Remember This: A Conversation with Clark Young

On the evening of Tuesday, October 19th, 2021, the Department of Performance Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts excitedly presented their first lecture series event of the semester with Remember This: A Conversation with Clark Young. This event featured co-playwright of Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski, Clark Young (PS MA ‘17 Alum), Academy Award Nominated Actor, David Strathairn, and Professors of Performance Studies, Barbara Browning and Ann Pellegrini.

Young opened the lecture with a succinct history of Jan Karski - Karski was a courier for the Polish government and was one of the first to deliver testimony and evidence of Nazi atroities - the deportation of Jews to death camps - to the Western Allies. After his testimony,  Karski was not allowed to return to Poland, so he chose to become a professor and teach at Georgetown University. Karski taught some of the subjects that he bore witness to; however, he self-imposed silence about his experiences for almost 35 years, as many of those who experienced the traumas of World War 2 did. It wasn’t until 1985 when the documentary Shoah, by Claude Lanzmann, was released that Karski was convinced to return and report once again about the atrocities of the Holocaust. 

Young continued on to describe how his production has evolved from an ensemble of performers to its current state of a one-man show. Strathairn noted that the former state of the production was “2-steps removed” from the audience, as the story was being transmitted through Karski, then the students, and finally the audience. Therefore, the natural evolution of the production has allowed for the audience to be in the positionality of the students as Strathairn embodies Karski, as well as many other voices that propel the story of remembering. Interweaving the voices of Karski’s mother, sister, wife, Frankfurter, Roosevelt, among many more, is where Strathairn praises Young and Goldman for their extraordinary work in molding them into a perfect puzzle. 

Browning praised both Young and Strathairn for their work thus far and commented on the “triangulation relationship between art, education, and advocacy” mentioning an excerpt from Young: “And there’s no coincidence, of course, that the play originated as a piece about a teacher and his students, because I was a student of Derek’s, and we lived in this liminal space of education, art, and advocacy. And Karski seemed to represent a perfect combination of all of those elements.” Karski’s advocacy could be thought of as political and humanistic commitments - rendering questions on how this atrocity was possible and, now,  how this knowledge and theatre production can be received and interpreted in contemporary socio-political life. 

One of the many ways in which Young brings this into contemporary life is through his and his co-playwright’s, Derek Goldman, creative choice of altering Karski’s own language to the present tense - utilizing his memoir, biographies, speeches, recordings, and so on. Employing the present tense, Young mentions a powerful line that Karski wrote and spoke at the 1981 International Libertators Conference that also marks the end of his production: “It haunts me now and I want it to be so.” So the audience is left with a mysterious being… Who is Karski? By the end of the conversation Young, Straitharth, Browning, and Pellegrini collectively come up with “A” instead of categorizing Karski as either a man or citizen. They collectively invoked A for actor, A for audience (active witness). 

Pelligrini picked up the notion of an active witness and notes, “this play is continuously testifying on his [Karski’s] behalf, but he’s already testifying on behalf of people who are not allowed to testify because they were precisely killed by this genocide.” She pondered the conception of proxy witnessing and how it affects the human throughout the course of Karski’s life, as well as Straithairn’s as he embodies Karski. Additionally, Pellegrini remarked a powerful moment in the play:

“Now… now I go back…

Thrity-five years.

No… I don’t go back. 

As a matter of …

Alright. 

I come back.”

Pellegrini discerned this moment as mesmerizing, yet questioned the meaning of Karski’s testimony as coming back with this history and coming back to the present. How does one sit knowing what has happened and with one’s own life? A mystery that none had a direct answer. 

The conversation with Young, Straithairn, Browning, and Pellegrini was energetically rich in discussing the history of Jan Karski, the evolution of this production, and the impact of trauma, testimony and witnessing. 

Remember This: The Lessons of Jan Karski is currently on tour. Their next available shows run from November 3 - 14, 2021 at The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare.

Story by Fluffy Andres Aguilar.