Critical Reception
[I’ve covered the development, or “devising,” as the Tectonic people would characterize the process, of Here There Are Blueberries, the verbatim play generated by the unveiling by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum of the Höcker Album of photographs of the staff and SS officers of Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp.
[That
process was the subject of Parts 2 and 3 (posted on Rick On Theater on 29 May and 1 June 2024). That followed Part 1 (26 May)
in which I posted the 60 Minutes segment on the play by Anderson Cooper
that recounted the origin of the play and the appearance at USHMM of the Höcker
Album, as well as its curation and interpretation, which became the subject
matter of Blueberries.
[Now, in Parts 4 and 5, I will cover the critical reception of the play on stage in the four productions that culminated in its début in an Off-Broadway mounting in New York City. That run is also the play’s homecoming, as Tectonic Theater Project’s home base is here. I’ve compiled the production history of Here There Are Blueberries thus far in its history.
[I’ll repeat here my frequent admonition to readers who are just joining this thread: it would be a good idea to go back and read Parts 1 through 3 before tackling Parts 4 and 5—not just for the background, some of which is repeated in the reviews posted below and in the final installment (coming on Friday, 7 June), but for the explanations and identifications that I’ve included (but which I won’t repeat consistently).
[Tectonic Theater Project’s Here There Are Blueberries, 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. Tectonic founder and artistic director, who co-wrote and directed the play, presented the first hour of material as part of Miami New Drama’s Works in Progress series.
[On 3 November 2021, Theater J, a prominent Jewish theater that’s part of the Edlavitch Jewish Community Center of Washington, D.C., announced that Here There Are Blueberries had won the Trish Vradenburg Jewish Play Prize. The Vradenburg Prize “recognizes a new play that celebrates, explores, and/or struggles with the complexities and nuances of the Jewish experience.”
[The prize was awarded at a reception on 7 December 2021, at which a reading of an excerpt of the play was presented. “Here There Are Blueberries,” said Theater J artistic director, Adam Immerwahr, “is an astonishing and unforgettable piece of theater.”
[The world première of Here There Are Blueberries, now a 90-minute, one-act play, was co-produced by La Jolla Playhouse with preview performances starting on 26 July 2022 in the Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre at the University of California-San Diego in La Jolla. The première opened on 31 July and ran to 21 August 2022.
[Starting with previews on 7 May 2023 and opening on 12 May, the play was presented by the Shakespeare Theatre Company at its Sidney Harman Hall in the Penn Quarter of downtown Washington, D.C. STC’s production ran until 28 May 2023.
[The New York City début of Blueberries started previews at the New York Theatre Workshop in Manhattan’s East Village on 17 April 2024 and opened on 13 May 2024. It’s currently scheduled to run until 30 June (extended twice from 2 and 16 June).
[On 6 May 2024, the winners and finalists of the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes were announced—the same day as this year’s Yom Hashoah, the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day. Here There Are Blueberries had been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. On the Pulitzer site, the play is described as “An elegant and harrowing work of documentary theater that examines the provenance of a photo album from Auschwitz and probes the unsolvable mystery of how individuals can insist on normalcy while atrocity lurks outside the frame.”
[For the immediate future, at least three productions have been announced. At present, first up will be the McCarter Theatre at Princeton University in New Jersey, with scheduled dates of 24 January-9 February 2025. The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Arts in Beverly Hills, California, follows with a prospective run of 13-30 March 2025. Then California’s Berkeley Repertory Theatre in the San Francisco Bay Area has announced it will mount a production from 5 April to 11 May 2025.]
“A PLAY INSPIRED
BY A PHOTO ALBUM”
by Aaron Krause
[The Album, the title under which the 2018 Miami Beach workshop of Tectonic’s Here There Are Blueberries was presented, was considered a workshop production. For that reason, I surmise, there were no reviews published (that I could find). Aside from Miami New Drama’s own website, the only report of the try-out that was published on the Internet was from miamiartzine, an online publication serving South Florida’s arts community and arts lovers with original feature stories about arts and entertainment, professional reviews, and photo galleries covering Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach Counties.
[Aaron Krause’s MAZ article was posted on the website on the first day of the four-day workshop, 31 May 2018. I presume that it was composed at least in part from MND press releases.]
Miami New Drama Presents Excerpts From New Production
Moises Kaufman’s father survived the Holocaust. [There is a short biographical sketch of Kaufman in the afterword to Part 1 of this series, posted on 26 May.]
So you can imagine what Moises thought when he saw photos of Nazis partying at a resort near an infamous concentration [camp].
“When I saw these pictures, something very personal happened,” said the renown [sic] Jewish theater artist and founder of the bold Tectonic Theater Project.
“When this album came to light . . . the fact that it was a new finding made me want to look at it again.”
Kaufman is referring to The Hoecker Album. [Hoecker is the same as Höcker; sometimes an umlaut (the two dots, or diaresis) is denoted in written German by adding an e to the umlauted vowel after the letter.] It’s a book of photographs showing the Nazi officers “singing, picnicking and flirting with young women,” at a pastoral resort near Aus[c]hwitz. Within that death camp, Nazis killed more than one million people.
The Hoecker Album is the subject of a new play in progress, titled “The Album.” Kaufman wrote it in collaboration with the Tectonic Theater Project in New York City.
The Miami Beach-based theater company Miami New Drama is presenting excerpts from the new play through Sunday at The Colony Theater. MND is the theater’s resident company.
Kaufman said this marks the first time he and Tectonic have examined the Holocaust – the worst genocide in history.
“There has been so much written and said about the Holocaust that it’s hard to think what else we can say about it that is interesting or new or insightful,” he says. “When this album came to light . . . the fact that it was a new finding made me want to look at it again.”
The multiple Tony award nominee, National Medal of the Arts winning playwright and director spent “days” talking to Rebecca Erbelding, a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archivist, and her colleagues. Erbelding led research into the photographs.
“What proceeds is a journey into discovering who owned the album, whose it was, why were these photos taken, who are the people in the photos, when in the Holocaust were they taken and what is the story the photos tell,” Kaufman says. “People talk about the banality of evil. This is evidence of what they were doing in the middle of the Holocaust – having a vacation, relaxing, singing. There’s something about that that begs the question: How can you do that? What does it take to make those photos?”
[Historian, philosopher, and political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-75) introduced the phrase “the banality of evil” in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann (1906-62), one of the major organizers of the Holocaust.
[The book’s subtitle refers to Eichmann's demeanor at his trial for crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes against the Jewish people, and membership in a criminal organization, as Eichmann displayed no guilt for his actions, claiming he was simply following orders and doing his job. He was tried by the State of Israel in 1961, found guilty, and sentenced to death by hanging. He was executed in 1962, and his body was cremated and the ashes scattered in the Mediterranean, outside Israeli territorial waters.
[Arendt’s sense is that Eichmann was not a monster, fanatic, or sociopath, but an ordinary, bland bureaucrat who relied on simplistic explanations for his deeds rather than thinking for himself. He was motivated by career advancement rather than ideology. Banality, in Arendt’s use, doesn’t mean that Eichmann’s actions were in any way ordinary, but that they were motivated by a complacency which was wholly unremarkable.
[A number of articles about and reviews of Here There Are Blueberries made reference to Arendt’s phrase, usually without explanation or source, but surprisingly few. It was, however, one of the first ideas that occurred to me when I started reading about Tectonic’s play.]
“The Album” is “in keeping with Miami New Drama’s commitment to locally resonant, nationally significant drama,” according to press material. The play is, according to the release, “particularly relevant to Miami, whose extensive, multi-national Jewish community has welcomed many Holocaust survivors. The play comes as Antisemitism and white nationalism are on the rise.”
Kaufman is the co-founder of Miami New Drama. Its artistic director is Michel Hausmann, who is also Jewish. The Venezuela native’s three grandparents lived through the Holocaust.
“This play could not be more timely,” Hausmann says.
He praised Kaufman’s collaboration with Tectonic.
“The work that Moises and Tectonic have done in the past two decades has changed the landscape of American theater. Moises has been a friend, mentor and teacher. Much of the original work we (Miami New Drama) are creating for next season is inspired by their process. What an amazing honor it is for a young company like ours to have a partnership with such an established, nationally recognized company.”
Kaufman and Tectonic rose to fame with “The Laramie Project,” a [2000] play “which examined the homophobia-driven torture and murder of Matthew Shepard (a gay University of Wyoming student).” On Oct. 12, 1998, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson pistol whipped Shepard with a gun, tied him to a fence in freezing weather, set him on fire and left him to die. A jury convicted both defendants of first-degree murder and a judge sentenced them to two life sentences. Prosecutors, however, didn’t charge McKinney and Henderson with a hate crime; that wasn’t possible under Wyoming’s criminal law. In 2009, President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard Act into law. It defined certain attacks motivated by victim identity as hate crimes.
[Shepard (1976-98) was actually beaten, tortured, and left to die on the night of 6 October 1998. He was found alive and taken to a hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he died six days later, on 12 October, from the head injuries he received during the attack.]
The Matthew Shepherd murder was turned into a film for HBO.
[Krause may be referring to the 2002 HBO film adaptation of The Laramie Project. There have been other television versions of the tragedy, but they weren’t made by or aired on HBO.]
Eventually, Tectonic turned the case into material for the stage. Kaufman frequently addresses issues such as identity, outsiders and intolerance in his work. It includes multiple Broadway directing credits, such as the Tony Award-winning I Am My Own Wife [2003], about a trans gender woman who survived Nazi and Soviet rule in East Berlin. Its transfer to Broadway established Kaufman’s track record of developing work that gains national attention.
But for now, “The Album” is in the developmental stage. It opened Thursday and runs through Sunday, totaling just four performances.
The collaboration, according to a press release from MND, represents a new stage in Miami New Drama’s development and its dedication to original theater.
[Aaron Krause is a freelance theater critic and feature writer based in South Florida. He reviews theater productions and writes arts- and entertainment-related stories for his own blog theatricalmusings.com, and has written for berkshirefinearts.com, the website of Berkshire Fine Arts, whose mandate is to cover all aspects of the arts in the Massachusetts Berkshire Mountains including the major theater companies and museums; The Parklander magazine in Coral Springs, Florida; theatrecriticism.com, a website for national reviews of theater works, films, and streaming media; and miamiartzine.com.
[Krause
has a bachelor's degree in English within the professional writing track at
Barry University in Miami Shores, Florida, and a master's in journalism from
Indiana University in Bloomington. He
spent 13 years as a staff writer at the Norwalk Reflector, the newspaper of Huron County,
Ohio.]
* *
* *
“LA JOLLA
PLAYHOUSE’S ‘HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES’
by Pam Kragen
[Pam Kragen’s review of the 2022 world première of Here There Are Blueberries in La Jolla was posted on the San Diego Union-Tribune website on 1 August 2022.]
World premiere play is a coproduction with New York’s Tectonic Theater Project
What is the essence of human evil? Surely Adolf Hitler’s “final solution” is on the shortlist.
But what about the German officers, doctors and office workers who ran Hitler’s most efficient death camp, Auschwitz, where more than 1.1 million Jews and others were massacred during World War II? Were they evil, or just regular people swept up in a frenzy of hate and nationalistic propaganda and readily able to emotionally detach themselves from the end results of their work?
Probing the shady areas of human nature is the heart of La Jolla Playhouse’s chilling world-premiere drama “Here There Are Blueberries,” which opened Sunday in a co-production with New York’s Tectonic Theater Project.
The 90-minute play — co-written by Tectonic founder Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, and directed by Kaufman — dissects in a clean, clinical way the seemingly blissful private lives of the Auschwitz staff in their idle hours.
Designed in prisonlike grays by scenic designer Derek McLane, the production is eye-poppingly illustrated with projections of more than 100 images from a photo album anonymously donated to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007. The album was created, and later discarded in 1945, by Auschwitz adjutant Karl Höcker, who’s a smiling presence in virtually every photo.
Like “The Laramie Project,” Kaufman’s 2000 play about the murder of gay Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard, “Here There Are Blueberries” is a documentary-style story told from the perspective of dozens of real people in and around the crime.
The excellent and understated ensemble cast, who all play multiple roles, includes Elizabeth Stahlmann, Charlie Thurston Grant James Varjas, Rosina Reynolds, Scott Barrow, Charles Browning, Jeanne Sakata and Frances Uku.
“Blueberries” is set in the archives room at the Holocaust museum, where researcher Rebecca Erbelding talks about receiving the album from a dying U.S. counterintelligence officer, and how she and her colleagues uncovered Höcker’s identity and those of the other officers and doctors in the photos.
The blithe behavior of the officers and young women staffers in the photo is often unsettling, especially when the eight-member ensemble cast add an eerie soundtrack of laughter, accordion music or clattering spoons, as when the women eat fresh blueberries from china bowls.
But the play’s most engrossing part is when it leaves the museum and explores how the exposure of these images in the global press impacts the devastated descendants of these Nazi officers and doctors. Thurston gives a moving performance as Rainer, the grandson of Auschwitz camp-builder Rudolf Höss. Rainer abandoned an adolescence marked by hate and violence toward others to disprove the Nazi belief that evil is an inherited trait.
Like “The Laramie Project,” “Blueberries” probes the thorny question of what drives seemingly ordinary people to commit murder, a timely subject in America where racism and mass shootings are on the rise.
As one character says ominously near the end of “Blueberries”: “Killing is the result of a long process. No genocide starts with the killing. It starts with the words.”
[Pam Kragen is a feature writer and critic who specializes in writing dining, theater, opera, and human interest stories. She joined the San Diego Union-Tribune staff in October 2012 after 27 years at the North County Times, former newspaper in the North County region of San Diego County (merged with U-T in 2012), where she served as the Arts & Features Editor, as well as the paper’s longtime arts writer and theater and opera reviewer.
[Kragen is the president and co-founder of the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle. She holds a bachelor of arts degree in journalism from San Diego State University and completed fellowships in theater criticism at the University of Southern California and opera-classical music criticism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York City. In 2022, she was chosen as one of the fellows in the National Critics Institute, run by the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut.]
* *
* *
“DISCARDED PHOTOS
OF NAZIS RELAXING
by Peter Marks
[The Washington Post review of the 2023 staging of Here There Are Blueberries, written by Peter Marks, WaPo’s chief theater reviewer at the time, came out on the paper’s website on 18 May 2023.]
‘Here There Are Blueberries,’ a documentary drama about a real photo album sent to the Holocaust museum, gives wrenching context to genocide
A play starring . . . research! Well, that sounds a little dry. Rest assured, though: “Here There Are Blueberries,” the story of a real photo album depicting Nazis at leisure in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and killing center, is anything but.
It is, rather, a gripping exposé of the depraved human inclination to convince oneself that nothing is amiss when everything is in fact horrifically, monstrously wrong. Made compellingly theatrical by the virtuosic visual instincts of director Moisés Kaufman, this documentary drama reveals how ephemeral events — the purchase of a camera, the discovery of a discarded keepsake, the mailing of a letter — can align to enlighten the world.
What unfolds in Harman Hall — where Shakespeare Theatre Company is presenting the play by Kaufman’s Tectonic Theater Project — is a meticulous illumination of the work of historians at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
Seventeen years ago, a retired American counterintelligence officer in Virginia offered the museum an extraordinary photo album he had found in a trash bin in Germany at the end of World War II. The 116 pictures were of Nazi officers, soldiers and office workers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, lounging and laughing in the bucolic countryside on their days off. These included the photo that gave the play its title: It is the caption on one of the photographs, showing a group of camp staff members happily gorging on the fruit.
The find was remarkable, the play’s real-life characters explain, because little photographic evidence has survived of the SS men who ran the camp and the young women who staffed the office in which communiqués were sent and received. But the donation also posed a moral dilemma for a museum founded as a repository of information about the victims of unspeakable Nazi atrocities: Should there be a place in the collection for depictions of mass murderers that portrayed them as ordinary humans?
It’s a play, in other words, that Ken Burns fans can love. The ethical thrust of “Here There Are Blueberries” is spelled out in a lucid, straightforward style by Kaufman and co-author Amanda Gronich. The highly polished cast of eight portrays multiple roles, as the story shifts back and forth from the museum to modern-day Germany, where descendants of some of the officers confront the irrefutable facts of their relatives’ crimes.
One such relative, played with compelling gravity by Maboud Ebrahimzadeh, comes forward to identify his grandfather, a camp doctor, in the photographs. Amid the obfuscation and denial of a nation that inflicted so much suffering, his response goes some way to helping us understand the museum’s investment in authenticating the photos. In all its humdrum documentation of daily activity, this album on the flip side of horror somehow makes what was happening just out of camera range seem all the more hideous.
The story is recounted in such reverent tones that sometimes you might wish for a little more about how the stressful work affected the researchers, chiefly Elizabeth Stahlmann’s Rebecca Erbelding, the historian who recognized the value of the album (and still works at the museum). She and her boss, Judy Cohen (played by Kathleen Chalfant), form an alliance of advocacy for the album, which they discover belonged to one Obersturmführer Karl Höcker, an aide to the camp’s last commandant, Richard Baer.
Stahlmann and Chalfant are eloquent embodiments of curatorial objectivity: Perhaps, as the play’s Erbelding explains, subjugating one’s emotions is the only way to carry on such work effectively. That work is also what Kaufman and Gronich animate so vibrantly. Set designer Derek McLane, working with projections designer David Bengali and lighting designer David Lander, has devised a cool, serene mise-en-scène that captures the professional neutrality of the research team. Bengali and McLane find innovative ways to embed the photos in the narrative and, with sound designer Bobby McElver, manage to create a multisensory experience around them.
The first object we glimpse, though, is in three dimensions: a Leica camera, the then-newly invented, portable mechanism that popularized the recreational photography recounted in “Here There Are Blueberries.”
This gives way to a stunning tableau of the researchers, each frozen at an examining table, each station lit from within. It’s a moving, imagistic prologue, a stage picture that stays with you. You’re a witness to history not being made but reclaimed.
I confess I’m the ideal audience for “Here There Are Blueberries,” as a Jewish man who has spent his life obsessed with and endlessly grief-stricken over the play’s concerns. That’s one reason, but not the only reason, that I spent the 90 minutes in Harman Hall with my heart in my mouth.
[Peter
Marks was the Washington
Post's chief theater critic from 2002 to 2023. He left the Post in 2024. Previously, he worked for nine years at the New
York Times, on the culture, metropolitan and national desks, and spent about
four years as its off-Broadway drama critic.]
No comments:
Post a Comment