David Strathairn

                             by Eugene Paul

If you are fortunate enough to have attended The Story of Jan Karski in its too brief run as a staged reading in the marvelous Museum of Jewish Heritage premises, you are already marked as hopelessly empathic to any endeavor to tell the all but incomprehensible story of the murder of 6,000,000 human beings solely because they were Jews.  Attempting to put that story before a rigidly unlistening world at the highest levels was the life work of Jan Karski, a Polish diplomat. Attempting to create a persuasive theater piece about this indigestible horror is an all but impossible dream. To witness the struggle of the tale tellers is inspiring.  But I’m biased.  Can’t help it.

Star David Strathairn is key to this extraordinary effort and has been since its inception at Professor Karski’s teaching home for forty years here in the United States as an American citizen, as a professor at Georgetown University, which gave birth to the Karski project: to tell his, Karski’s, story.  Karski died in 2000,  believing his task unfulfilled.  Strathairn has, in the early stages of the play already become  this dogged, passionately cool Professor Karski, but because it is a work in progress – with hopes of a Broadway production – he has yet to become fully what Karski finally came to know: you had to become a Jew. When Srathairn adds that to his ever so commanding performance the play will become electrifying.  Karski fully understood the Jewish experience when in his own family – they were Roman Catholic, as he was –were exterminated by the Nazis.  It is a wrenching revelation.

Playwrights Clark Young and Derek Goldman --  Goldman also directs handsomely – know they’ve bitten off more than they can chew and have been asking workshop audiences  for help ever since their initial efforts, even when they went to Poland to present the play.  The show is constructed around Karski and a figure called “Young Man”, partly real, partly imaginary, who on several occasions identifies himself by name as he follows Karski’s harrowing personal life story and exhorts him as strongly as he can to tell the Western war powers that people are being killed in huge numbers by the Nazis simply because they were Jews. Save them!  Stop the slaughter! Karski survives his imprisonments and tortures and actually gets to tell President Roosevelt, Supreme Court Justice Frankfurter, Lord Anthony Eden – who kept him from Prime Minister Winston Churchill – what he, himself witnessed, what was happening. But they already knew. They had other priorities. The war had to come first.

What, then, is the focus of this play? Guilt, complicity in the Holocaust by our heroes? Recounting Karski’s personal experiences? And is the glossing over of the Polish dimension of anti-Semitism deliberate? The result of persuasion through the stated support for this production by the Polish government? There are no disclaimers. (Here a disclaimer of my own: the play was presented as a staged reading in Warsaw, Poland, in 2014 with Strathairn and a cast of Polish theater students for the opening of POLIN, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews.  There had been 3,000,000. At war’s end, there were 3,000. The root of my family name is Polin.  I am not a neutral observer.)

Misha Kachman’s setting and Jennifer Schriever’s lighting design provide effective, rudimentary work space for Strathairn and his splendid supporting company. I don’t know how wonderful the Polish theater students were but I can attest to the wonderfulness of these American theater actors in the present staged reading: Josh Landay, Kersti Bryan, Nick Carriere, Connie Castanzo, Mariko Nakasone Parker, Pj Sosko, Robbie Tann. Courageous choreographer Emma Laster has given them moments of atmospheric enhancing group movement they perform amazingly.  But most amazing is David Strathairn who will be towering when he completes his performance.

  That, of course, still depends on the playwrights and the focus of the play. Already it is a compelling work entirely because of the fact of Karski. Unfortunately, enacting the facts of his tortuous, tortured history do not become new theatrical experiences for an audience. Only he is new. Theirs is a  substantial problem: their center is the Karski project, but the play’s center as it now exists veers inevitably to the young Jew, the Young Man portrayed by Josh Landay, Karski’s shadow conscience. Then, too, Polish anti-Semitism was so virulent it was held by Jews as second to Nazi anti-Semitism in anathema. Is that part of this story?  Not in this play. Thankfully, somehow, that’s vastly changed.  Thanks to Karski?  Is that part of this story? Indeed a work in progress.                                                     

My Report to the World: The Story of Jan Karski. A staged workshop reading at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, 36 Battery Park Place. 100 Min.