"Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski" at Theatre for a New Audience

Not satisfied with having sat through Tom Stoppard's Holocaust-centered play Leopoldstadt two nights ago, we boldly set out to Brooklyn this afternoon to catch David Strathairn in a solo show at the Theatre for a New Audience's Polonsky Shakespeare Center. This promised to be very heavy.

The Play

 It's not exactly a monologue. The single actor portrays mostly Jan Karski, but also occasionally slips into someone Karski interacts with. It starts as a simple story about him and his background, but ends up focusing on his life in the Polish Underground during World War II, after Germany invades Poland. Karski, who has a photographic memory, becomes a witness and messenger, carrying messages in his mind to leaders of the exiled government.

At one point Karski (who is Catholic) is recruited to observe conditions in the Warsaw ghetto and one of the Nazi death camps, then report what he has learned, first to the Jewish leadership in exile in London, then to the British foreign secretary and then to officials in the U.S., up to and including President Roosevelt. His messages are ignored, and officials later claimed they had no knowledge of the actual situation.

Throughout, Karski reflects on his own life (including his later four decades on the faculty of Georgetown University), his marriage, and many other subjects. But ultimately, his message is about the capacity in every human for good or for evil, and the reluctance to believe horrors, even when irrefutable.

The script is powerful. Apparently it was originally written to have at least one other actor besides Karski, but in the hands of a terrific actor, at least, the solo performance is quite moving.

The Production

The script has been in development for several years, and David Strathairn has been involved throughout, along with a lab at Georgetown that meshes performance with politics (which sounds pretty cool!). After several smaller runs, this five-or-six week Off-Broadway run at the Theater for a New Audience is their biggest yet, and apparently will later turn into at least a limited national tour.

Strathairn is the single actor in the show, although there is a bit of film of the real Jan Karski as well. For a man in his early 70s, Strathairn still displays a lot of energy, and fills the 90 minutes without much of a break to catch his breath, changing his outfit as he goes to subtly reflect changes in Karski's circumstances.

The Karski narrative is a remarkable story, and the play depicts it without much commentary, save for tiny monologues at the start and end. Karski's story is allowed to speak for itself, with an implicit notion that we, unlike his contemporaries, need to heed his warnings.

Bottom Line

This was a tremendous piece of theater, both in the sense that it's an impressive piece of writing and a daunting challenge for the actor, all of which rolls into a simple but compelling message about our responsibility as humans to respond to reports of inhumanity in our time. Although the production does not explicitly mention the situation in Ukraine, there is clearly concern for that.

The show has been extended in Brooklyn for a week, through October 16th. The show we saw on the 9th was supposed to be the closing (and it was sold out). So this would be a good week to see it in Brooklyn. And I'm told that it will be traveling, including to the Bay Area, so watch for it--this is a piece of theater that really needs to be seen.

I would be remiss if I didn't note the conversation going on in my head between this show and Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt, which we saw two nights earlier. Stoppard's play talks about the denial among even those who explicitly knew the Nazi threat, and also shows the dangers of reacting too late. It is a different, but also very personal, reminder of the consequences of looking away when people threaten other people.