[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
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.]
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