There are catastrophes so terrifying that the mind has a hard time making sense of them. Jan Karski, who visited the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw in 1942, recounted seeing corpses lining the streets and a starving woman breastfeeding her disemboweled baby: is explained. “That’s not humanity.” But this was humanity. And Karski, an agent of the Polish government in exile during World War II, was tasked with reporting it.
theater for new audiences “Remember: The Lessons of Jan Karski” Originally produced by Georgetown University’s Global Performance and Politics Institute, it is a majestic and influential solo exhibition. Starring the brilliant David Strathairn and adapted in Karski’s own words by Clark Young and Derek Goldman, the film brings Karski’s memories to his tormented life. With its limited instrumentation of lighting, sound, table, two chairs and one suit, the play not only outlines Karski’s own eventful biography, but also the horrors of war, with a particular emphasis on Allied failures. and evoke poverty. Governments to recognize and intervene in the murder of European Jews.
Karski, a Catholic diplomat recruited into the Polish underground, reported on the changes the Nazis made by first entering the ghetto and then the deportation camps. “I’ll be a tape recorder. A camera,” he says of his Strathairn Karski. He then elaborated: I shouldn’t have any feelings. I’m a camera “
The precursor to “Remember This” is not necessarily or inherently theatrical. (“I testify” by Viktor Klemperer) played a classic stage company A more significant influence seems to be documentary film. Karski has been featured in two of his documentaries by Claude Landsmann, ‘Shoah’ (1985) and ‘The Karski Report’ (2010), but Gold, the Institute’s artistic director and director here Mann wrote Karski’s 1944 memoir and 1994 biography. It is frequently underlined here. Sound design and original composition by Rock Lee. This gives the show a cinematic feel, accentuated by Zach Blaine’s evocative lighting.
Whatever its form, “Remember This” serves as a remarkable showcase for Strathairn’s fluid movement through characters and time periods. At one point he jumps on the table and at another point he jumps off the table. Throughout, he successfully conveys both Karski’s extraordinary moral strength and his passionate reaction to what he sees. Because Karski has feelings. As Strathairn portrays him, he’s more than a camera and a stylus, he’s a man greatly changed by what he witnesses.
Strathairn offers great performance, but it never sacrifices content for attention, and it’s also unobtrusive. This restraint makes “Remember This” perhaps most affecting and effective in the tension between the coolness and expertise of its form and the hot horror of its subject matter. It is in the space between these poles that the specific evils of the Holocaust are communicated and understood and unimaginable suffering is imagined. Despite Karski’s efforts, the Allied leaders – Franklin D. Roosevelt, Anthony Eden – weren’t convinced of the truth. We are in the audience, even when they ask us to gently examine what they are doing.
This is most likely the lesson the title refers to. Karski of Strathairn explains: Each individual has an infinite capacity to do good and an infinite capacity to do evil. we have a choice. “
Karski, a distinguished professor at Georgetown University and posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, died in 2000. That means he lived long enough to see minimization and outright denial of the Holocaust come into fashion again. However, this does not seem to worry him. “These voices are weak,” he says in the play. “They have no future. As I tell my students, we have a future because we are speaking the truth.”
But the truth seems to be becoming more and more an alternative concept. I wonder what special advice Karski has for us now in the face of our current culture of misinformation, disinformation and propaganda.
Remember this: The lesson of Jan Karski
Until October 9 at the Polonski Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn. tfana.orgPerformance time: 1 hour 30 minutes.