29 May 2024

'Here There Are Blueberries,' Part 2

 

Development

[Anderson Cooper and 60 Minutes didn’t cover much of Here There Are Blueberries in “NAZI’s photo album shows Auschwitz officers singing and socializing as gas chambers operate,” posted in “Here There Are Blueberries, Part 1” (26 May), so I’m adding coverage of the development of the play and its reception by the press.  The post will be a miniseries of several parts, starting with Tectonic Theater Project’s “devising” the production over the 17 years after founder and artistic director Moisés Kaufman first read about the Höcker Album of photographs from Auschwitz.  

[“Devising” in this usage is a special sense of the word for Tectonic’s theater artists.  I gave the company’s own definition of it, along with “Moment Work,” another proprietary Tectonic term, in the introduction to Part 1, but since the concepts are so fundamental to Tectonic’s creative methodology, especially for Here There Are Blueberries, I’ll repeat it here:

Moment Work is the groundbreaking process of devising new work developed by Moisés Kaufman and Tectonic Theater Project to create works such as Here There Are Blueberries, The Laramie Project, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, and 33 Variations, among others.  Moment Work explores the theatrical potential of all the elements of the stage in order to create strong theatrical and dramatic narratives from the ground up.  Moment Work gives us the freedom to create individual, self-contained theatrical units (Moments) and to sequence these units together into theatrical phrases that eventually become a play.

Devising Theater means creating new work for the stage in a collaborative laboratory setting.  Moment Work begins with the premise that powerful storytelling employs much more than words.  Through a rigorous and thoughtful process, these moments are sequenced and layered to build narratives which lead to the creation of original and innovative new plays.

[The 60 Minutes report in Part 1 describes how Kaufman learned of the photographs and what he did next to begin creating the play.  Though some of that process will be repeated in the following articles, it would be a good idea for readers who haven’t already done so, to go back and read the first installment of this series.  My introduction and afterword to Cooper’s report will also provide useful background to the material here.] 

IN THE SHADOW OF HORROR, SS GUARDIANS RELAX AND FROLIC
by Neil A. Lewis 

[“Here There Are Blueberries, Part 1” gives the origin of the Tectonic production.  It mentions a New York Times article that revealed the existence of the album of photos from Auschwitz concentration camp which appeared on the front page of Section E (”The Arts”) on 19 September 2007.  The article Kaufman read is posted below.  (Many of the names in this report are also mentioned in the first part of this series.  I’ve supplied identifications for most of them in that post.)]

Photos that show murderers as ordinary human beings

Last December, Rebecca Erbelding, a young archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, opened a letter from a former United States Army intelligence officer who said he wanted to donate photographs of Auschwitz he had found more than 60 years ago in Germany.

Ms. Erbelding was intrigued: Although Auschwitz may be the most notorious of the Nazi death camps, there are only a small number of known photos of the place before its liberation in 1945. Some time the next month, the museum received a package containing 16 cardboard pages, with photos pasted on both sides, and their significance quickly became apparent.

As Ms. Erbelding and other archivists reviewed the album, they realized they had a scrapbook of sorts of the lives of Auschwitz’s senior SS officers that was maintained by Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the camp commandant. Rather than showing the men performing their death camp duties, the photos depicted, among other things, a horde of SS men singing cheerily to the accompaniment of an accordionist, Höcker lighting the camp’s Christmas tree, a cadre of young SS women frolicking and officers relaxing, some with tunics shed, for a smoking break.

In all there are 116 pictures, beginning with a photo from June 21, 1944, of Höcker and the commandant of the camp, Richard Baer, both in full SS regalia. The album also contains eight photos of Josef Mengele, the camp doctor notorious for participating in the selections of arriving prisoners and bizarre and cruel medical experiments. These are the first authenticated pictures of Mengele at Auschwitz, officials at the Holocaust museum said.

The photos provide a stunning counterpoint to what up until now has been the only major source of preliberation Auschwitz photos, the so-called Auschwitz Album, a compilation of pictures taken by SS photographers in the spring of 1944 and discovered by a survivor in another camp. Those photos depict the arrival at the camp of a transport of Hungarian Jews, who at the time made up the last remaining sizable Jewish community in Europe. The Auschwitz Album, owned by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum, depicts the railside selection process at Birkenau, the area where trains arrived at the camp, as SS men herded new prisoners into lines.

The comparisons between the albums are both poignant and obvious, as they juxtapose the comfortable daily lives of the guards with the horrific reality within the camp, where thousands were starving and 1.1 million died.

For example, one of the Höcker pictures, shot on July 22, 1944, shows a group of cheerful young women who worked as SS communications specialists eating bowls of fresh blueberries. One turns her bowl upside down and makes a mock frown because she has finished her portion. [This is the photo, with the hand-written caption “Hier gibt es Blaubeeren,” that gave Kaufman the title for his play: Here There Are Blueberries.]

On that day, said Judith Cohen, a historian at the Holocaust museum in Washington, 150 new prisoners arrived at the Birkenau site. Of that group, 21 men and 12 women were selected for work, the rest transported immediately to the gas chambers.

Those killings were part of the final frenetic efforts of the Nazis to eliminate the Jews of Europe and others deemed undesirable as the war neared its end. That summer the crematoriums broke down from overuse and some bodies had to be burned in open pits. A separate but small group of known preliberation photos were taken clandestinely of those burnings.

[Known as the “Sonderkommando photographs,” these were taken secretly in August 1944 inside Auschwitz by a member of the Sonderkommando (‘special unit’), Jewish inmates forced to work in and around the gas chambers. The photos are at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum but can be seen online at many sites on the Internet.]

Auschwitz was abandoned and evacuated on Jan. 18, 1945, and liberated by Soviet forces on Jan. 27. Many of the Höcker photos were taken at Solahütte, an Alpine-style recreation lodge the SS used on the far reaches of the camp complex alongside the Sola River.

Though they as yet have no plans to exhibit the Höcker album photos, curators at the Holocaust Memorial Museum have created an online display of them on the museum’s Web site (www.ushmm.org) that will be available this week [nb: they are available now]. In many cases they have contrasted the Höcker images with those from the Auschwitz Album. In one, SS women alight from a bus at Solahütte for a day of recreation; meanwhile, in a picture from the Auschwitz Album taken at about the same time, haggard and travel-weary women and children get off a cattle car at the camp.

Museum curators have avoided describing the album as something like “monsters at play” or “killers at their leisure.” Ms. Cohen said the photos were instructive in that they showed some sense, people who also behaved as ordinary human beings. “In their self-image, they were good men, good comrades, even civilized,” she said.

Sarah J. Bloomfield, the museum’s director, said she believed that other undiscovered caches of photos or documents concerning the Holocaust existed in attics and might soon be lost to history.

The donor, who had asked to remain anonymous, was in his 90s when he contacted the museum, and he died this summer. He told the museum’s curators that he found the photo album in a Frankfurt apartment where he lived in 1946.

The photos of the Auschwitz Album were discovered by Lili Jacob [1925-99; later Lili Jacob-Zelmanovic Meier; born in Bilke, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia)], a Hungarian Jew who was deported in May 1944 to Auschwitz, near Krakow in Poland. She was transferred to another camp, Dora-Mittelbau in Germany [near Nordhausen in Thuringia, in the former East Germany; about 20,000 inmates were murdered there between 1943 and 1945], where she discovered the pictures in a bedside table in an abandoned SS barracks.

She was stunned to recognize pictures of herself, her rabbi and her brothers aged 9 and 11, both of whom she later discovered had been gassed immediately after arrival.

Höcker fled Auschwitz before the camp’s liberation. When he was captured by the British he was carrying false documents identifying him as a combat soldier. After the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel, West German authorities tracked down Höcker in Engershausen his hometown [in the Federal Republic state of North Rhine-Westphalia, on the western border of the country], where he was working as a bank official.

He was convicted of war crimes and served seven years before his release in 1970, after which he was rehired by the bank. Höcker died in 2000 at 89.

*  *  *  *
LA JOLLA PLAYHOUSE’S ‘HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES’
TO EXAMINE THE SECRET LIVES OF HOLOCAUST PERPETRATORS
by Pam Kragen 

[Pam Kragen’s article, which includes an excerpt from an interview with Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, was published on the San Diego Union-Tribune website on 24 July 2022.  The world première of Here There Are Blueberries, coproduced with La Jolla Playhouse, opened on 31 July and ran through 21 August 2022 at the Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre on the campus of the University of California at San Diego.]

World premiere play by Moises Kaufman and Amanda Gronich is a co-production with Tectonic Theater Project

It’s been 77 years since the first Nazi concentration camps were liberated by Allied troops, exposing to the world the horrors of the Holocaust.

But for all of the camp photos, video footage, mass graves and survivor stories that opened the public’s eyes to the Germans’ systematic extermination of as many as 11 million Jews, Roma, homosexuals and others, one element was always missing from the story: The secret lives of the camps’ administrators, guards and office workers, who fled ahead of the approaching Allied forces and went into hiding.

“Here There Are Blueberries,” a world premiere play opening in previews Tuesday [26 July 2022] at La Jolla Playhouse, will offer a rare snapshot of these men and women who ran the Nazis’ most notorious death camp: Auschwitz in Poland, where as many as 1.1 million people — mostly Jews — were killed between 1940 and January 1945.

Co-written by playwrights Moises Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, “Here There Are Blueberries” is the true story of how a recently discovered photo album exposed the private lives of the German SS officers and staff who kept the brutal camp humming.

Among the 116 black-and-white photographs kept by Karl-Friedrich Höcker, who was adjutant to the commandant of Auschwitz, are images of him and others laughing, singing, celebrating, sunning themselves on lounge chairs and enjoying bowls of fresh-picked blueberries. Most of the photos were taken in 1944 and early 1945 at a chalet-like recreation center near the camp, where staff relaxed together in their off-hours.

Kaufman said the Germans’ carefree behavior in the photographs show a disturbing side of human nature.

“The purpose of this play is to show in a very specific way that the people who did this were not raised to do this,” Kaufman said. “They were people like you and me, and through a series of very specific things, they learned how to do it. I refuse to believe the Nazis are monsters. The moment you label them as monsters you can separate yourself from them. They were regular human beings, which makes it all the more frightening.”

Kaufman is the founder and artistic director of New York’s Tectonic Theater Project, which is co-producing “Here There Are Blueberries.” In years of past, the Playhouse has also produced Kaufman’s Tony-nominated play “33 Variations” and Tectonic‘s “Laramie Project: 10 Years Later,” which Kaufman co-wrote. Kaufman also directed the Playhouse’s pre-Broadway workshop Doug Wright’s Tony-winning play “I Am My Own Wife.”

Like “Here There Are Blueberries,” all of those past projects were based on real people and historical events.

The unbound pages of Höcker’s album were donated to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in January 2007 by a dying World War II American counterintelligence officer, who chose to remain anonymous. He told museum archivist Rebecca Erbelding that he’d discovered the album in a Frankfurt apartment where he’d lived after the war in 1946 and had kept it hidden for 60 years. In the early 1960s, Höcker was working as a banker in Germany when he was captured and convicted of war crimes. He served seven years in prison was freed. He died in 2000 at age 89.

Kaufman first read about the photo album in a 2007 New York Times article [see above] and said that from the moment he read the story, he knew he wanted to write a play about it. Kaufman’s parents were orthodox Jews from Eastern Europe who survived the war by hiding in a basement. After the war, they immigrated to Caracas, Venezuela, where Moises was born and raised. [A brief biography of Kaufman is in my afterword to the first part of this series.] His “Blueberries” co-writer, Gronich, is also Jewish and a longtime Tectonic collaborator and documentary filmmaker.

Kaufman said that as Jewish writers, he and Gronich can offer a unique perspective on the story.

“An uncle of mine who was from Hungary was in Auschwitz at the same time these photos were taken,” Kaufman said. “I showed him the photographs, and he told me, ‘You are surprised because you have led a pampered life. I lived there. I saw those faces, I saw these things you’re showing me pictures of. I’ve seen this side of man.’ I feel that the play allows us to look into the human condition through very specific glasses.”

In order to help audience members process the heavy issues in the play, the Playhouse, Tectonic and the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Professional Study of Ethics (FASPE) are hosting a series of free, post-show audience talk-back sessions during the run of “Here There Are Blueberries.”

The topics are: “Doctors at Auschwitz: Joseph Mengele and the Role of Medicine in Nazi Germany,” Aug. 2; “The Next Generation: How Do We Deal With the Sins of Our Fathers, Both Literally and Metaphorically?,” Aug. 3; “Ethics in Nazi Germany: Himmler’s Posen Speech,” Aug. 16; “There Were Blueberries: The Transformation of Norms and Complicity as the New Normal,” Aug. 17; and “Nazi Crimes and the Complicity of Business Leaders and Professionals,” Aug. 18. For details, visit lajollaplayhouse.org/show/here-there-are-blueberries.

Here are some excerpts of a recent interview with Kaufman about the play:

Q: How did these photos from the album speak to you when you first saw them in 2007 and, now, today as the play makes its world premiere?

A: Those photos pose questions about culpability and also complicity. Those issues are important in American culture right now. The play is very timely. This is my most American play. It speaks about how do we coexist when tremendous injustices are being committed. And how do we leave our daily lives when everything about our country is in perilous danger?

Q: You did a workshop performance of this play, then titled “The Album,” in Miami in 2018. How has the play changed since then?

A: It has become bigger. Since then I went to Germany with my co-writer Amanda, and we were able to interview some of the children [and grandchildren] of the people who are in the photographs. All of the materials we gathered from that have made it into the play.

Q: Are any of the characters in the play fictional or composites?

A: Everybody in the play is the real person. It’s a story of the people who received the album, the detective work they did to understand what the photos told us and how do we extract all we can from it. And it’s about one of the [grand-]children in one of the photographs.

Q: How do the photos themselves inform the play?

A: The photos depict a side of the concentration camp we hadn’t seen before. A lot of the work in the Holocaust community has been focused on the victims. There’s a shift in the community to focus also on the perpetrators. The thing that’s most shocking about the album to me is there’s not a single prisoner in any of the shots.

Q: It must have been depressing to research and write this play. Did it affect you emotionally?

A: Many times there were moments of great reckoning in the work. But at the same time, being a playwright, my goal is to always find a way to try and bring about “tikkun olam” (the Jewish concept of healing the world). I believe that theater has a realm that is more powerful than politics or religion. It addresses people’s brains, hearts and spiritual life. The purpose of writing plays serves as a great antidote to the subject matter of the play.

*  *  *  *
HIDDEN IN THIS PICTURE,
THE MURDER OF 1.1 MILLION JEWS
by PJ Grisar
 

[The Jewish newspaper Forward ran PJ Grisar’s article on the Tectonic verbatim play on its website on 23 April 2024.  Here There Are Blueberries should have special impact on a Jewish viewer, so I was especially interested in seeing what a Forward reporter would have to say.  Surprisingly, Grisar’s report isn’t terribly different from, say Pam Kragen’s above.]

Tectonic Theater Project’s ‘Here There Are Blueberries’ shows the SS enjoying life at Auschwitz

In 2006, Rebecca Erbelding, an archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, was paging through a newly submitted photo album from an anonymous donor. The album contained images from Auschwitz, but they were not what she expected.

“I was looking for things that I recognized,” said Erbelding, now the historian for the secondary education team at the museum. “I was looking for trains and prisoners and didn’t see any of that.”

Instead she saw officers picnicking, hunting and celebrating Christmas. The third time she sorted through the dusty pile of pages — many with water damage — she recognized a figure in an SS uniform, laughing, his hand tucked into his jacket. It was Josef Mengele. The image was the first photographic evidence placing the doctor at the camp where he committed his horrific experiments on prisoners.

Erbelding showed the pages to Judy Cohen, the director of the museum’s photographic collection. By the end of the day they had identified six or seven members of Nazi leadership.

The album, first owned by Karl Höcker, adjutant to Auschwitz’s third commandant Richard Baer, captures Nazi command and camp staff in their leisure. The pictures were not limited to the top brass. A series of photographs show young women auxiliaries [Helferinnen – literally, ‘female helpers’] sitting on the deck of the Solahütte, a riverside chalet about 20 miles from the barracks. A handwritten caption reads “Here there are blueberries,” and shows the women smiling and sampling the fruit while a man plays the accordion.

[SS-Helferinnen were female volunteers assigned as concentration camp administrative staff, typists, secretaries, and supply personnel.  They were SS employees, but not fully members of the Waffen-SS as the SS-Aufseherinnen (‘female overseers’), who served as camp guards (including at Auschwitz), were.]

As history, the album was invaluable. There are very few photographs of Auschwitz prior to the camp’s evacuation, and Höcker’s collection contains some of the last images of the camp before the arrival of the Red Army on Jan. 27, 1945. But on receiving the Höcker album, museum staff debated whether to display the images, concerned that doing so might elevate Nazis or that these happy snapshots of the camp personnel committing no crimes might even fuel Holocaust denial.

In the end, the decision was made to share the photographs with the press and later the public, advancing the museum’s mission beyond victims to a consideration of the perpetrators and their experience.

Moisés Kaufman, co-founder of Tectonic Theater Project, known for documentary dramas like The Laramie Project, read about the photos on the front page [of the arts section] of The New York Times in September 2007, with a banner image of Höcker resting on the porch of Solahütte.

Kaufman, whose father survived the Shoah as a child in Romania, had long wanted to do a piece about the Holocaust, but struggled with how to tell a new story about it. 

“The images of these people just having a perfectly lovely day, when, outside of the frame, 1.1 million people are being killed, really struck me,” said Kaufman, whose play, Here There Are Blueberries, made its New York debut at New York Theatre Workshop April 17 [the first preview]. The photos posed big questions, like how could one enjoy blueberries outside of Auschwitz and, more searchingly, what is the difference between culpability, complicity and complacency?

When Kaufman and his co-writer Amanda Gronich interviewed Erbelding and her colleagues about receiving the photos, they discovered their archival process had the makings of a detective story they could recreate onstage. The play begins with a primer on the rise of Leica cameras and reveals how the democratized habit of photography paved the way for the images we see in the show — photos that Gronich said behave like scene partners for the cast of 10. 

The actors use dialogue taken from the playwrights’ interview transcripts and archival texts; the Nazis mostly appear in pictures. Erbelding is the central character in the play, working with her colleagues to piece together the faces she recognizes and, by the end, undermining claims that any of the people pictured were truly ignorant of the horrors to which they contributed. (Another album featured in the play, called the Lili Jacob album after the survivor who discovered it [aka: the Auschwitz Album], testifies to this; its images recording the selection of Hungarian Jews for extermination were taken by the same photographer of many of the images in the Höcker album.)

Gronich and Kaufman also interviewed descendants of people in the photographs, including Peter Wirths, the son of SS doctor Eduard Wirths, and Rainer Höss, the grandson of Auschwitz’s founding commandant Rudolf Höss. A number of the photos in the play show Höss’ garden and swimming pool near the camp, recreated in [the] Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest.

[2023; directed by Jonathan Glazer, written by Glazer and Martin Amis; co-produced in German, Polish, and Yiddish by the United Kingdom, the United States, and Poland; nominated for five Oscars (including Best Picture), winning for Best International Feature and Best Sound, plus several other awards and nominations; loosely based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis; the term “Zone of Interest” (Interessengebiet) was used by the Nazis to designate the area around Auschwitz reserved for the SS, created on the land confiscated around the camp; it was administered by the camp and patrolled by the SS, Gestapo, and local police.]

But while that film focuses on one family, Blueberries takes a broader view, Kaufman said. It doesn’t just highlight people like Höss, whose crimes were unambiguous, but also depicts the young women secretaries who, while maybe not culpable, were nonetheless complicit. Looking into the record, Gronich and Kaufman found that this complicity was not entered into with reluctance — many later recalled their tenure at Auschwitz as the best time of their lives. 

Kaufman, who has directed the play in La Jolla and Washington, D.C., said working on it is “traumatizing,” but that he is energized by the idea that the carousing pictured in the private album is something the Nazis would never want the world to see.

[Above, I called Here There Are Blueberries a “verbatim play.”  Verbatim theater is a form of documentary theater which is based on the spoken words of real people.  (See my post “Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama,” on Rick On Theater on 9 October 2009; also the American Theatre series “On The Real: Documentary Theatre,” republished on ROT in five parts between 15 and 27 September 2017.  I write about “verbatim theater” in my article and Jules Odendahl-James discusses Moisés Kaufman in “A History of Documentary Theatre in Three Stages,” the first installment of “On The Real,” 15 September 2017.)

[Strictly speaking, a verbatim play such as Here There Are Blueberries is fashioned from words actually spoken by real people in real situations, and reproduced by actors in performance.  Most verbatim scripts are created by interviewing members of a community about a common topic or event to which they are all connected, recording these conversations, and using the resulting stories as the stimulus for the development of the performance.  This is the tactic of Tectonic’s The Laramie Project and Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror (1992) and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994).  (I have a performance report on the blog for Fires on 12 December 2019.  I saw Laramie in 2000, but that predates the blog and my pre-ROT reports.)

[The verbatim play is different from the archival documentary, drawn from records and published texts.  The verbatim documentarist creates her or his own documents through interviews and then recreates the personages who’ve been affected by a local event. 

[Thus, while the characters of traditional archival documentary plays are historical figures or prominent people—Pope Pius XII (The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth, 1963), Churchill (Hochhuth’s Soldiers, 1967), J. Robert Oppenheimer (In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Heinar Kipphardt, 1964)—the voices of the verbatim plays are mostly ordinary folks—the citizens of Laramie; the Delaney sisters (Having Our Say by Emily Mann, 1995); the people of Greensboro, North Carolina (Mann’s Greensboro: A Requiem, 1996)—whose testimony would otherwise have been unlikely to be noted.

[The archival documentary plays are, therefore, reexamining recorded history, while the verbatim plays are recording history that often hasn’t been documented yet.  If it weren’t for the plays, in a way, the events on which they’re based might be lost (The Laramie Project) or unrevealed (Here There Are Blueberries).

[There are more articles that cover the devising of Tectonic’s Here There Are Blueberries, several of them interviews with Kaufman and Gronich.  I’ll be posting them in the third installment of this series which will be coming up on Saturday, 1 June.  I hope you will return to Rick On Theater for that continuation, following which, I’ll be posting some of the critical reception of the productions.


26 May 2024

'Here There Are Blueberries,' Part 1

 

[In 2007, director and playwright Moisés Kaufman read the New York Times article “In the Shadow of Horror, SS Guardians Relax and Frolic” (Neil A. Lewis, sec. E [“The Arts”]), detailing the discovery of a previously unknown album of photos from Auschwitz, believed to be the property of Karl-Friedrich Höcker, administrative adjutant to the commandant of the extermination camp.  

[Kaufman contacted Holocaust historian and author Rebecca Erbelding, a U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum archivist, to learn more.  From their conversations, the theatrical seeds of Here There Are Blueberries blossomed.

[From 2016 to 2018, Kaufman, founder and artistic director of Tectonic Theater Project; Amanda Gronich, a charter member of Tectonic and Kaufman’s writing partner; and the members of Tectonic explored the theatrical potential of Erbelding’s story and the Höcker Album, as the artifact has been dubbed, through a series of workshops and readings.  In 2018, the first hour of material was staged at Miami New Drama in Miami Beach.  Longtime company members Scott Barrow and Grant Varjas (members of the current cast) joined the project as devisors.

[In April 2019, Kaufman, Gronich, dramaturg and associate director Amy Marie Seidel, and Tectonic executive director Matt Joslyn traveled to Poland and Germany to visit the sites in the album and interview descendants of Nazis whose photographs are in it.  That summer, Tectonic continued with devising workshops using their signature “Moment Work” method to explore and expand narrative possibilities.  

[“Moment Work” is Tectonic’s trademarked “pragmatic approach to creativity and creative expression,” created by Kaufman and taught in the company’s Moment Work Institute.  In the troupe’s own words (from its website, http://www.tectonictheaterproject.org/), it’s described thus:

Moment Work is the groundbreaking process of devising new work developed by Moisés Kaufman and Tectonic Theater Project to create works such as Here There Are Blueberries, The Laramie Project, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, and 33 Variations, among others.  Moment Work explores the theatrical potential of all the elements of the stage in order to create strong theatrical and dramatic narratives from the ground up.  Moment Work gives us the freedom to create individual, self-contained theatrical units (Moments) and to sequence these units together into theatrical phrases that eventually become a play.

Devising Theater means creating new work for the stage in a collaborative laboratory setting.  Moment Work begins with the premise that powerful storytelling employs much more than words.  Through a rigorous and thoughtful process, these moments are sequenced and layered to build narratives which lead to the creation of original and innovative new plays.

[By fall, the piece was presented in readings with FASPE (Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics) and the German Consulate.  In March of 2020, NYTW hosted a reading of the piece.  Throughout the COVID-19 shutdown, Kaufman, Gronich, Seidel, Joslyn, Barrow, and Varjas worked together on Zoom to develop the script.

[Here There Are Blueberries was originally commissioned and developed by Tectonic Theater Project.  The world première production at La Jolla Playhouse in the summer of 2022 was created in a collaborative, laboratory setting—what Kaufman and his coworkers call “devising.”  

[The rehearsal room engaged the full creative team from day one to integrate design and the narrative.  David Lander (lighting designer), David Bengali (projection designer), Derek McLane (set designer), Bobby McElver (sound designer), and Dede Ayite (costume designer) each made contributions to the overall creation of the production as co-devisors of the piece.

[The play, under its original working title The Album, had its first workshop production, an excerpt of the work in progress, at Miami New Drama’s Colony Theater in Miami Beach from 31 May to 3 June 2018.  In December 2021, the play was awarded the Trish Vradenburg Jewish Play Prize by Theater J, a prominent Jewish theater that’s part of the Edlavitch Jewish Community Center of Washington, D.C. 

[The world première of Here There Are Blueberries was produced by La Jolla Playhouse and presented from 31 July to 21 August 2022 in the Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre at the University of California-San Diego in La Jolla.  Patricia McGregor saw the La Jolla production of the play just before becoming NYTW’s artistic director.  

[Between 12 and 28 May 2023, the play was presented by Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company at its Sidney Harman Hall in the Penn Quarter of the Capital’s downtown.  STC and Tectonic partnered with FASPE to curate a series of post-show conversations where leading ethicists, scholars, and audiences could discuss the issues raised in the play—and consider their relevance for today.

[Tectonic had continued to refine the piece in advance of the New York City production and it opened at the New York Theatre Workshop in Manhattan’s East Village on 13 May 2024, where it’s currently scheduled to run until 30 June (extended from 16 June).]

NAZI’S PHOTO ALBUM SHOWS AUSCHWITZ OFFICERS
SINGING AND SOCIALIZING AS GAS CHAMBERS OPERATE
by Anderson Cooper
 

[I have a serious problem with Holocaust stories and memorials.  I can’t even look at a collection of Holocaust-related photographs without getting so angry that I come close to losing control.  I actually had to leave Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Center, when I toured Israel in December 1982 because I started to shake with rage. 

[I don’t like feeling that way—it actually scares me—so I seldom watched those movies or TV shows and I don’t go to those places.  I’m a native Washingtonian and my parents still lived there until their deaths.  I visited them often—but I’ve never been to the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

[I seem to be gaining control of my response to the atrocity that is the Nazi Holocaust, however.  I got through Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) with no trauma—or maybe I sublimated it.  I saw the Signature Theatre Company’s production of Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy (see my performance report on Rick On Theater on 16 December 2015) some years later.

[I’ve also posted on several aspects of the Holocaust on this blog, with no ill effects to me.  In addition to reporting on performances that deal with the Third Reich and the Holocaust, such as “The Diary of Anne Frank Online,” posted on ROT on 29 May 2020, and “The Last Cyclist,” 2 and 5 September 2022, other blog articles include “Latter-Day Esthers & Women Maccabees,” 24 April 2021; “Faye Schulman (1919-2021),” 16 June 2021; “‘Prisoners in Nazi concentration camps made music; now it’s being discovered and performed,’” 2 March 2022; “‘Performing for Survival – Cultural Life and the Theatre in Terezin,’” 7 March 2022; and “‘Minneapolis chamber group performs music written by Polish prisoners at Auschwitz,’” 17 February 2024.

[60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper’s report on the remarkable public unveiling of a collection of photographs of the Nazi staffers and guards at the Auschwitz concentration camp relaxing and enjoying themselves while the horrific purpose for which they were all employed went on just outside the range of the camera aired on CBS News’s 60 Minutes on 19 May 2024.  The transcript of the segment, which was slugged “The Album” on air, is republished below.

[Most of us know what Auschwitz and the rest of the Third Reich’s killing machine were about from 1938 to 1945, and many post-liberation photos of the camps and their awful accomplishments have been published and circulated for decades now, but the Höcker photos are unique because they’re not of surviving inmates or even the corpses of the Third Reich’s innocent victims.  They’re of the SS officers, men, and auxiliary staff in their off-time, enjoying themselves as respite from the hard work of planning, executing, and facilitating mass murder.]

By the time a new play opened last week off-Broadway by acclaimed writer and director Moises Kaufman, it had already been nominated for a Pulitzer prize. It’s based on the true story of a photo album from Auschwitz [concentration and extermination camp in Oświęcim, Poland; at least 1.1 million prisoners were murdered here between 1940 and 1945] that was sent to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC in 2007. Museum historians weren’t sure what to make of it at first, but the album turned out to be the scrapbook of a Nazi – an SS officer – who helped run the day-to-day operations of Auschwitz, where about 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered between 1940 and 1945. The album doesn’t show any prisoners or gas chambers, what it does show are some of the most notorious killers in history seemingly enjoying themselves. That’s what museum officials found so chilling, and what Moises Kaufman spent 14 years creating a play about.

Moises Kaufman: When I first saw the photographs I got goosebumps, and I – I remember thinking – you know, s many of the people in my family died in Auschwitz. And these are the people who were doing it. And they don’t seem to have any remorse. Seeing that in a photograph so clearly articulated is terrifying. This is terrifying because they all look so much like us.

The photographs may appear unremarkable at first – SS officers at dinner parties drinking, socializing, flirting with their young Nazi secretaries – but when these pictures were taken, the Germans were losing the war and exterminating more Jews in Auschwitz than at any other time in the Holocaust.

Several images show an SS officer giving his secretaries blueberries while a man plays an accordion. The inscription reads: “here there are blueberries” [“Hier gibt es Blaubeeren”] Moises Kaufman picked that for the title of his play.

Moises Kaufman: I wanted the audience to have the experience that we had looking at the photographs.

Anderson Cooper: What was it about the series of the women eating blueberries that – that so struck you?

Moises Kaufman: That they were just, you know, teenage girls who were secretaries. Everyone is showing the photographer their empty plates, there’s one of the women who’s pretend crying. So she’s so sad because she’s run out of blueberries and outside of the frame, there’s 1.1 million people who are being killed. So how do you lead your daily life and at the same time participate in one of the largest killing machines in the history of mankind?

Kaufman’s play is centered on the museum historians who worked with survivors and even descendants of Nazis themselves to uncover what the album was.

No one had ever seen images like these before. There are few photos of Auschwitz because the Nazis worked hard to conceal their crimes.

Kaufman’s main character is Rebecca Erbelding, a historian at the Holocaust museum, played by actor Elizabeth Stahlmann.                        

The real Rebecca Erbelding received the album from a former U.S. counterintelligence officer. He said he found it in 1946 in an abandoned apartment in war-torn Frankfurt while hunting down Nazi war criminals. He donated it to the museum but wanted to remain anonymous.

Anderson Cooper: How did you go about finding out who made this?

Rebecca Erbelding: I didn’t see any trains. I didn’t see anything I recognized. It was maybe the third time flipping through it, and that’s when I saw Josef Mengele.

No pictures of Dr. Josef Mengele [1911-79; dubbed Der Todesengel, ‘the angel of death’] in Auschwitz [1943-45] had ever been found before. To see the album, we went to a high security, climate-controlled facility in Maryland where the original pages are stored.

Anderson Cooper: That’s Dr. Mengele.

Rebecca Erbelding: That’s Mengele. And these are still the only known photos of Mengele while he was stationed at the camp.

Mengele was known by prisoners at Auschwitz as the “angel of death.” He conducted gruesome medical experiments, mostly on children, and often stood on the platform when trains arrived, selecting who would be sent to work and who would die immediately in gas chambers.

Rebecca Erbelding: Not only is it Mengele, these are some of the most infamous officers at the camp. So you see there’s Baer.

Richard Baer [1911-63] is on the album’s first page, he was the last commandant of Auschwitz [May 1944-January 1945]. That helped historians identify his deputy, Karl Höcker [Karl-Friedrich Höcker; 1911-2000]. And it turned out this was Höcker’s personal album – his cherished memories behind the scenes of a massacre.

Anderson Cooper: May 1944 is when Höcker got to Auschwitz.

Rebecca Erbelding: Yes. So this is the entirety of his time at Auschwitz.

Before the war Höcker had been a struggling bank teller. Becoming an SS officer at Auschwitz was considered a big step up.

Rebecca Erbelding: He had been staffed at the Majdanek camp [concentration and extermination camp near Lublin, Poland; at least 78,000 prisoners were murdered here between 1941 and 1944] before this and so he had experience with prisoners arriving, with selections, with gas chambers. He signed receipts for Zyklon B, the lethal gas that was used for killing people. He is a crucial cog in the Nazi killing machine.

The 116 photos in the album show Auschwitz as Karl Höcker wanted to remember it.

Anderson Cooper: Wow.

Rebecca Erbelding: It’s a mix of, like, candid things and really official. This is his dog. His dog’s name is “Favorit.”

Anderson Cooper: I mean what’s so stunning about them is how—

Rebecca Erbelding: Normal.

Anderson Cooper: Yeah.

Rebecca Erbelding: Yea.

Anderson Cooper: I mean, who hasn’t taken a photo of them shaking their dog’s hand?

Rebecca Erbelding: Uh-huh. So this is “Yule Fire 1944,” which is—

Anderson Cooper: Wow.

Rebecca Erbelding: – Nazi Christmas. [I suspect Erbelding is speaking specifically about the burning of the Yule log, a traditional part of the Germanic pagan winter solstice celebration; the Nazis created their own ritual around the Yule fire tradition.]

[The Nazis attempted to remove Christianity from the celebration of Christmas and substitute the pagan observance of Yule, the celebration of the winter solstice, which the regime saw as more Germanic. The Jewish origins of Jesus and the recognition of his birth as the arrival of the “King of the Jews” ran counter to the Nazi ideology and their racial beliefs. The holiday was renamed Julfest, the Yule winter festival.

[The rites and practices of Christmas were all either abandoned or redirected.  The Christmas tree, an age-old symbol of German Christmas, was renamed the Yule fir (Jultanne) and decorated with little swastikas and war weaponry. On top was a swastika instead of a star or an angel.

[Presents were wrapped in brightly colored paper decorated with National Socialist symbols. The gift-bringer was no longer Santa Claus (Weihnachtsmann in German – “Christmas Man” or “Mr. Christmas”), but Wotan (the German name for the Norse god Odin).

[Traditional carols were either rewritten to remove all references to Christian symbols and beliefs, or replaced with new, Nazi carols.  Crèches displayed a blonde mother with her baby, exalting motherhood as a source of the pure Aryan race.]

Rebecca Erbelding: They know that the Soviets are coming. They are not far. [Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Union on 27 January 1945.] They can probably hear the bombs and here – here they’re lighting–

Anderson Cooper: And they’re lighting a Christmas tree.

Rebecca Erbelding: Yeah.

The album revealed something else museum officials hadn’t seen before. The Nazis built a vacation resort at Auschwitz. It was called Solahütte. These pictures show a gathering of top SS officers there in July 1944. Rebecca Erbelding believes it was a party – they were congratulating themselves for successfully murdering more than 350,000 Hungarian Jews in just 55 days.

[Between May and June 1944, about 440,000 Jews from Hungary were transported to Auschwitz.  Rudolf Höss (1901-47), the first, and longest-serving, commandant of Auschwitz (May 1940-November 1943, and again from May 1944-January 1945), returned to oversee what became known as Aktion Höss (‘Operation Höss’). 

[SS-Obersturmbannführer Höss should not be confused with Rudolf Hess (1894-1987), Deputy Führer to Adolf Hitler from 1933 to 1941, when he flew to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from World War II. He was taken prisoner, convicted of crimes against peace at Nuremberg, and sentenced to life in prison.  Hess was famously the last prisoner in Spandau Prison in West Berlin when he committed suicide in 1987.

[Neither the camp nor its gas chambers and crematoria could handle the influx of prisoners, so with the gassings and cremations operating 24 hours a day—as many as 10,000 Jews were being gassed per day—many more were simply shot at the edges of massive open fire pits and their corpses rolled into the flames and burned.

[Solahütte, an Alpine-style lodge complex, was built by prisoners for the Auschwitz staff in 1940 and expanded in 1942. The name means ‘Sola hut’ or ‘Sola cabin.’ (The Sola is a river that was damned in 1935 to form a lake-reservoir.) It’s located about 18 miles south of the Auschwitz complex and had all kinds of recreation facilities for the pleasure of the Auschwitz guards, officers, and staff.]

Anderson Cooper: This looks like they’re singing.

Rebecca Erbelding: They are. This front row is really what the director of the museum, Sara Bloomfield, calls the “chorus of criminals.” So you have Höcker. You have Otto Moll [1915-46; known as “The Pig Butcher” (der Schweinemetzger)], the head of the gas chamber section. There’s Rudolf Höss.

Anderson Cooper: The former commandant of Auschwitz.

Rebecca Erbelding: The former commandant of Auschwitz. Mengele is here.

Anderson Cooper: They’re celebrating the  the successful–

Rebecca Erbelding: The successful mass

Anderson Cooper: slaughter

Rebecca Erbelding: murder. Yeah. 

Irene Weiss: It was, somebody labeled it, a metropolis of death. And that’s what it was. It worked like an assembly line factory.

Irene Weiss [b. 1930 in what was then Czechoslovakia, now Ukraine] got to Auschwitz the day after Karl Höcker started working there. She arrived when she was 13, on a train packed with Jews from Hungary. Separated from her parents and four of her siblings, she says she found herself on the platform holding her younger sister Edith’s hand as they approached Dr. Mengele.

Irene Weiss: And everything was in a matter of seconds, you know, the stick came down between us. He held life and death with that stick. All of a sudden, I was alone.

She didn’t know it at the time, but that moment was captured by a Nazi photographer documenting the arrival and processing of Hungarian Jews. It appears in one of the only other albums of Auschwitz. This photo has been colorized.

[Known as the Auschwitz Album, now held by Yad Vashem, it includes 193 photographs taken by SS officers around May 1944 during the transport to the extermination camp of the Hungarian Jews.  The album was found by another inmate of Auschwitz after the evacuation of the camp in January 1945 when she was transferred to another camp.]

Irene Weiss: This is the group already going to the gas chamber.

Anderson Cooper: Wa – where are you in this picture?

Irene Weiss: Well, I am right here

Anderson Cooper: This is you–

Irene Weiss: That’s me right here.

Anderson Cooper: So this is the moment after you’d been separated from your little sister, Edith.

Irene Weiss: The very moment, yes. That’s what I’m looking at. I can’t leave. I left her.

Irene Weiss never saw Edith, her parents, or her brothers alive again. What she has is this photo. That’s her mother Leah sitting on the ground just behind her brothers Gershon and Reuben at Auschwitz. After this picture was taken, they were led into a gas chamber.

Irene Weiss: They had to kill the children so there will not be a new generation. And they discovered that if they also killed the mothers, then they didn’t have to worry about the chaos that that would create, separating.

Anderson Cooper: The children wouldn’t be upset by being separated?

Irene Weiss: And the mothers wouldn’t be – wouldn’t be upset.

Weiss spent the next eight months working outside one of those gas chambers. She sorted shoes and other belongings of the dead.

Irene Weiss: We saw these columns of women, mothers and children, and going into the door there talking to us. And they’re told they’re walking into a bathhouse, you know? They’re asking questions, “Where are you from?” And a half hour later, the chimney’s belching fire. And that went on day after day and night after night.

Anderson Cooper: So you saw thousands of women, children walking into gas chambers?

Irene Weiss: Absolutely.

Anderson Cooper: And you talked to some of them. In the last seconds of their life, minutes of their life.

Irene Weiss: Yes, but we couldn’t cry. It was an amazing thing. This is beyond crying. Tears are for normal pain. That kind of brutality from fellow mankind is so deep that, you know, people say broken heart. The heart keeps working, but the soul never forgets.

Irene Weiss wasn’t surprised by the photos in Karl Höcker’s album, but when they were released publicly, they made headlines around the world. Tilman Taube read about them online in Germany while on his lunch break.

Tilman Taube: And there was an article, “New photos from Auschwitz have appeared.” I thought, “This is interesting.”

When he looked at the photos, he was surprised to see his grandfather – Dr. Heinz Baumkotter [1912-2001].

Tilman Taube: On the first picture, it wasn’t 100% clear. But then I flipped two more pictures. It was absolutely 100% clear that – that was him.

Taube knew his grandfather was head physician at Sachsenhausen concentration camp [Oranienburg, Germany; at least 50,000 prisoners were murdered here between 1936 and 1945], and had done medical experiments on prisoners and sent thousands to be killed at other camps. But Taube wasn’t sure why his grandfather had gone to Auschwitz.

He connected with Rebecca Erbelding and soon discovered just how deeply involved his grandfather was in the Holocaust.

Anderson Cooper: When you see the picture of your grandfather, I mean, does that feel like your grandfather?

Tilman Taube: For me, strictly speaking, it’s two different persons. The grandfather that I knew was a rather normal grandfather. And the SS officer is – is a different person for me.

Anderson Cooper: It’s impossible to reconcile the two.

Tilman Taube: It’s difficult, difficult, really.

Taube now helps the museum search for more photos and documents by reaching out to other descendants of Nazis.

Tilman Taube: Of course, you want to be part of some kind of movement that helps preventing things like that from happening again.

Anderson Cooper: You know your grandfather and you know what he did. Does it make you think differently about human beings, what we are all capable of?

Tilman Taube: Absolutely. Absolutely.

The play about the Höcker album by Moises Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, his co-writer and longtime collaborator, raises difficult questions . . . not just about our past, but about ourselves.

Amanda Gronich: When we look at these pictures, we’re looking through the lens of how they saw what they were doing.

Anderson Cooper: Why is it important to see Auschwitz through their eyes?

Amanda Gronich: Because they didn’t wake up each morning thinking, “I’m an evil monster. I’m going to do evil, monstrous things.” They woke up each day, and they went about their lives filled with justifications and beliefs in what they were doing. 

Anderson Cooper: It makes all of us ask the question, “Well, what am I capable of doing?”

Moises Kaufman: I think that’s what’s happening. When the audience comes in, they sit here and they go, “Who would I have been in that picture?” 

Irene Weiss: The most dangerous animal in the world is man because other animals will hurt you if they’re hungry or it’s their nature of hunting, but man can turn into an animal in no time. All he needs is permission. As soon as permission is given from higher-ups, from government, it accelerates. Even a hint of permission that it’s okay to attack this group or exclude this group or shame that group. It’s – it’s happening. I – it’s never stopped.

Produced by Nichole Marks. Associate producer, John Gallen. Broadcast associate, Grace Conley. Edited by April Wilson.

[Moisés Kaufman’s father survived the Holocaust as a child in Romania.  His parents were orthodox Jews who survived the war by hiding in a basement.  An uncle, who was from Hungary, was in Auschwitz at the same time that the Höcker photos were taken.  After the war, the Kaufmans immigrated to Caracas, Venezuela, where Moisés was born (in 1963) and raised.

[He graduated from Venezuela’s Universidad Metropolitana, where he began to study theater, then came to New York City in 1987 and continued his studies of theater at New York University.  In 1991, Kaufman became a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect and co-founded Tectonic Theater Project, creating work through a rigorous process of research and collaboration in a laboratory environment.  Among the first company members was fellow NYU student, actor and playwright Amanda Gronich.

[For Tectonic, Kaufman wrote his first play: Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1997), which ran Off-Broadway for a year and a half.  Gross Indecency received the Lucille Lortel Award for Best Play and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Play.

[While Gross Indecency was running, Matthew Shepard, a young gay student at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, was killed (12 October 1998).  Kaufman and 10 members of Tectonic traveled to Laramie six times over a year starting in November 1998 to conduct interviews with the people of the town.  From these interviews, they wrote the play The Laramie Project (2000).  

[Time magazine called Laramie “one of the 10 best plays of 2000,” and it was recently selected by the New York Times as one of their “25 Best American Plays Since ‘Angels in America’” (1 June 2018, compiled by Ben Brantley and Jesse Green; Laramie was #17).  It remains among the most performed plays in the United States each year.  In 2002, Kaufman co-wrote (with Amanda Gronich and Stephen Belber) and directed HBO’s film adaptation of the play, which garnered four Emmy Award nominations, including Best Writer and Best Director.

[Since then, his writing credits have included 33 Variations (which he directed on Broadway with Jane Fonda in 2009), The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later (2008), One Arm (based on the short story and screenplay by Tennessee Williams; 2011), an Afro-Cuban adaptation of the opera Carmen (2013-2016), Las Aventuras de Juan Planchard, a bilingual play about his native Venezuela (adapted from Jonathan Jakubowicz's bestselling novel; 2023), and Here There Are Blueberries.

[Kaufman’s also a dedicated teacher.  Since 2000, he and Tectonic’s teaching artists have been sharing the company’s techniques in lectures, training labs, and educational residencies.  In 2018, he co-wrote Moment Work: Tectonic Theater Project’s Process of Devising Theater (Vintage), a comprehensive introduction to his theatrical principles and the company’s creative tools.

[On Broadway, Kaufman directed Paradise Square (2022), which garnered 10 Tony Award nominations; the 2018 Broadway revival of Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song; the 2012 revival of The Heiress with Jessica Chastain; the 2009 Tony-nominated 33 Variations with Jane Fonda; Rajiv Joseph’s 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo with Robin Williams (see my report on ROT, posted on 11 June 2011); and Doug Wright’s 2003 Pulitzer- and Tony Award-winning I Am My Own Wife with Jefferson Mays (see my ROT profile of Mays on 31 October 2014).

[Other directing credits, aside from Here There Are Blueberries, are Seven Deadly Sins (débuted at Miami New Drama, 2020; Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience), One Arm, The Tallest Tree in the Forest with Daniel Beaty (Kansas City Repertory Theatre, 2013), The Nightingale (La Jolla Playhouse, 2012), The Common Pursuit (Off-Broadway revival, 2012), Macbeth in Central Park with Liev Schreiber (2006), This Is How It Goes at the Donmar Warehouse with Idris Elba (2005), El Gato con Botas (Puss in Boots, 1948 operatic adaptation; New York City, 2010), Master Class with Rita Moreno (Berkeley Repertory Theatre revival, 2004), and Into the Woods (Kansas City Rep revival, 2009).  

[Kaufman is actively developing other new works including Treatment & Data (about the activist group ACT-UP and the fight to find a cure for AIDS), and a solo show co-created and performed by renowned drag queen and performance artist Sasha Velour.

[Amanda Gronich, born and raised in New York City and with a BA in dance from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, has devoted her career to bringing true stories to the stage and screen.  An Emmy-nominated documentary scriptwriter, Gronich created top-rated series and specials for national broadcast networks, including NatGeo, Animal Planet, WeTV, and the Travel Channel.  Over a 10-year career in television, she worked as a lead series writer for National Geographic and became the Supervising Senior Writer at Hoff Productions, overseeing the company’s staff of writers and all scripting.

[Prior to this, Gronich was a charter member of Tectonic Theater Project, where she directed the company’s Toronto production of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (Canadian Stage Company; 25 June-6 September 1998) and was one of the group of 10 artists who traveled to Wyoming and co-created The Laramie Project (2000), later made into an HBO film (2002).

[Currently, she works as a playwright and a script development consultant.  She also teaches interview and research-based storytelling as a Lead Teaching Artist at The Moment Work Institute, using techniques she developed as an Adjunct Lecturer at the Graduate Program in Educational Theatre, City College of New York. She is at work founding a documentary theater development institute.  In addition, a book about her original play-devising methods will be released by Southern Illinois University Press.

[Gronich currently works as a playwright and script consultant and she’s developing a new documentary musical about a family coping with a rare genetic condition.  She continues to work in the under-explored field of interview-based musicals.

[Now, since Anderson Cooper and 60 Minutes didn’t cover much of Here There Are Blueberries, I’ll be extending this post into a miniseries to discuss the development of the play and its reception on the stage.  Please come back to Rick On Theater on 29 May for the next part of the short series.]


21 May 2024

Dance & Choreography

 

[I have published few articles on dance on Rick On Theater.  That’s mostly because it’s one of the areas of the performing arts about which I know least.  (Others are music and the electronic fields of theater tech, namely sound and lights—but at least I’ve worked in or with those aspects of theater to some extent.)

[While doing some research on the topics covered in the responses to "‘Morley Safer's Infamous 1993 Art Story,’" posted on ROT on 2 April 2024, I read an interesting article (from the New York Times in 1990, republished below) about defining—or ‘redefining’—dance (with respect to ballet) for the contemporary dance company and audience.

[Then I came across an article in this April’s issue of Dance Magazine about innovation in theatrical choreography to suit the “nontraditional” stage and set designs of some recent Broadway productions.  I decided to put these two pieces, one very recent (one of the shows discussed just opened and is still running) and one 34 years old, together for the blog.  They won’t close the gap between posts on dance and those on acting, directing, and playwriting . . . but they’ll narrow it a smidge.

[Previous posts on ROT on dance include “Dance & Acting,” posted on 9 June 2010; “Visual & Spatial Structure In Theater And Dance,” 11 December 2016; “Joan Acocella: Critic, Historian, or Critic-Historian,” 31 May 2019; and “Reconstruction of Ballet,” 30 July 2019.  There are also several performance reports of shows in which dance was material, such as “Chéri,” 20 December 2013, and “An American in Paris,” 2 August 2015, among others.] 

How Three Broadway Choreographers
Create in Nontraditional Theater Spaces
by Rachel Rizzuto 

[Rachel Rizzuto’s article from Dance Magazine was published on the journal’s website on 15 April 2024. 

[There are six stage productions mentioned in the discussion below.  Rather than insert a brief identification of each one as they occur, I’m going to list them all in the afterword following the text of Rizzuto’s article in the order in which they appear in the report.  Since I’ll be listing them separately from the article, I’ll include more detail than I would in an insert.]

Even conventional Broadway prosceniums can present plenty of challenges for choreographers: steep rakes, gargantuan moving set pieces, awkward sightlines. But what happens when a show’s creative vision includes a total overhaul of the theater’s playing space, eliminating the familiar stage-and-seating setup in favor of something more immersive? What goes down with the dancing when the physical boundaries between the audience and the cast become less defined—or even nonexistent?

The choreography steps up to the challenge, of course. Shows like Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 (2016), Here Lies Love (2023), and this month’s new revival of Cabaret made avant-garde stages their own.

Letting the Movement Evolve

Choreographer Sam Pinkleton joined the Great Comet creative team during its second off-Broadway iteration, in 2013. That version was performed in a small custom tent—a naturally intimate environment. Its 2015 American Repertory Theater run was in a more traditional space, where it began experimenting with some of the elements featured in the 2016 Broadway production at the Imperial Theatre. Pinkleton found himself with onstage audience members to involve, a series of cascading staircases to navigate, and a cast of 30 (up from 16 in 2013) at his choreographic disposal.

What saved Great Comet from getting lost in its new digs, he says, was the creative team’s focus on its original intention. Scenic designer Mimi Lien “was really fierce about maintaining a level of intimacy,” Pinkleton says. “She wanted every person in the room to have a personalized, specific experience to this show that is only theirs.” The entire creative team, led by director Rachel Chavkin, was aligned on this mission. Pinkleton used the staircases Lien designed to connect the main and upper levels of the theater as tiny stage spaces for individual performers to interact personally with theatergoers.

Julia Cheng, choreographer of the 2021 West End version and current Broadway revival of Cabaret—which eliminates some of the orchestra seating to create a small stage space in the round—met spatial challenges by focusing on choreographic authenticity. Cheng’s movement training is in street styles, like hip hop and waacking, and she wanted to capitalize on the way those genres naturally lend themselves to an up-close audience experience.

“Those styles are about holding space, and that requires a different skill set,” she says. She created what she refers to as the prologue to the show, when arriving audience members encounter a small group of dancers and musicians “already vibing,” as if the theatergoers have walked into a club. “The prologue ended up becoming a show in itself,” she says. She let her dancers’ particular strengths shine, too. “I wanted to draw out their fortes, their specialisms from the underground and subculture—forms not usually represented on the musical theater stage.”

Sometimes choreographers even help shape transformative theater designs. When working with choreographer Annie-B Parson on Here Lies Love, scenic designer David Korins knew there needed to be give-and-take between the show’s unusual, immersive playing space—one long catwalk, with the audience below on either side, plus smaller spaces throughout the theater with room for a performer or two—and its movement vocabulary. “I think Annie is an extraordinary visual storyteller,” he says. “There were tentpole moments we wanted to accomplish, and in those, she really held her ground—‘If we’re going to do this, then we need to do that.’ When she had a sense of that, you listened.”

Rising to the Challenge

In revamped theater spaces, changes that might at first seem like challenges can actually offer opportunities for innovative thinking. Pinkleton found that to be true on Great Comet, where he had to convey a sense of closeness in a large house without a central meeting place where the entire cast could fit. Eventually, he landed on placing dancers throughout the house—on the staircases, in the aisles, on platforms, in an audience member’s lap—and choreographing intentional eye contact. “It was, ‘I am looking at you in the sixth row and waving at you and saying I’m glad you’re here,’ he says. “That became more important than asking people to kick their leg on five.”

From Korins’ perspective, the disparate stage spaces of Here Lies Love allowed Parson to create a different kind of Broadway dynamic. “Annie could stage these beautiful, isolated islands of dance and movement,” he says. “You might be looking at two people dancing in unison, but they’re doing it 150 feet away from each other. That tension and connectivity between the bodies in space was really effective.”

For Cheng, the task of choreographing in the round was a welcome one, not a thorn in her side. “When I’m in the club cyphering, that’s my comfort zone: You’re in the circle, there’s a community around you,” she says. “It’s sometimes difficult to get that in a really big space.” She saw typical theater choreographic taboos—turning one’s back to the audience, for example—as a chance to offer unexpected perspectives. “I don’t mind having a back to the audience,” she says. “I think that’s interesting.”

Overhauled theaters, with their myriad challenges, require a special kind of mind-meld between the members of the creative team. When all of a show’s leaders are invested in the same idea, however out-there it might seem—what Pinkleton calls “everybody working on the same show”—that’s when the real magic happens. When it does come together, Pinkleton says, “it doesn’t feel insane. It feels inevitable.”

Broadway Theater Revamps of the Past

Most revolutionary staging choices in Broadway’s history have had the same aim: to get the audience closer to the action than a proscenium stage can.

Before transferring to what’s now known as the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, Man of La Mancha (1965) opened at the ANTA Washington Square Theatre in Greenwich Village, which boasted an experimental stage with the audience seated on three sides. Jazz dance pioneer Jack Cole was nominated for a Tony Award for his Latin-influenced choreography, described as “blistering” and “orgiastic” by one critic.

The 1974 Broadway production of Leonard Bernsteins often-revised Candide ripped out much of the Broadway Theatre’s orchestra seating. This meant that many audience members had an immersive experience with Patricia Birch’s choreography, which New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes likened to a rocket booster.

For its 1998 revival, Cabaret transformed the former disco nightclub Studio 54 into a Broadway house—but with a small thrust stage surrounded by tables and chairs, to lend an authentic­ Kit Kat Klub vibe. Choreographer and co-director Rob Marshall used the audience’s nearness to highlight his raw, rough-edged choreography.

[Here’s the list of productions named in Rachel Rizzuto’s report:

•  Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812: 14 November 2016-3 September 2017 (336 regular performances) at the Imperial Theatre; book, music, and lyrics by Dave Malloy; “pop-opera” based on the 1869 novel War and Peace (first translated into English, 1889) by Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910); commissioned and premièred Off-Off-Broadway by Ars Nova (2012), further developed and produced by the American Repertory Theatre of Cambridge, Massachusetts (2015); directed by Rachel Chavkin, choreographed by Sam Pinkleton, with a cast including Denée Benton (Natasha) and Josh Groban (Pierre); 2 Tony Awards, 10 additional nominations (including Best Choreography); 4 Drama Desk Awards (including Outstanding Director of a Musical; not choreography)

  Cabaret (official title: Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club): 21 April 2024-Present (32 regular performances as of 19 May) at the August Wilson Theatre; book by Joe Masteroff, music by John Kander, and lyrics by Fred Ebb; based on the play I Am a Camera (1951) by John Van Druten and The Berlin Stories (1939) by Christopher Isherwood (1904-86); transferred from London’s West End at the Playhouse Theater from 15 November 2021-Present; both London’s Playhouse and New York City’s August Wilson Theatres have been refurbished as the Kit Kat Club in an arena-theater format; directed by Rebecca Frecknall, choreographed by Julia Cheng, set designed by Tom Scott, with a cast including Gayle Rankin (Sally Bowles), Eddie Redmayne (Emcee), Ato Blankton-Wood (Clifford Bradshaw), Bebe Neuwirth (Fraulein Schneider); 9 Tony Awards nominations (not choreography); 5 Drama Desk Awards (no awards)

  Here Lies Love: 20 July-26 November 2023 (150 regular performances) at the Broadway Theatre; music by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, lyrics by Byrne; disco-pop bio-musical of life of Imelda Marcos (b, 1929), First Lady of the Philippines (1965-86), based on the concept album by Byrne and Slim (2010); the musical, almost entirely sung through, has little dialogue (hence, no book-writer), instead projections at the side of the stage by projection designer Peter Nigrini provide text that explains crucial facts; originally produced by New York City’s Public Theater; the Broadway Theatre was transformed into a disco ballroom; directed by Alex Timbers, choreographed by Annie-B Parson, set designed by David Korins, with a cast including Arielle Jacobs (Imelda), Jose Llana (Marcos), Conrad Ricamora (Ninoy Aquino), Lea Salonga (Aurora Aquino); 4 Tony nominations (including Best Choreography); no awards

  Man of La Mancha: 22 November 1965-26 January 1971 (2,328 regular performances) at the ANTA Washington Square Theatre (Greenwich Village; demolished in 1968), Martin Beck Theatre (renamed the Al Hirschfeld in 2003), Eden Theatre (East Village; converted to a movie house in 1976, now called the Village East), and Mark Hellinger Theatre (acquired by the Times Square Church in in 1989); book by Dale Wasserman, music by Mitch Leigh, lyrics by Joe Darion; based on the life and works of Miguel de Cervantes (1547?-1616); directed by Albert Marr, choreographed by Jack Cole, with a cast including Joan Diener (Aldonza/Dulcinea), Irving Jacobson (Sancho Panza), Richard Kiley (Don Quixote/Cervantes); 5 Tonys (including Best Musical and Best Direction of a Musical), 2 additional nominations (including Best Choreography)

  Candide: 10 March 1974-4 January 1976 (740 regular performances) at the Broadway Theatre; book adaptation by Hugh Wheeler, music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Richard Wilbur r (with additional lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, John La Touche, and Bernstein; based on the novel Candide (1759) by Voltaire (1694-1778); Broadway Theatre was transformed by platforms on the stage and in the auditorium for the action instead of changing scenery; directed by Harold Prince, choreographed by Patricia Birch, set designed by Eugene Lee, with a cast including Lewis J. Stadlen (Dr. Pangloss/Voltaire, et al.), Mark Baker (Candide), Maureen Brennan (Cunegonde); 5 Tonys (not choreography), 3 additional nominations (not choreography); 5 Drama Desks (including Outstanding Choreography, Outstanding Set Design, Outstanding Director)

  Cabaret: 19 March 1998-4 January 2004 at the Kit Kat Klub (Henry Miller’s Theatre was renamed for 8 months while Cabaret was in residence; when the show moved to the former night club, the theater reverted to its former name; it was renamed the Stephen Sondheim in 2010), Studio 54 (2,377 regular performances); text and script details are the same as for 2024 revival above; produced by Off-Broadway Roundabout Theatre Company; inspired by the 1993 London production at the Donmar Warehouse; directed by Sam Mendes, choreographed by Rob Marshall, set and club designed by Robert Brill, with a cast including Alan Cumming (Master of Ceremonies), Natasha Richardson (Sally Bowles), John Benjamin Hickey (Clifford Bradshaw), Mary Louise Wilson (Fraulein Schneider); 4 Tonys, 6 additional nominations (including Best Choreography, Best Direction of a Musical); 3 Drama Desks, 7 additional nominations (including Outstanding Choreography, Outstanding Direction of a Musical, Outstanding Set Design of a Musical

[Rachel Rizzuto is a choreographer, performer, teacher, and dance writer.  She’s a contributing writer to Dance Magazine and Dance Teacher magazine.  Rizzuto earned her MFA in dance from the University of Illinois in 2021. She graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi with a BFA in dance and a BA in English.]

*  *  *  *
JUST WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED DANCE?
by Jack Anderson

[Jack Anderson, the New York Times dance reviewer in 1990, launches a discussion of how ballet has changed with respect to current ballet troupes and their audiences by introducing a debate he asserts was generated by productions of two ballets by the New York City Ballet in the summer of 1990. 

[Anderson, whose article was published in the “Arts & Leisure” section of the New York Times on 12 August 1990, doesn’t really explain why these dances, one a première and the other a revival of a 18-year-old creation, initiated such a controversy, so I did some research, and here’s what I found.

[In his review of the first piece, the début of Peter Martins and Robert La Fosse’s A Mass, Anderson labeled the dancing “choreographically controversial” (“‘A Mass,’ a Surprise City Ballet Premiere,” sec. C [“The Arts”], New York Times, 29 June 1990), a description that applies to both ballets.  That’s the crux of the debate.

[A Mass, which premièred on 27 June 1990 and was repeated on 1 July, is a Missa Sicca (literally, ‘Dry Mass’), a medieval Roman Catholic rite that takes the form of the Mass, but without communion.  As staged by Martins to choral music composed by Michael Torke, it was largely a processional composed of 100 dancers.

[Anderson observed, “The question to be asked is not whether ‘A Mass’ contains choreography, but whether its choreography is expressive.”  He described the movements as “kinetic austerity” and concluded, “‘A Mass’ was curiously vague.”

[Jerome Robbins’s Watermill débuted at NYCB in 1972 and was revived for the first time since 1979 on 12 July 1990 with a repeat on the 16th as part of the troupe’s Festival of Jerome Robbins’ Ballets.  It was set to music composed by Teiji Ito and Edward Villella, the original lead dancer in the première, returned to NYCB to reprise his performance.

[Named for an eastern Long Island resort town (Water Mill, in Suffolk County) where Robbins vacationed, the ballet was described by NYCB founder George Balanchine, Robbins recalled, as “about there being no time” (Anna Kisselgoff, “Jerome Robbins, a Creator from Head to Foot,” sec C [“The Arts’], New York Times, 3 June 1990).  Dance reviewer Kisselgoff felt that it was an “attempt to treat what Mr. Robbins called ‘the unstated’” in contrast to the literalness he’d dealt with earlier.  Robbins called the work “contemplative” and “internalized.”

[Kisselgoff characterized the feel of the production as the “slow-moving time sense derived from Japanese Noh theater,” a solemn and deliberate performance form suffused with the perspective of Zen Buddhism (see my post “Noh Theater of Japan,” published on ROT on 11 April 2023).  Thus, she later concluded, the audience that was “primed for toe shoes and the fasted dancers in the world was suddenly invited to watch one of ballet’s prime movers—Mr. Villella—in near stillness for an hour” (Kisselgoff, “Villella Returns to ‘Watermill,’ a Robbins Meditation on Time,” sec. C [“The Arts”], New York Times, 14 July 1990).

[This lack of movement, or, in the case of Martins and La Fosse’s Mass, balletic movement, primed the ballet world to ask ‘What is a ballet these days anyway?’]

This summer, two City Ballet productions — ‘Watermill’ and ‘A Mass’ — fueled the debate over what constitutes a ballet.

Choreographers choreograph dances. Dancers dance dances. Ballet dancers dance ballets.

Those statements are not quotations from a first-grade reader for young dance students. Instead, they constitute a primer for adult dancegoers and, even though they may sound self-evident, they point to matters of the utmost artistic importance.

They are especially worth considering because of the uproar that occurred at the New York City Ballet earlier this summer. Two productions — a revival and a premiere — caused the fuss. Those ballets were accused of being “not really dance.”

As part of its festival of Jerome Robbins’s ballets, the company presented “Watermill,” Mr. Robbins’s allegory of 1972 that traces the course of a man’s life in solemn slow motion to music by Teiji Ito [Japanese-born American composer and performer; 1935-82]. The troupe’s final performances in late June featured “A Mass,” a new work by Peter Martins [Danish former ballet dancer and choreographer; b. 1946; Co-Ballet Master-In-Chief of New York City Ballet with Jerome Robbins, 1983-90, and Ballet Master-in-Chief, 1990-2018; dancer, choreographer, film director, theater director and producer Robbins, 1918-98, was Ballet Master of the New York City Ballet, 1983-90)], the company’s ballet master, and Robert LaFosse [dancer, choreographer, and dance teacher; b. 1959], a principal, that consisted largely of ceremonial marching to a choral score by Michael Torke [composer of music influenced by jazz and minimalism; b. 1961].

Some members of the audience disliked both. Certainly, the pieces have their peculiarities: “Watermill” takes place in such a symbolic realm that its events can seem unduly remote from reality; “A Mass” never invests its Christian symbolism with genuine spiritual significance. Such criticisms point to deficiencies of content. But other observers went even further: They asserted that neither work was really a ballet; the most disgruntled even argued that neither work was dancing in any sense of the word.

These objections raise serious issues that transcend the virtues or faults of any single season’s offerings, issues that have been debated over the years. For instance, in 1957 Paul Taylor [dancer and choreographer; 1930-2018; founder of the Paul Taylor Dance Company in 1954] offered a notorious concert in which his dancers scarcely moved at all, and in the 60’s and 70’s Minimalist choreographers devoted themselves to such simple physical actions as walking and skipping. 

[The Paul Taylor concert Anderson cites was Seven New Dances, performed one time on 20 October 1957 at New York City’s 92nd Street Y.  New York Social Diary (The 92nd Street Y presents Paul Taylor Dance Company: Celebrating the Past, Present & Future of Modern Dance, Hosted by Alan Cumming | New York Social Diary), a website that styles itself as “a social, historical, and cultural chronicle of life in New York City,” characterizes the dance program as

a series of movement and music studies in collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg [painter and graphic artist; 1925-2008; designed costumes for Seven New Dances] and John Cage [American experimental composer; 1912-92] that sought to ask essential questions regarding “What is dance?” and “What is music?” Inspired by gestures, postures, and “pedestrian” or “found movements,” Taylor created a wholly unique performance of modern dance . . . . In one dance, “Epic,” Taylor performed a series of simple gestures for 13 minutes to the sound of telephone time signals. In another, Taylor and a fellow dancer posed on stage – in complete stillness – for four minutes before the curtain came down. . . . “Events II” features two women in 1950s cocktail dresses shifting between poses on stage to the sounds of rain as a gentle breeze billows across the stage, catching their petticoats in the wind. The 1957 performance became famous, not necessarily for its artistic momentum, but for its raw questioning of what modern dance is. While audiences left throughout the evening, it was the review by Louis Horst in Dance Observer that cemented the performance as one of the most famous in dance history: the review was simply four inches of blank space.

[Horst (1884-1964), originally a composer and pianist, helped define the principles of modern dance choreography.  His famous review appeared in Dance Observer, a monthly journal he founded in 1934 (it closed down at his death in 1964), in the November 1957 issue where he wrote out “Paul Taylor and Dance Company” with the date and location of the performance, and left the rest of page 139 blank.

[In the New York Herald Tribune of 27 October 1957 (sec. 4 [“Theater – Movies – Music – Dance . . .”]), reviewer Terry Walter quipped, with reference to the program’s title, that “there were seven items, they were new but they weren’t dances.”]

To deny any work presented by a dance group the right to be called a dance or a ballet necessarily involves asking just what is a dance or a ballet. What, for that matter, is choreography? The only all-inclusive answers to such questions sound like baby talk. Dances are what choreographers create and dancers perform; ballets are created by ballet choreographers.

“Ballet,” “dance” and “choreography” resist easy definition, in part because the arts to which they refer are constantly developing. Possibly in an effort — an unsuccessful one, it turned out — to prevent people from complaining that “A Mass” was not “really ballet,” the program note for it read “staged by,” rather than “choreographed by,” Mr. Martins and Mr. LaFosse.

However, what they provided was certainly choreography, if choreography is thought of as the art of organizing movement in space and time. The results of such organizings are dances. Of course the boundary lines between dance and other related arts have never been fixed, and it is occasionally difficult to distinguish dance from mime or from the imagistic movement-theater associated with such an experimentalist as Robert Wilson [experimental theatrical stage director and playwright; b. 1941; also worked as a choreographer, among other things].

Although ballet may seem superficially easier to define, it, too, is hard to pin down. Ballet certainly involves a training method that has been evolving since the 17th century. But what makes a choreographic composition a ballet and not just a dance? The five classroom positions of the feet? Not all ballet choreographers use them in every work. An erect, turned-out stance? That aspect may also be rejected by some choreographers: for instance, they will almost certainly do so in order to depict grotesque characters. Thus, it’s back to baby talk: ballets are what choreographers devise for ballet-trained dancers.

Does this mean, then, that dances are dances and ballets are ballets simply because people who call themselves choreographers say they are? This critic would assent to such an extreme view. And adopting it does not rob the terms dance and ballet of all meaning. Rather, it involves a recognition that by calling their compositions dances or ballets, choreographers are asking the audience — for whatever possibly quirky personal reasons they may have — to regard those compositions as part of a tradition that includes other works labeled dances or ballets.

However, when some dance lovers grumble that a work is “not really dance,” they are not concerned with abstruse esthetic points. They simply mean that, for them, the work is not sufficiently virtuosic. When “Watermill” received its premiere back in 1972, it was booed by some members of the audience because its star, Edward Villella [ballet dancer and choreographer; b. 1936], was given no opportunity to display his athletic prowess.

Although dancing can — and frequently should — dazzle, dance should never be equated with virtuosity alone. This is easy to do today when dance schools are producing remarkably agile performers. Yet, to make dancing solely a matter of physical dexterity may be to limit the range of its expressive potentialities.

Fine choreographers devise movements not necessarily because of their difficulty, or lack of it, but because those movements are meaningful in a specific theatrical context. What makes a dance satisfying is not the quantity or the difficulty of its steps, but their appropriateness to a given situation.

Choreographers should always feel free to invent any kinds of sequences or phrases they wish, be they simple or complex. And it should never be forgotten that if choreography is an art of organized movement, anything a dancer does on stage is dancing.

[Jack Anderson (1935-2023) was a poet, dance critic, and dance historian.  His reviews of dance performances appeared in the New York Times (1978-2005) and Dance Magazine (1964-70), and his scholarly studies in dance history and his eleven volumes of poetry are highly regarded.]