Old Stories, Retold, Reveal New Truths
Early in “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski,” a new play by Clark Young and Derek Goldman, the lights go low, shrouding the stage in black, and a video starts. It’s an intense, moving clip of the real Karski—a heroic Polish diplomat who served as a dogged messenger to the outside world during the Holocaust, sharing his eyewitness accounts of the grotesque German occupation. Karski is a serious-looking man with flushed cheeks and tailored clothes. He tries to speak but, quickly losing his composure, begins to weep. The video—taken from Claude Lanzmann’s documentary “Shoah”—is a compressed statement of the play’s themes: here’s a man trying to speak the unspeakable, seeking and failing to corral language for ungraspable horrors.
Once the video stops—it’s the show’s only detour into multimedia—David Strathairn, who plays Karski, begins, despite those awful difficulties, to talk. “Remember This,” directed by Goldman, for Theatre for a New Audience, at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, is an exhaustive (and at times exhausting) one-hander, full of the primal urge to transport an experience from one mind to the next. The spare set, a table and chairs, is, for the most part, placeless—the better to accommodate the rafts of detail about Karski’s life that Strathairn pours forth, from childhood to middle age, in a jagged and immediate first-person present—but, at the outset, it resembles a classroom.
“We see what goes on in the world, don’t we?” Strathairn says at the beginning of the show, before he assumes Karski’s accent and mannerisms. At this point in the script, his character is designated, simply, as Man. This is direct address, meant to touch us, and to provide a kind of pedagogical context for why Karski and his tale are deadly relevant today. “Our world is in peril,” he continues. “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.”
Karski spent his later life as a professor, and Strathairn’s earnest, demonstrative tone makes it easy to imagine the theatre as a lecture hall, and yourself, an audience member, as a student, mutely dazed by an accretion of terrible facts. Karski narrates his covert mission, as a member of an underground resistance group, into the camps—and then, even more harrowingly, his attempts to get powerful people to believe him. Churchill won’t give him an audience. Roosevelt listens to his litany of horrors, then changes the subject. The Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter puts together a chilling formulation, perhaps the most memorable of the show: “I did not say that he’s lying. I said that I do not believe him. These are different things. And my mind, my heart . . . they are made in such a way that I cannot accept.”
This is nakedly didactic theatre. (It was initially created under the auspices of Georgetown University’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics.) It’s spiced up here and there by the simplest effects of light (designed by Zach Blane) and sound (designed by Roc Lee): a bang here, a flash there, to remind you of the true dynamics of the story. But all the meat’s in the words.
Sometimes the recitation—fact after fact—sounds like a lightly dramatized Wikipedia article, or a distillation of a dense autobiography. The writing can get clunky at moments of high action or excruciating emotion. But this is the unfinished-feeling awkwardness of communication that understands its audience as a real entity, waiting—even hoping—to be changed by the encounter. It’s hard not to respect such obvious belief in the power of public speech. “Remember This” reminded me of the “Living Newspaper” propaganda plays of Depression-era America, which brought news of current events—and pointed interpretation of those events—to working-class audiences. Except that, in the case of Karski, who died in 2000, the news is quite old, if not yet sufficiently understood.
It’s a high-stakes time to retell Karski’s story, which is itself about the troubles—the impossibilities—of telling. Europe’s identity in the twentieth century was painfully wrought in the wake of the carnage that Karski witnessed; lately, its hard-won political coherence, marked by a nervous insistence on peace, feels endangered. The war that has groaned on in Ukraine for the better part of a year has, in large part, to do with an insidious reinterpretation of Russian national and imperial history. Neo-Fascist parties in France, Italy, and elsewhere are gathering support too quickly, retconning themselves into respectability, trying to erase the fact that last century’s darkness had its genesis in ideas like the ones they now disseminate so blithely.
Recently, I saw the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre’s short-lived but wonderful production of “Audience,” by the great Czech writer and statesman Václav Havel, at the Bohemian National Hall, on the Upper East Side. The play, which is semiautobiographical, depicts a writer named Ferdinand Vanek—a stand-in for Havel—who is consigned to working in a brewery after running afoul of the Communist regime. He engages in a long, comic, increasingly menacing conversation with the facility’s brewmaster, showing how even innocent-seeming language can be made to bend to the authoritarian Big Lie. Two performers, Vit Horejs and Theresa Linnihan—who also conceived the production—manipulated a battery of puppets, giving silent but substantial (often hilarious) form to the entire terrorized social world of the brewery. Through the fog of official obfuscation, this sly production seemed to say, the real story makes its way out in even the smallest gestures.
Here’s hoping that’s true. Stuck at a hinge in history, we’re cloaking ourselves in new fables, making desperate, wholesale attempts at self-reinvention through the slipperiness of stories. Voices like Havel’s, and like Karski’s—spiky with undigestible and often incommunicable truths—will have to keep struggling to be heard.
“Marie It’s Time,” a new play by Julia Jarcho, directed by Ásta Bennie Hostetter, at HERE, has its own revisionist intentions. It’s a riff on the famous unfinished play “Woyzeck,” by the Expressionist playwright Georg Büchner. The original work, written in the eighteen-thirties, tells the story of a poor, desperate, God-haunted, lovesick army barber who is cuckolded by his common-law wife, Marie, and kills her in a rageful fury. “Marie It’s Time,” which was developed by the Minor Theatre, recenters the drama on Marie, who is played doubly, by Jarcho and by Jennifer Seastone.
The Maries speak to each other like split strands of a wounded soul, revealing some of Marie’s psychological ruptures, which prophesy the more concrete violence to come. They talk in high-flown poetry, lending the production a sense of unreality. Sometimes the language is lovely—little rhymes run through the text, in a way that will undoubtedly reward second readings. Sometimes it’s irritatingly opaque.
Both Jarcho and Seastone also play Frank, a dumb but scary interpolation of Woyzeck. Like Woyzeck, Frank is a barber, but he has no connection—at least that we’re told of—with the military. Perhaps he’s the perfect avatar of postwar, post-9/11, post Great Recession American male fecklessness: stripped of institutional ties and seeming to lack friends, he trains his attention on the woman he thinks he can control. Marie is overwhelmed by her baby—the mechanical cry the doll emits is shrill and rhythmic and weirdly funny—and increasingly enthralled by a musician named Major (Kedian Keohan), who sings repetitive, trope-heavy, subtly funny songs (written by Jarcho and Jeff Aaron Bryant) directly to the audience but, implicitly, also to Marie.
If Büchner—a radical who had to flee his home after calling for revolution—was moved by a twisted sense of pity for poor Woyzeck, Jarcho is intent on illustrating the double jeopardy faced by Marie, who is seemingly fated by her gender and by the intensity of her desires. Here’s the potential upside of our unsettled narratives, our stories gone topsy-turvy: sometimes you find an old jewel in the rubble, and a new facet gleams. ♦
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September 19, 2022 at 05:01PM
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Old Stories, Retold, Reveal New Truths - The New Yorker
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