Rich Hein
Jan Karski should be better known, and perhaps David Strathairn’s masterful and committed performance bringing him to stage life will help remedy that. In the Theatre for a New Audience’s New York premiere of Clark Young and Derek Goldman’s 90-minute play Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski, directed by Goldman at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn (to Oct. 9), we see not just the unpeeling of Karski’s story but the urgent echoes his experience presents to our present day.
The play was created at the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University, where—after his formative Second World War experiences as a courier for the Polish Underground resistance exposing the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto and a Nazi death camp—Karski was a much-loved and respected professor in the School of Foreign Service for 40 years.
Indeed, the Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated Strathairn, before immersing himself in Karski’s character, says this to us directly: “We see what goes on in the world, don’t we? Our world is in peril. Every day, it becomes more and more fractured, toxic, seemingly out of control. We are being torn apart by immense gulfs of selfishness, distrust, fear, hatred, indifference, denial. Millions are being displaced, driven from their homes, impoverished, denied justice simply because of who they are, sickened, silenced, forgotten. We see this, don’t we? How can we not see this? So what can we do? Is there something we can do that we are not already doing? Do we have a duty, a responsibility, as individuals… to do something, anything? And if so, how do we know what to do?”