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We see one table, two chairs, black wall, fog, spotlights. That’s it. With the standard tools of minimalist stagecraft, REMEMBER THIS transforms Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Yard into something that is both approachable and terrifying. Approachable because actor David Strathairn greets the audience, house lights up, as an unassuming college professor. Terrifying because, house lights dimmed, Strathairn fully inhabits that professor, Jan Karski, a Polish Catholic resistance fighter, and courier during World War II.
Surviving torments that would have felled a lesser person, Karski is remembered for reporting Hitler’s extermination of the Jews to British and American officials – in person and while the barbarism was in progress. No response followed. “Governments do not have souls,” concludes Karski. “Individuals have souls.” Co-authors Clark Young and Derek Goldman (who also directs) have shaped Karski’s past into a 90-minute script that, like the staging, uses standard narrative tools. To this writer, the results are as transformative as the physical production. Just when it seems that all Holocaust history has been told, Young, Goldman and Strathairn convey details so intimate, they shock anew.
Photographic Memory in REMEMBER THIS
“It is not easy knowing,” declares Karski, a man with a photographic memory. So unbearable are his wartime experiences, he does not speak of them until many years later. When filmmaker Claude Landzmann, described by Karski as pushy and authoritarian, wrests an interview out of him for the 1985 documentary Shoah, Karski breaks down in tears. As events unfold on stage, this writer observed a young audience member break down as well, hiding her face for many scenes while evidently absorbing every word.
When Jewish leaders take him to the Warsaw Ghetto, Karski asks why a man is standing in the middle of the street stark naked. “He is just dying,” his guide replies. Later, he sees a pair of Hitler Youth walk through the ghetto. After one pulls out a gun and randomly kills several people, the other offers his congratulations. Karski then goes to a transit camp disguised as a guard where, he notes, the inmates simply “did not look like human beings.”
Georgetown’s Global Performance and Politics Lab at Chicago Shakespeare Theater
As wrenching as these witness-bearing episodes are, Karski’s information trips to Britain and the United States hits our guts even harder. President Roosevelt’s unwillingness to bomb train tracks that transported victims to concentration camps is well documented. Karski’s recollection of his meeting with FDR, in which the President changes the subject from the organized murder of Jews to Poland’s agrarian horse supply, is not. After Karski describes these horrors to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, the justice replies “I don’t believe you.” For Frankfurter, who is a Jew, knowing is just too hard.
Karski came to the United States after the war and, perhaps in response to the willful ignorance of world leaders, taught international affairs at Georgetown University for the next 40 years. A tribute to the revered professor, REMEMBER THIS was developed at Georgetown’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics. Recent decades have given us Rwanda, Syria and other dehumanizing barbarism that powerbrokers failed to stop. For those willing to hear facts that still matter, REMEMBER THIS serves as Karski’s posthumous messenger.
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Remember This was originally created by The Laboratory for
Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University.
CREATIVE TEAM:
Writers: Clark Young and Derek Goldman
Director: Derek Goldman
Scenic Designer: Misha Kachman
Costume Designer: Ivania Stack
Lighting Designer: Zach Blane
Assistant Lighting Designer: Peter Leibold
Original Music and Sound Design: Roc Lee
Movement Director: Emma Jaster
Production Stage Manager: Andrew Neal
WHEN:
Thru November 14, 2021
WHERE:
Chicago Shakespeare Theater
800 East Grand Avenue
Chicago, IL 60611
TICKETS:
$43+
For more information please visit the Chicago Shakespeare Theater website.
Photos by Teresa Castracane Photography
About the Author: Susan Lieberman
Susan Lieberman is a Jeff-winning playwright, journalist, teacher and script consultant who commits most of her waking hours to Chicago theatre. Her radio drama In the Shadows aired on BBC Radio 4 last season.
Editor's Note: Click here to find more Picture This Post reviews by Susan Lieberman
