Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich’s HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES: Gauging culpability through photographs

• By drediman
• May 24, 2024
• No Comments

Pictures are worth a thousand words. These famous words of wisdom have been taken to heart with gusto by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich in their new play Here There Are Blueberries, a work of documentary theater that’s currently playing Off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop. A co-production with Tectonic Theater Project, the work was previously seen at La Jolla Playhouse and was just recently named a Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Drama. In essence, the piece investigates a particular album of photos — anonymously submitted in 2007 to an archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum — depicting Nazi perpetrators during their leisure time in Auschwitz.

Oddly missing in these photographs, however, are the Jewish prisoners held hostage at the notorious Polish concentration camp. Such an album has the potentially to be a controversial subject matter for a play. Indeed, attention paid to such an artifact can be mistaken as glamorizing the photos’ smiling subjects, at the expense of the millions murdered at Auschwitz and other extermination sites. But by systematically dissecting and painstakingly researching the circumstances behind these unsettlingly nonchalant photos, the sleuth-like archivists — and by extension, Kaufman and Gronich — have been able to make a compelling, clear-eyed argument for the culpability of the Nazis captured in these images (the particular focus of the play is one Karl Höcker, the main administrator at Auschwitz towards the end of the war), even within the context of the propagandistic machine that allowed them to morally shrug off any direct responsibility for the genocide.

Like Kaufman’s landmark 2000 play The Laramie Project about Matthew Shepard — also developed in conjunction with Tectonic Theater Project — Here There Are Blueberries is important, top-notch documentary theater that also makes for gripping theater (there’s a coup towards the end that shifts the perspective to the point of view of a Holocaust survivor, thereby bringing the entire endeavor to a satisfying, if somber, conclusion). The 90-minute production has been elegantly and thoughtfully directed by Kaufman himself, who has assembled a rock solid ensemble (playing multitudes of roles), led by Elizabeth Stahlmann as the primary archivist. Her steely performance anchors and centers the evening.

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HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES
Off-Broadway, Play
New York Theatre Workshop
1 hour, 30 minutes (without an intermission)
Through June 30