of epilogue, tracing his academic career and marriage, also ends in tragedy. This is a story that must be told, but I'm not convinced that this is the ideal format.

In a way, the real drama is buried in the conflict between the awful truth and the inability of those in power to accept it. To get at that, however, we would have to understand something more about Eden, Roosevelt, et al -- the demands of waging war, the politics of pragmatism, and the urge to deny crimes that can't be measured in everyday terms. Remember This is content to leave us with the bleak outlines of Karski's life, which may be both too much, in its cascade of brutality, and not enough, in terms of examining the endless human capacity for denial.

The deceptively simple production design goes a long way toward theatricalizing the action. Mischa Kachman's set consists of little more than a table and chair, and the uncredited video consists of but a few moments of footage. But Zach Blane's extraordinarily inventive lighting makes bold use of angles and staccato cuing (simulating a passing train or an unexpected burst of bullets) to underline Karski's grim journey. Whatever reservations one may have about Lee's compositions, his sound effects -- ranging from tolling bells to cheering crowds to weapons in battle -- add an almost tactile sense of reality.

Strathairn, uncommonly fit and energetic at 73, embodies Karski with vigor, capturing his dawning alarm at the Nazis' crimes and the terrible guilt that shadows him down through the ensuing decades. With a shy smile, he recalls his late-in-life marriage to a modern dancer (alas, another story that ends in tragedy), and he even finds moments of humor in the darkest circumstances. ("As a boy in Poland, we had to learn many languages, because we never knew who would take us over!") All hail to him for putting his immense talent in the service of Karski's life.

Even so, Remember This must be considered a qualified success, a vivid slice of history and a probing examination of individual responsibility in a world gone mad that, nevertheless, is sometimes numbing in its effect. (To be sure, it makes one eager to read Karski's memoir, Story of a Secret State, or Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust, the standard biography.) The piece begins and ends with Strathairn, asking, in reference to our own world of upheaval, "Is there something we can do that we are not already doing?" It's a question that, days later, still gnaws; that, I suppose, may justify the production's assaultive tactics. --David Barbour


(15 September 2022)

E-mail this story to a friendE-mail this story to a friend

LSA Goes Digital - Check It Out!

  Follow us on Twitter  Follow us on Facebook

LSA PLASA Focus