'Here There Are Blueberries,' Part 5

 

Critical Reception (continued) 

[This is the final installment of my series on the Tectonic Theater Project’s latest verbatim play, Here There Are Blueberries, which is now playing at the New York Theatre Workshop.  Part 5 below is the second post covering the critical reception of the play, namely the New York City début.

[Part 1, which was the republication of the transcript of the 60 Minutes story of the inception of the play was posted on 26 May.  Parts 2 and 3 (29 May and 1 June) covered the play’s development over 17 years, and Part 4 was the first selection of reviews of productions (in Miami Beach; La Jolla, California; and Washington, D.C.). 

[As always, my recommendation is that readers who haven’t already read the first four parts of “Here There Are Blueberries” go back and pick them up before reading this last section.  Most of the people, things, and events mentioned in passing below are more fully identified and explained in the previous parts of the series.

[For the introduction to Part 4, I compiled the production history of the play.  I’m repeating it here for quick reference to the sequence through which Blueberries went to get to New York City.

[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.]

“THE CHILLING TRUTH PICTURED
IN ‘HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES’”
by Vinson Cunningham 

[In Part 4, I posted one review for each of the first three presentations of Blueberries (though the coverage of the Miami Beach performance wasn’t actually a review because there were none on the ’Net).  For the New York première, I had a wider choice, so I decided to select two, one of which was written by a reviewer with reservations about the play’s treatment of its subject.

[I’ll say more about that when I introduce the second review in Part 5.  Below is the New Yorker’s notice by Vinson Cunningham, posted the magazine’s website on 18 May 2024.  The review-writer raised some interesting points in his assessment of the productions (starting with his opening remarks), which, aside from his positive evaluation of the production, makes the notice well worth reading.]

Moisés Kaufman’s play dramatizes the discovery of a photo album of Nazis at leisure at Auschwitz, and the reckoning it provoked.

There’s something awful about a lost picture. Maybe it’s because of a disparity between your original hope and the result: you made the photograph because you intended to keep it, and now that intention—artistic, memorial, historical—is fugitive, on the run toward ends other than your own. The picture, gone forever, possibly revived by strange eyes, will never again mean quite what you thought it would.

“Here There Are Blueberries”—a new play at New York Theatre Workshop, conceived and directed by Moisés Kaufman and written by Kaufman and Amanda Gronich—begins with the discovery of a well-curated album of photographs. It’s not just one misplaced dispatch from a former world but whole pasted-together pages of them, carefully arranged in order to tell a story. The album was found in the nineteen-forties, after the Second World War, by a man who describes himself, more than sixty years later, as an “87 year old retired U.S. Lieutenant Colonel.” It’s the early two-thousands, and he’s sent a letter to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The photographs are from Auschwitz.

“Blueberries” moves forward artfully, telling the true tale of the pictures and their march through public consciousness. The photographs show Nazis at ease at the site of the world’s most famous death machine. The Nazis lounge at a chalet, flirt with the secretarial pool, offer cheese smiles to the camera. None of the camp’s Jewish prisoners are pictured in the photographs, only their murderers, in the moments between murders. The album is a placid, subtly horrifying log of the mundane aspects of those people’s daily lives.

Rebecca Erbelding (Elizabeth Stahlmann), an archivist on whose desk the lieutenant colonel’s letter lands, recognizes the faces of notorious Nazis. There’s Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death, and Rudolf Höss, the administrative architect of Auschwitz, “responsible for everything we think of as the camp: the barracks, the electrified fences, the guard towers, the extermination infrastructure . . . the whole organization.” After some detective work, Rebecca discovers that the album was apparently created by an upwardly mobile functionary named Karl Höcker. He probably put it together in a triumphal mood, thinking that it would be behind-the-scenes evidence of a heroic victory. Later, in the war’s aftermath, having lost the thing, maybe he thought of it compulsively, hoping it stayed lost, wishing he could have set it ablaze. The pictures—thirty-two pages of them, a hundred and sixteen images in all—had escaped his intentions not once but twice (so far).

Kaufman’s staging of the play is noble but simple. Characters approach the lip of the stage and state their thinking plainly. Besides Rebecca, there’s the director of the museum’s photography collection, Judy Cohen (Kathleen Chalfant, a brilliant performer whose mere presence gives the proceedings a fitting gravity), and the museum’s director, Sara Bloomfield (Erika Rose). The lighting, designed by David Lander, is bright and clean, just how we imagine the back rooms of a great museum might look (the apt scenic design is by Derek McLane), except when it dims a bit, the better to illuminate a picture from the album. Sometimes the flexible ensemble (which also includes Scott Barrow, Nemuna Ceesay, Noah Keyishian, Jonathan Raviv, Anna Shafer, Charlie Thurston, and Grant James Varjas) acts out a scene from a photograph—playing an accordion, laughing like schoolchildren on an exhilarating trip.

This is an institutional saga, the story of how a memorial museum—meant to honor and dramatize the lives of victims, not the idle pleasures of their captors—learned to metabolize Höcker’s difficult artifact. The play is based on real interviews conducted by Kaufman and Gronich, a documentary technique that Kaufman also employed for “The Laramie Project,” his renowned play about the death of Matthew Shepard. That method matches the art form that is this play’s spur: photography. Just like an interview, a photograph is a quivering, ambivalent, sometimes deceptive form of evidence, especially when the photographer is an amateur. You can suss out mood and tone, discern planetary facts like weather and time of day. But the spaces between exposures, before and after the questioning begins—who knows?

Even as “Blueberries” went about its business—it has the often dutiful tone of a high-quality PBS docuseries—I kept thinking about the lieutenant colonel who held on to the album for so many years, whose story the play must reasonably sweep past on the way to its forensics. In his initial letter to the museum, he says that he was sent to Germany to “do some work for the government.” What that work was he doesn’t specify. “While there,” he says, “I was housed in an abandoned apartment where I found a photo album. I salvaged the album and have kept it in my archives now for over sixty years.”

Sixty years! One wonders who, if anybody, he told of the record of horror living with him like a roommate in his home. How often did he look at it? How perfectly, over that span, had he memorized its faces, whether or not he was able—without a museum’s resources—to assign them any names? Why keep it for so long? What had he been thinking, at the outset and then for those many decades? That unknowable mystery, about the allure of evil and the power of photography, is sometimes captured by this play and sometimes not—a casualty, perhaps, of its fealty to pure fact.

One central concern of the play—what it means to look at the mundane when, somewhere just beyond the frame, there’s a massacre afoot—makes it a kind of companion piece to “The Zone of Interest,” the recent Oscar-winning film by Jonathan Glazer, very loosely adapted from the novel by Martin Amis. The movie tracks the home life of Rudolf Höss, the administrator who, with his distinct high-and-tight haircut, slick and floppy up top, recurs throughout the Höcker album. “The Zone of Interest” uses sound design—the crackle of flame, cries coming from invisible mouths—to create an underhum of terror, to make an unseen context the whole point of the domesticity that shows up onscreen. “Blueberries” makes that irony a clear pain point. The museum’s staff worry about showing the photographs, but eventually, and rightly, decide that there’s no way not to. To understand sickness like this, you need to see how the perpetrators are—in more ways than you might like—just like you.

Blood underpaints today’s world, too, no matter how many lovelier colors fill our normal days. You go about your business; attend meetings on Zoom or at some office; ride the subway and watch the faces, with their plural origins, blur past; take walks through the warming spring air, admiring the onrushing green. Now and again, you look down at your phone, and here come the images: a bloody limb, a shell-shocked parent, a dead child caked in rubble and dust. Photographic evidence, the irrefutable cinematography of the smartphone amid emergency, death in vivid hue: this is how we know that things are wrong.

There is no leisure in these newer images, no blueberries and cream eaten by smiling accessories to a heinous passage in history—just the news, seemingly simultaneous with its happening. I sometimes wonder if these images and videos, for now fleeting on screens, illustrations on a scrollable feed, will one day adorn the walls of museums, or whichever repositories the people of the future choose for the display of their collective glories and great shames.

Auschwitz and the other camps whose names haunt our textbooks were mysteries to outsiders—this was part of their power. It took so many efforts of reconstruction like the one dramatized by “Here There Are Blueberries” just to know, belatedly, what exactly went on. Photography will also be part of the story of today’s traumas, but in a very different way. We won’t be able to say we didn’t see.

[Vinson Cunningham is a theater reviewer for the New Yorker.  His début novel, Great Expectations, came out in March 2024.]

*  *  *  *
“HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES 
KEEPS THIS MOMENT AT ARM’S LENGTH”
by Sara Holdren 

[Sara Holdren’s review of Blueberries was published on Vulture, the online platform for New York magazine, on 14 May 2024.  Holdren was one of few reviewers who had some negative criticism of the play, both in New York City and beyond, though she, like her like-minded journalists, had almost universal praise for the production itself.

[There weren’t many who articulated reservations about Kaufman and Gronich’s handling of the revelations and truths in the Auschwitz photos.  The few that did were remarkably similar to one another—as, in fact, were the assessments of the writers who had nothing but praise for both the play and the production.]

As powerful as this Pulitzer-finalist play about Auschwitz is, it studiously avoids the conversation people are having right now.

Moisés Kaufman first saw the photographs that prompted the creation of Here There Are Blueberries in 2007. He first contacted Rebecca Erbelding, the archivist and historian who brought the photos to light, in 2010. The play — a documentary-style piece grappling with the images, which give a Nazi’s-eye view of Auschwitz — was written by Kaufman and Amanda Gronich and developed by Kaufman’s Tectonic Theater Project over more than a decade, building on research, interviews, and the company’s signature devising process of “moment work.” [Both “devising” and “Moment Work” are defined in the introductions to Parts 2 and 3.] After premiering at La Jolla in 2022, it went to D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company, just a short walk across the National Mall from the Holocaust Memorial Museum, where Erbelding works and where the photos live in the archives; more recently, during its previews at New York Theatre Workshop, the play became a Pulitzer finalist. There’s nothing hasty about Here There Are Blueberries — it has been built, piece by deliberately laid piece, over years, and its run at NYTW comes augmented with a whole series of talk-backs and scrupulously planned postshow discussions.

And yet, at least in my experience of the show, there’s the hovering sensation of something not being addressed. Here we are, at the theater where the playwright Victor I. Cazares launched a personal strike declaring that they would stop taking their HIV meds until their onetime “artistic home” called for a ceasefire in Gaza (NYTW never did; artistic director Patricia McGregor responded with this letter). And here we are at the end of a theatrical season that has felt particularly crowded — even by the standards of the form, which is always pretty present in New York — with Holocaust plays. A show both can and cannot help the moment it lands in. Development processes take months, or, as with Blueberries, years. But even the most slapdash productions don’t go up in the same world in which they were conceived. Every play, and every team of artists, owes something to itself: Are we telling the story we set out to tell? And, to some degree, to the context in which it finds itself: What does this story, whatever our original intentions, mean now? By avoiding any clear allusion to Gaza, not even a nod in its copious program materials, Here There Are Blueberries provokes a nagging feeling of double vision. Through one eye, you’re watching an earnest, solidly crafted show in which a group of fine actors dissects a fascinating and appalling historical artifact. Through the other, you’re watching a production, a theater, and a theater world that, on the whole, still somehow can’t bring itself to make its parallels explicit — to say out loud, That was an atrocity and so is this. A genocide happened then, and one is happening now. Cease fire.

Angering theatergoers has to be okay, has to be something we stop fearing. Comparison is beyond fraught when it comes to the Holocaust, but the truth is that comparison — which, counter to some arguments, is not necessarily diminishment — is already implicit in every piece of historical theater. We are presented with lenses through which to witness our own moment. Events, no matter how monumental or horrific, become points of reflection, whether or not we are willing to reflect.

What’s striking is that Here There Are Blueberries knows as much. Its protagonist — the rich-voiced Elizabeth Stahlmann’s thoughtful evocation of Erbelding — repeatedly pauses to ask herself, “What would I have done?” or “Who are we in the story?” Erbelding is guiding us through the Höcker Album, a collection of photographs that a retired U.S. lieutenant colonel brought to her attention in late 2006. Taken by Karl Höcker, adjutant to the Nazi commandant Richard Baer, the photos depict day-to-day life at Auschwitz as experienced by the camp’s officers and communications staff (women known as Helferinnen, who worked the switchboards). There are casual lunches and staff outings, people relaxing in lawn chairs, playing the accordion, laughing in the rain, eating blueberries. There isn’t a single prisoner in the 116 images. Like Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, the Höcker Album horrifies through its sunlit mundanity, its blithe — and, in this case, indisputably factual — representation of mass murderers and their accomplices not as monsters but as smiling, pie-faced family men and rosy-cheeked young women. “​​A bank clerk, a sweet-maker, an accountant,” says the curator Paul Salmons (Scott Barrow), listing the prewar professions of Höcker (also embodied by Barrow); his boss, Baer; and Josef Kramer, who ran the extermination center at Birkenau. In the face of such a document, the credo “Never again” becomes not simply a call to resist authoritarianism, or even to be awake to the continued scourge of antisemitism, but a warning to ourselves about ourselves: See how easy it is to live as if you and those closest to you are the only actual human beings in the world?

Zadie Smith wrote recently, and with much ensuing ire, about “that fantastical, linguistical, conceptual, unreal place” where public intellectuals, and surely plenty of private citizens, feel pressured to plant a “rhetorical flag” regarding Palestine and Israel. In my own way, so did I. I sympathize with Smith’s addiction to humanism — in the brutal, reductive currents of the world, I too find myself clinging to complexity and nuance as a life raft. But why should that raft become a shield or a mask? Why should a belief that people are people, that history is a thousand-thread knot, and that words are highly imperfect tools stop us from saying and doing all we can in the service of what’s right? As it stands, “all we can” too often feels like next to nothing, yet still we hesitate. Is an individual play, artist, or institution responsible for making clear public statements beyond the broader template of values expressed in their work? I don’t know the answer, or whether it’s an answer that is always the same, one moment to the next — I suspect not. I suspect that, sometimes, invisible thresholds are crossed, and beyond these shifting lines, not speaking becomes in itself a kind of speech.

This is why Here There Are Blueberries is one play in an artistic vacuum and another in, well, the world. Part of the problem is that, in plays that take us where Kaufman and Gronich’s does, we’re dealing with content that both is and is not metaphor. One viewer will see the Höcker photos — and those from the Auschwitz Album, which stand in sickening contrast to Höcker’s — and will hear Holocaust historian Stefan Hördler (Nemuna Ceesay) talk about how “for the Nazis, the whole process of killing people [was] about dividing responsibilities”; or she will listen to Stahlmann, speaking in the person of Holocaust survivor Lili Jacob about being torn from her family, all of whom were murdered, and she — this viewer — will think, We are doing it again. Destroying families, killing children, and spreading the complicity as thin as we can to decrease the sting. Another viewer will see and hear all the same images and words and will think, This event stands alone and always will, and this is exactly why Israel needs to exist and to defend itself. 

The show makes space for both these audience members and those in between, and perhaps this is precisely what it wants to do; some may even argue that such multi-partisan inclusivity is one of theater’s key jobs. But I am hesitant about the number of productions I have seen this year alone that, in their retreading of our shared history, seem to be offering their audiences not so much an opportunity for hard reflection and possible change of mind as for confirmation of the mind-set they walked in with. When, in his much-misunderstood Oscars speech, Jonathan Glazer addressed the “dehumanization” of both “the victims of October 7 in Israel” and of “the ongoing attack in Gaza,” he expressed the pain of having “Jewishness and the Holocaust [be] hijacked by an occupation.” What’s happening now is that with each new production that returns us to these subjects and these places without some kind of defiance of Zadie Smith-ian remove, this hijacking is being allowed to continue. Though Kaufman and Gronich still have their responsibility to their own process and story in its more contained, theatrical sense, there must exist more possibilities than persisting in keeping that story’s current resonances so pointedly limited. It’s not about radical rewrites — a statement in the program, a gesture from the stage, a coda of some kind, one postshow discussion that mentions Gaza? Surely, this is a different play than the one that opened at La Jolla in 2022; surely, the behind-the-scenes conversations have been frequent, long, and difficult. Why not bring more of that difference and difficulty to the stage?

It’s a shame not just in this broader sense but in a more finely focused one that Here There Are Blueberries is haunted by an aura of contextual diffidence because so much that’s compelling is happening in the production. Derek McLane’s set design riffs on the layout and equipment of an archival-research lab, and its fluid interaction with David Bengali’s projections creates an eerily elegant backdrop for the Höcker Album’s procession of calm, awful images. Stahlmann, Ceesay, Barrow, and the rest of the ensemble (including the wonderful Kathleen Chalfant as Erbelding’s supervisor, Judy Cohen) never overgild or sentimentalize their many parts, and in a few striking moments, they bring the photos to life with jolts of terrible energy. “Rain from a clear sky,” reads the translation of one picture’s caption: We see a series of photos of the Helferinnen posing with Höcker, their grinning boss; thunder claps, and then the candids show the group scattering in a surprise summer downpour. Beneath the looming projected images, the women in the cast stand in a line, giggling and shrieking with delight.

“Feigling,” says Heinz Baumkötter (one of the Nazi officers in the photos, played with square-shouldered inscrutability by Ceesay). “Maybe I was . . . Feigling. A coward. Maybe I was a coward at times, and for this reason, I didn’t do what I should’ve done.” It’s something Baumkötter’s grandson, Tilman Taube (played by Jonathan Raviv), remembers him saying, and of all the words spoken in Here There Are Blueberries by figures portrayed in the Höcker Album, these feel the most honest, the least self-protective — the easiest, and most frighteningly so, to locate within one’s own soul. They raise the same question that lurks in the silent gap where this and so many projects and institutions, whether consciously or not, draw the line of their current political engagement: What are we so afraid of?

Here There Are Blueberries is at New York Theatre Workshop through June 16 [extended to 30 June].

[Sara Holdren is a director (As You Like It, Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival; Three Sisters, Two River Theater), teacher (NYU Graduate Acting Program, SUNY Purchase, Atlantic Acting School), and theater writer.  She’s originally from the Blue Ridge foothills outside of Charlottesville, Virginia.  

[Holdren’s the theater critic for New York magazine and Vulture.com and she’s a Drama League Fellow as well as the recipient of the 2016-2017 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.  She has a BA in Theater from Yale University and an MFA in Directing from Yale School of Drama and is a graduate of the Acting Shakespeare Program at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.]