Theatre for a New Audience has extended Clark Young and Derek Goldman's Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski at Off-Broadway's Polonsky Shakespeare Center. Now extended by one week through October 16, the New York-premiering show stars Oscar nominee David Strathairn in a solo performance which began previews September 10 and opened September 15.
Strathairn (Nomadland, Nightmare Alley) portrays Karski, a Polish resistance fighter, World War II hero, and Holocaust witness in a solo performance. Karski volunteered to witness the Warsaw ghetto and a Nazi concentration camp in occupied Poland in order to bring news of it to British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and the Allied Nations in London as well as President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the United States. His reports, however, were received with skepticism and denial.
Goldman directs Remember This, which he developed at The Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University. Karski earned his doctorate and taught at Georgetown for four decades following the war, and Goldman worked with Young on crafting a script almost entirely from Karski's words, informed by Karski's former students and colleagues.
Remember This marks Strathairn's TFANA debut. Read the reviews of Remember This here.
Featured on the creative team are scenic designer Misha Kachman, lighting designer Zach Blane, composer and sound designer Roc Lee, costume designer Ivania Stack, and movement director Emma Jaster.
“Theatre for a New Audience is a modern classical theatre whose cornerstone is Shakespeare. What is this play doing in a season at TFANA? The answer lies in the question ‘what is a classic?’," said TFANA Founding Artistic Director Jeffrey Horowitz in an earlier statement. "To me, it’s a story that is never over. It keeps getting retold because the issues that the classic plays are addressing are never over. Every generation has to deal with them.”
Remember This premiered in 2019 at Georgetown, and then played runs in London, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.
For tickets and more information, visit TFANA.org.