'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.]

'Here There Are Blueberries,' Part 4

 

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’
A CHILLING EXAMINATION OF THE ROOTS OF HUMAN CRUELTY”
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
AT AUSCHWITZ LED TO THIS RIVETING PLAY”
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.] 

*  *  *  *

[“Here There Are Blueberries, Part 5,” which contains two reviews of the New York Theatre Workshop’s production of the play, will be posted on Friday, 7 June.  I hope readers will return to ROT to read what two local critics said about this unique theatrical work.  To whet ROTters’ appetites for this conclusion to the short series, I’ll say only that one notice is by Vinson Cunningham from the New Yorker and the other is from Vulture/New York by Sara Holdren.]

'Here There Are Blueberries,' Part 3

 

Development (continued) 

[In the first installment of the section of this series (Part 2, published on Wednesday, 29 May) on Tectonic Theater Project’s verbatim theater production of Here There Are Blueberries, I posted three articles discussing the method writers Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich used to create the text—including the performance text—of the play.  One of those articles, from the San Diego Union-Tribune, includes an excerpt from an interview with the two writers.

[I wanted to continue that line of examining this intriguing production, so I’m posting a second “Development” section, Part 3 of the series, that’s exclusively a presentation of published interviews.  I’m starting with one that’s solely with Tectonic artistic director Kaufman, who touches on other scripts he’s written since forming the company in 1991, and continuing through two joint interviews with his writing partner Amanda Gronich, and concluding with a different perspective in an interview of one of the cast members, Elizabeth Stahlmann, and the real-life archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum she portrays, Dr. Rebecca Erbelding.

[As I suggested in Part 2, I recommend reading the preceding two parts before engaging in Part 3.  (Part 1 was posted on Sunday, 26 May.)  The principal reason for that is that I’ve added explanations and identifications in Part 1 (mostly) and Part 2 that will help readers follow the interviews below.]

“MOISÉS KAUFMAN PLAYS WITH FORM”
by Nathaniel G. Nesmith

[This American Theatre interview with Kaufman, which was posted on the AT website on 12 May 2023, at the time of the run of Blueberries at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., is an examination of the writer-director’s play-devising methodology.  In addition to Here There Are Blueberries, interviewer Nathaniel G. Nesmith asks Kaufman about several of his earlier plays; he also covers some other issues of Kaufman’s theatrical career.] 

Both with his Tectonic collaborators and on his own, the playwright-director has always explored the architecture of theatre and its potential social impact.

The multitalented playwright-director Moisés Kaufman is the artistic director and founder of New York City’s Tectonic Theater Project; he is also a co-founder of Miami New Drama at the Colony Theatre in Miami Beach. Beyond earning nominations for Drama Desk, Tony, and Emmy awards, he is a winner of an Obie and a Lucille Lortel Award.

Born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, Kaufman earned an undergraduate business degree from Universidad Metropolitana in Venezuela, where he acted and studied theatre, before moving to the U.S. in 1987 and studying theatre at New York University. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, and in 2016, President Barack Obama awarded him the National Medal of Arts.  [There’s a brief biography of Kaufman in my afterword to Part 1.]

The Laramie Project (2000), which he created with the Tectonic Theater, brought him and the company international acclaim. Other major credits include two of his own plays (1997’s Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, a hit Off-Broadway, and 2007’s 33 Variations on Broadway), as well as stints as director of Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo in 2011 [see my performance report on ROT on 11 June 2011], Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song, and Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife. He has worked with many legendary actors, from Robin Williams to Jane Fonda. The last play he directed on Broadway was the musical Paradise Square (2022).

Mr. Kaufman is always exceptionally busy, but he took time out of a busy schedule to have a Zoom conversation with me last year about his career as a theatre artist and an art activist. His newest work with Tectonic, Here There Are Blueberries, had just been staged at La Jolla Playhouse [31 July-21 August 2022]; it is currently running at Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre [12-28 May 2023], and will be part of New York Theatre Workshop’s 2023-24 season [13 May-30 June 2024].

---

NATHANIEL G. NESMITH: You were born and raised in an Orthodox Jewish family in Caracas. Can you tell me a bit about your upbringing, your family, and what your parents did in Venezuela?  

MOISÉS KAUFMAN: My father was a Holocaust survivor. He was born in Romania, and during the war he hid in the basement of a building, and when the war was over, he fled to Venezuela with his brother and his mother. At that time, it was very hard to get a visa for the United States, but it was easier to get a visa for Venezuela. He also had relatives down there, so they went to Venezuela. It’s the immigrant story: They arrived in Venezuela without any money, and my father was at that time, I think 20, and he started working in the back of a deli. He slowly went to university, became an accountant, and learned the trade. Then he opened his own supermarket, and then he owned a few other supermarkets. He was very much a self-made man. 

My mother: Her parents were Ukrainian and had arrived in Venezuela in the 1930s. It was a generation before my father’s, also escaping the war. My mother was born in Venezuela, and she met and married my father. The experience was interesting, because I was born in the very Orthodox Jewish community in a very Catholic and very machista country [machista is Spanish for ‘male chauvinist’], and by the time I was 11 I realized that I was gay. Every single cultural artifact around me told me that what I was was diseased, sick, and perverted. From very early on I realized that I was the other, because I was a Jew in a Catholic country. But then, even within the Jewish community, I was the other, because I was gay in a mostly straight environment. 

When you were a student at New York University, Arthur Bartow [1936-2021; professional actor, producer, and director; was the Chair and Artistic Director of the Drama Department at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts] was then the dean at NYU’S Tisch School of the Arts. He is the one who advised you to start your own theatre company, which in turn led the birth of the Tectonic Theater Project. As an emerging theatre artist, what other important advice did you get from theatre artists that you respected?

Before I arrived in New York, I went to college in Venezuela and was a member of a theatre company there. After I left NYU, Arthur said, “Go, make your own work.” I think one mistake young artists make is that they try to fight to get opportunities that other people are going to give them. The best advice I got was, “If you don’t find those opportunities, make your own opportunities.” There are basements all over the city. If there’s a basement, there’s a play. You can get a couple of actors together and start doing the work. That’s the most important advice: Do the work. Yes, it’s important to network. Yes, it’s important to find an agent. Yes, it’s important to find other people who will hire you. But it’s also important for you not to wait for that and to do your own work.

After you completed your education at NYU, you and Jeff LaHoste founded Tectonic Theater Project in 1991. Where did the funding come from? 

At the beginning we did what a lot of theatre companies do: We would do bake sales, and we would ask for donations. The first play Tectonic Theater Project ever did, we did it in a synagogue. We made a deal with the owner of the synagogue that we would clean the synagogue for three weeks if they gave us three weeks of performance. And they did. We worked for three weeks cleaning the space so that we could perform there. The experiences of those first five years of the company were exuberant and exhilarating, but also terrifying and very depressing. Many times there would be fewer people in the audience than there were people onstage. We once did a play with two actors, and there was only one person in the audience.

It was hard. We dealt with a lot of the same things that many new companies deal with, which is, people don’t know about you, especially in New York. In New York, there are 200 shows every night. It took us a long time to find our audience; it was a slow process. What happened was we did Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde—that was when we broke through. People saw the work, and they loved the work. Things changed from there.

Let’s stay with 1991. On Nov. 22, 1991, a day after your 28th birthday, Mel Gussow did not give you a birthday present with his NY Times review of Women in Beckett [1991; Off-Off-Broadway; review: “Listening to The Women Of Beckett,” sec. C (“The Arts”)], which you directed at Theatre for the New City. What did such a review mean to you at that time?

That production of Women in Beckett was the first production of Tectonic Theater Project. Look, it was devastating. The first legit review of the company, and he didn’t like our production. Yes, I did take a lot of liberties with [Samuel] Beckett [Irish; 1906-89]. One of the things that was important for me was the reason I created the Tectonic Theater Project: because I was bored with a lot of the theatre I was seeing around me. It was all realism and naturalism. You went to the theatre, and you felt like you were in the studio for a sitcom. I thought sitcoms are better done for television and film. What are the theatrical languages we can explore in the theatre? What is it that we can do in the theatre that those other mediums cannot do? During the first five years of the company, we did our own work, but we also staged playwrights who were dealing with those same questions. So we did Beckett and we did Brecht and we did Sophie Treadwell [1885-1970], an American Expressionist playwright. We did young American playwrights who were screwing with form. When we did Beckett, we were having a conversation about form with Beckett, and Mr. Gussow didn’t care for the liberties that we took. In a way it was devastating—and in a way it was kind of liberating. We weren’t surprised, because the work we were doing was daring and pushing the boundaries of what was possible on the stage.

Years later, of course, Ben Brantley at the Times gave you a major thumbs up for Gross Indecency, your first produced play as a playwright and director. The play also won the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Play. Were you prepared for the type of success the play garnered?

No one’s ever prepared for that kind of success. For me, what was exciting was that for the first five years of the company, we were doing other people’s plays. And then I said, If we’re really being daring about theatrical form, it’s not enough to do other people’s plays; we have to write our own plays. So I decided to write this play, the first play I ever wrote, and it became a huge hit. It ran for two years in New York, and then it became one of the most performed plays in America that season. That was very encouraging. As a theatre company, we weren’t prepared. The way that we took reservations was that we had an answering machine in my apartment, and then the answering machine blew up the next day because that review was such a rave that everybody wanted tickets.

The Laramie Project, which you also directed, explored Matthew Shepard’s brutal torture and murder in 1998. His death became a very important cultural and theatrical benchmark, and the play has been extraordinarily successful. Not only did it have many professional productions, but it had many productions in colleges, high schools, and community theatres. If you had to travel this journey again to bring about The Laramie Project, what would you do differently?

Nothing. As you said, The Laramie Project is still one of the most performed plays in America, and so I think, regardless of what one thinks of it as a play, it did exactly what it needed to do.

What is it about The Laramie Project that make[s] it still so relevant, do you think?

I think there are two things: One is the subject matter of the play. Unfortunately, we’re still in the middle of that conversation about gender identity and sexual orientation and rights, and what is the social contract that we live under as Americans. But I think the other thing that was interesting was the form of the play, because it’s not only a play that uses the language of the people of Laramie; it is a play that speaks of a theatre company going to Laramie to create a play. You know how I said before that for me, I created the Tectonic Theater Project to explore theatrical language and theatrical forms; I was bored with the kind of theatre I was seeing. I was really interested in creating a laboratory where I could ask: What is theatrical? How does the theatre speak? And if you look at our plays, whether it was Gross Indecency or The Laramie Project or 33 Variations or, more recently, Here There Are Blueberries, each play is exploring a different form. Gross Indecency was using trial transcripts to explore history. The Laramie Project was done by conducting interviews, having the theatre company go to Laramie, travel to Laramie, spend a year conducting interviews with the people of the town. 33 Variations was written using Beethoven’s musical sketches. Here There Are Blueberries was created using photographs of the Third Reich. So there’s a real desire to write plays that really question what is theatrical.

You made your directing debut on Broadway with Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife [2003], a play that dealt with a gay transvestite’s survival in Nazi Germany and Soviet East Berlin. What was unique about that experience?

Doing that kind of work on Broadway was a very important milestone in my career, because I Am My Own Wife is very much in the world of Gross Indecency and The Laramie Project. It uses found text as a source and then constructs a narrative around it. So to have that kind of work done on Broadway was a gigantic moment, a step forward, because I felt like, “Oh, we are now mainstream if this kind of work can happen on Broadway.”

In 2009, you directed your own play on Broadway, 33 Variations, which starred Jane Fonda as a musicologist obsessed with Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. What can you share about that experience, and about directing Fonda, who hadn’t been onstage since 1963 [Strange Interlude by Eugene O’Neill]?

Again, that was another milestone for me, because it was the first play I had written that made it to Broadway. You know, there’s something terrifying and wonderful about having your play done there. Jane Fonda is a magnificent actor, but also a magnificent human being. I just really loved her and loved working with her. And, as you said, she hadn’t done theatre in 50 years. But she had such craft, such beauty, and such ability to do the work. It was really good.

In 2010 you staged the opera Puss in Boots (El Gato Con Botas) at the New Victory Theatre [on West 42nd Street, specializing in theater for young people]. This was Spanish composer Xavier Montsalvatge’s [Spanish; 1912-2002] 1947 one-act chamber opera, but in your version you combined puppeteers and human actors. At the time you were quoted as saying, “I’ve never been more scared in my life.”  What scared you about this project?

I took on an opera that’s usually performed by humans and had it performed by puppets. The puppets were created by one of the most famous international puppet theatre companies, Blind Summit. It was really joyous, really wonderful—but it was just very scary. Again, it was another formal experiment. As you can see, there is a theme emerging in this interview, which is, “tectonic” means the art and science of structure. I’m interested in how things are built, and in what forms you can use on the stage to create new theatrical experiences. For me, doing Puss in Boots with puppets in an opera was part of that formal exploration.

In 2011, you directed Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo on Broadway. What can you share about that experience, including working with Robin Williams?

We all know he was a brilliant actor. He was also a brilliant man. The thing I remember the most about that experience is that there were seven actors in that cast, he and six actors, who had never been on Broadway. They were young people starting their lives, and every day he would go out to lunch with the actors. He was so humble.

Here There Are Blueberries was created in collaboration with Miami New Drama [workshopped, 31 May-3 June 2018]. You conceived, wrote, and directed it, in collaboration with Amanda Gronich and Barbara Pitts McAdams from Tectonic Theater Project. The play explores an album of World War II photographs that was received at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. The play uses first-person accounts, interviews, and historical artifacts to reveal things about the Holocaust. What more can you share about this production?

It was very scary, because we were using photographs taken during the World War about the Nazis in a concentration camp; I was interested in formally asking whether the photographs could carry part of the narrative, and they did. That was very interesting.

Theatre is a collaborative art form. But as a director, how you know when the time for collaboration is over, and it’s time for the big decisions to be made by the main person holding the reins?

It’s a very organic process. With Tectonic Theater Project, we always say that we are a collective because we collaborate in creating the play. But in every project that the Tectonic Theater Project has ever done, there’s always one author. When we did Uncommon Sense, Andy Paris was the one who was, as you say, holding the reins [written and directed by Paris; 2017, Sheen Center for Thought & Culture’s Loreto Theater in Greenwich Village]. He was the one who was making the decisions about the text.

Your body of work has had major impact in the U.S. and abroad. What is it that you feel you have not yet done?

I sometimes feel that I would like to achieve in film what I have achieved in theatre. I think that I and the artists of the Tectonic Theater Project have been successful in, if not changing the paradigm, at least shifting the paradigm of how theatre is made in America, and what kind of plays theatre can create. It would be great to be able to do that in film.

In 2016, you were awarded the National Medal of Arts and Humanities by President Barack Obama. You were the first Venezuelan to receive this award. What did all of this mean to you?

It was a wonderful moment of recognition. Awards in the theatre are usually for one play, until you become very old, and you get the lifetime achievement award. I am not that old; I was 53 when I got this award. So it didn’t feel like a lifetime achievement award, and yet it felt like a recognition of a lifetime of work. So that was really wonderful.

Correct me if I am wrong, but you said that the work that interests you most is work that explores the connection between the personal and the political. If this is true, will you expand on that premise?

I think that every interaction between human beings occurs in a political context. I think that, for theatre to fully realize its potential, it must take that into account.

You have referred to yourself as an “activist in art.” Would you expand on that premise and its connection to your works as a playwright and director?

Every time that you share a story with the world you become an activist, because your story is either reinforcing or questioning the status quo. I think that it’s important for artists to be aware of that power that we have.

You said you are Venezuelan, Jewish, gay, Latino, playwright, director. Spanish is your first language—you have a lot there. Anything I am leaving out?

No, I think that’s plenty. I am often surprised that all of the plays that I have written, I have written in English, which is not my mother tongue. I think all theatre in a way is an act of translation for me.

I know this is a difficult question, but if you had to pick one of your talents, would you want to be known as a director or as a playwright?

I want to be known as a theatremaker.

You have suggested that America is the place to fulfill one’s dreams. Have you fulfilled your dreams?

It depends on the day when you ask me.

[Nathaniel G. Nesmith holds an MFA in playwriting and a Ph.D. in theater from Columbia University.] 

*  *  *  *
“INTERVIEW: IN HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES,
MOISÉS KAUFMAN AND AMANDA GRONICH
TELL A NEW HOLOCAUST STORY”
by David Gordon  

[David Gordon’s interview with Blueberries co-writers Kaufman and Gronich ran on TheaterMania on 24 April 2024, during the preview run of the play at the New York Theatre Workshop.]

The detective drama brings an album of Nazi-era photographs to life at New York Theatre Workshop.

In 2007, a photo album made its way to Rebecca Erbelding, an archivist at the United States Holocaust Museum. The book, now known as the Höcker Album, contained more than 100 images believed to have been collected by SS officer Karl-Friedrich Höcker, which depicted Auschwitz commandants Richard Baer and Rudolph Höss, as well as “Angel of Death” physician Josef Mengele, going about their daily lives. [See “In the Shadow of Horror, SS Guardians Relax and Frolic” by Neil A. Lewis in “The Arts” section of the New York Times on 19 September 1990, posted in Part 2.]

When Tectonic Theatre Project founder Moisés Kaufman heard about the album, he instantly imagined a play — a detective story about an archivist unravelling the mystery behind these photographs, where the people in the images become characters themselves. Writing with fellow company member Amanda Gronich, Here There Are Blueberries has had runs at La Jolla Playhouse and Shakespeare Theatre Company, and is now having its New York premiere at New York Theatre Workshop.

This new drama is a cautionary tale, the writers assert, reminding us of the importance of not just remembering the victims, but the perpetrators, too.

The work of archivists is important, and it’s also one of those jobs where people don’t understand the complexities. Why was it important for you to immortalize that in Here There Are Blueberries?

Moisés Kaufman: I find great nobility in their pursuit. To spend hours focusing on the minutiae of history is so moving to me. It’s not dissimilar to what we do in theater, or, at least, the kind of theater that I like to do. We go into a space, and we try to understand something about the human condition. One of the reasons we wanted to write this play was to honor this pursuit.

Amanda Gronich: It’s so important for all of us to participate in the telling of our history, and to examine the artifacts of our own lives and families. The telling of history is in no small part based on what history leaves behind, and if we don’t decipher the evidence and explore the mysteries therein, we don’t get the full story.

This is a play that’s based on a photo album of, essentially, people going about their lives. Until you realize —

Moisés: Until you realize what’s outside the frame. And that struck me. My father is a Holocaust survivor. I always wanted to write a play about the Holocaust, but the Holocaust is the historical event that has been most-written about in the history of humanity. What else is there to say? I saw that photo and I thought “Oh, this is new.” I had a very strong visceral response to the photos because it’s exactly what you said. It looked like any outing any of us could have gone on. I thought there was a play there. 

What we do at Tectonic Theatre Project is explore theatrical languages and forms. We started the company because we were bored to death with realism and naturalism. In every play we do, we try to explore a new form. Gross Indecency was based on trial transcripts. Laramie Project was based on interviews. 33 Variations was based on a piece of music. Could we make a play in which photographs carry a large part of the narrative? That was the question.

Amanda: If we can invite the audience to step inside the photo album of a Nazi, what does that look like? From a practical standpoint, this artifact comes out of a box at the beginning of the play, and it begins to take over the stage. The actors are engaging with the pictures like they’re scene partners, and we’re inviting the audience to go on this detective story by stepping into the selfies of an SS officer.

Moisés: When we went to La Jolla, we didn’t know if this experiment was going to work. We didn’t know if the pictures were going to carry the narrative as much as we needed them to. But it was incredible to do it there, because I’ve never heard that kind of silence from an audience. They’re watching the actors, but they’re also scrutinizing the images and forming emotional ties with the people in the photographs. We have been able to make the people in the images characters in the play.

Amanda: I’m always so fascinated by the reactions that we get. When we were writing, the thing that was most terrifying for me was wondering what would happen if survivors came to see this play. You’re going through the full playwright’s angst of “how dare I explore this material in this way?” We had dinner with a remarkable woman who was at Auschwitz during the time these photographs were taken, and Rebecca at the museum spoke with another Auschwitz survivor who was there at the time these photographs were taken, and they’ve both said that this story must be told so the audience can see it for themselves.

What is the story behind the title, Here There Are Blueberries?

Moisés: This is an album of photographs of Auschwitz, and you’re taking the care to put all the photographs exactly where you want them. And then you can see that he carefully wrote down “Here There Are Blueberries.” [In German, the caption reads: Hier gibt es Blaubeeren.] 

Moisés: For a while, we were going to call the play The Album, and everybody hated it. And then we were going to call it The Album — Here There Are Blueberries [the title used for the 2018 workshop in Miami Beach]. And everybody hated that title even more. There are still people who don’t like the title. But then they come see the show and they understand that it’s a really good title.

Amanda: That’s the only title it could have been. Like, how do you look at that picture and that’s the caption you write?

Moisés: For the last 70 years, scholarship has been focused on what happened to the victims. In the last 10 years, there’s been a shift, and more scholarship has been focusing on the perpetrators and how they did it. How can you eat blueberries next to a concentration camp? And I think it’s time. That generation is passing away and it’s time to not forget them, not by retelling their stories, which of course are important, but by looking at how the people who did it, did it.

Amanda: There’s an incredible statistic I came across in my research. In a population of roughly 71 million people at the time, it took one million people to carry out the actions, and 70 million people to look the other way. How did this happen? How did they carry out those actions? And how did they see themselves as they did it? If we portray them as rabid sociopathic monsters, we learn nothing.

Moisés: Not only do we learn nothing, but we perpetuate the idea that they’re different from us.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

[Born and raised in New York City, David Gordon is a Broadway critic and the managing editor of TheaterMania.  He’s also the president of the Outer Critics Circle.  Gordon, a graduate of the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College, is a passionate advocate for the Broadway theater community.]

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“INTERVIEW: MOISÉS KAUFMAN AND AMANDA GRONICH
ON THE EVOLUTION OF HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES”
by Gerard Raymond 

[Slant Magazine, an online publication that features reviews of movies, music, TV, DVDs, theater, and video games, as well as interviews with actors, directors, and musicians, ran this interview with the two writers on 7 May 2024, just under a week before Blueberries opened at NYTW.]

The play examines the provenance of a photo album from Auschwitz.

A photograph in the New York Times, showing a group of people relaxing at a vacation resort, caught the eye of playwright and director Moisés Kaufman in 2007. The seemingly innocuous image was shocking due to when and where it was taken. The picture, dated 1944, depicted a group of Nazi families on holiday at the Solahütte resort, which was situated within the boundaries of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The snapshot was part of a memory book belonging to Karl Höcker, an SS officer who served at the time as administrative assistant to the head of the notorious death camp. The historical artifact was discovered by a U.S. officer in Germany after the war who sent it, more than six decades later, to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Kaufman is the founder of the Tectonic Theater Project, an innovative theater company whose experimental theater documentaries shed light on pivotal moments in history, reflecting both the time when the events occurred and our contemporary responses. Tectonic is best known for Gross Indecency, based on transcripts from the 1895 Oscar Wilde trials and The Laramie Project, about the 1998 murder of gay university student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. The company’s latest production, Here There Are Blueberries, inspired by the Nazi officer’s personal photo album, is currently running at New York Theater Workshop following acclaimed runs in San Diego and Washington, D.C.

Kaufman co-wrote the play with Amanda Gronich, a charter member of the Tectonic Theater Project who was part of the team that travelled to Wyoming to co-create The Laramie Project. The two writers spoke with me recently about making Here There Are Blueberries.

Tell me about the genesis of the project.

Moisés Kaufman: I’m the son of a Holocaust survivor and I always thought that I wanted to write a play about the Holocaust, but, you know, it’s the single historical event that’s been most written about in the history of literature. So, as a playwright, I didn’t know what else I wanted to say about it. But when I saw the photos of these people frolicking in the woods, eating blueberries and playing an accordion, I kept thinking, “What’s happening outside this frame?” Outside the frame, they’re killing 1.1 million people [at Auschwitz].

So I contacted the archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum who had received the album and asked if I could interview her. Coincidentally, she had just seen a production of The Laramie Project, so she knew of our work. She walked me through the process that she went through trying to figure out who everyone was, what they were doing, and what was happening in the camp at the time the photos were taken. And as she was telling me that, I thought, “I know how to tell this story.” This is a detective story. I reached out to Amanda, who’s been a company member of the Tectonic Theater Project for many years, and we started working.

Amanda Gronich: What was remarkable for me, aside from my Tectonic history, for 10 years I was a writer in nonfiction television. And unlike all of my colleagues, I’d never worked on anything about the Holocaust or World War II. When Moisés showed me the pictures, I said, “Well, it’s impossible to make a play out of this.” But then I thought, if we can figure out a way, what an extraordinary journey for the audience to go on. It begins in a box, this collection of photographs, and as the play progresses the album sort of starts to take over the stage. So, theatrically, we’re inviting the audience to step inside the album. The actors are interacting with the photos, like scene partners. [It’s like] the photos themselves become characters in the play. It’s such a dynamic and exciting way to experience this material [and] unique to theater.

How does this new play fit into the mission of your company?

MK: All of the work that the Tectonic does occurs at the intersection of the personal and the political. And I think that this certainly falls into that category. You know, the key thing about Tectonic is that we’re interested in how the theater speaks; we’re interested in new theatrical forms. Tectonic means the art and science of structure, architecture, architectonic. We started the company because we were really bored with realism and naturalism and we wanted to [explore] other theatrical vocabularies. How do we use theatricality to differentiate what happens on the stage versus what happens on a TV screen or a movie screen? And now here’s this idea of creating a play, half of which is happening in the photographs.

Did you use the same interviewing and collaborative techniques that you’ve used in your previous projects?

MK: Amanda and I both interviewed the people in the play. But more importantly, we got into a room with actors and we used our devising technique, “moment work,” to create the play.

[✵(The previous bracketed inserts have all been from the writer and editor of Slant. This one is from Rick of ROT; I’ll mark any further notes from me with the star.) I have added a brief explanation of the Tectonic terms ‘devising’ and ‘Moment Work’ in the introductions to both Parts 1 and 2. Their use is peculiar to the company.]

AG: The other thing that was very special for us with this production is that we were able to bring designers into the room at a very strategic point in the development. Part of Tectonics’ vision is that designers are a part of the devising process from as early as you can manage it.

How did the technical process evolve as you created the production?

MK: I think we wanted to really articulate the relationship between the archivists and the work they do. So the actors who play the archivists who are trying to delve into this historical artifact would handle the projectors and images that we would bring into the rehearsal room. They would transform the images and articulate them; they would add sound and, you know, zoom in. It became a very organic and visceral way of working with images. But it had to be theatrical.

In the play we see the archivists wrestle with the ethical issue of whether the museum should actually be publicizing the photos in the album. Can you talk a little about that?

AG: What’s so remarkable about this story is [that the] album arrives at the desk of, at the time, the youngest archivist on the team at the museum. And inside are what I like to call the selfies of an SS officer. The album portrays the perpetrators on their days off. There’s not a single prisoner in any of the photos. So [the museum’s] moral dilemma is that they’re a memorial museum and their charter is to tell the story of the victims. And yet, you cannot exclude the perpetrators. There’s a line in the play: “Six million people did not murder themselves.” So how do you tell the story of the perpetrators? What’s so striking to me is the telling of history is in no small part determined by what history leaves behind. And so I think this artifact offered the museum an opportunity to tell the perpetrator story in a very unique way.

Would you say that’s a quandary you faced as well when putting on this play?

AG: Oh absolutely. You know, allowing oneself as a writer—and I’ll speak for myself—to step into the shoes of the perpetrators, to really allow yourself to explore their story from their point of view . . . how do they tell the story of the Holocaust? I constantly feel sitting on my shoulders the survivors, their descendants, all of the victims—the 1.1 million people who died in that camp alone. And yet, you know, every survivor that we’ve shared this material with, without exception, has said, “You must tell the story. We who lived through it, we’re not surprised to see this side of the men and women. But for those who have led a pampered life and have never experienced what it was like to go through Auschwitz, tell this story, show the pictures.”

It’s most upsetting to see the young women in the photos—essentially secretaries [✵SS-Helferinnen – ‘female helpers’ employed by the SS]—who seem oblivious to the horrific death industry of which they are part. Do you think this is because they were indoctrinated as youth to follow the Nazi party, or were they able to compartmentalize their work from their daily lives?

MK: I think that’s very much at the heart of the play. How can you eat blueberries next to a concentration camp? How can you have a perfectly natural normal life when your daily job includes the murder of 1.1 million people? And the way that we think about it is this question: What’s the difference between culpability, complicity, and complacency? Those girls, they were sending telexes telling Berlin what was going on. They were part of the industrial complex, but they didn’t kill anybody. So they were complicit, but they weren’t culpable.

There’s that line in the play that somebody called the archivist and said, “I know I couldn’t be the head of the camp, I know I couldn’t be Dr. Mengele, but could I have been one of these women?” We interviewed an ethicist and he said that the thing about ethics is that, unless you have a strong ethical system before it gets tested, you’re gonna end up constructing an ethical system that justifies your behavior. I think that’s really powerful.

[Those women] probably compartmentalized. I think that might be one of the answers. Another answer is that they were taught that it was the right thing to do so they didn’t need to compartmentalize. Other people did it because it was a good job at that moment when there were no jobs in Germany. There are as many answers as there are people involved in the event.

AG: It’s important for a moral code to be in place if you hope to live through that morality when crisis strikes. The Germans went to great lengths to make all of this legal, to codify it and to make the engine of the “Final Solution” exist within a legal framework. When I was doing research, I uncovered this incredible vibrant PR program to get [the young women] to sign up. It was packaged as this wonderful adventure: “Come, have an adventure in the East; come serve the cause. You’ll meet a husband, you’ll spend time with your friends from the Hitler youth.”

The “normal lives” led by the perpetrators at the camps has become a part of current conversations about the Holocaust. For example, The Zone of Interest [✵2023 film by Jonathan Glazer; see note in Part 2].

MK: There’s been a shift in scholarship. For the longest time, the scholars were focused mainly on the victims and their stories. Now I think there’s more interest in the perpetrator story.

AG: One of the other things the play explores is the story of a businessman in Germany who, when the pictures were broadcast online, he clicks on the link to one and sees his grandfather. He knew his grandfather had been a Nazi doctor, but here he is walking on the grounds of Auschwitz. So he embarks on his own detective story. He begins working with the museum, trying to contact other descendants whose relatives are in the photos. What I’m so fascinated by is they don’t have the luxury of distance, these people. They’re descendants of the Nazis who committed the Holocaust—people who are my age today, the third and fourth generation. Now they’re wrestling with their responsibilities to the telling of this history and their own family’s story. They’re looking at their own artifacts, their own photographs, the things that they grew up with around the house that tell the story of the Holocaust in a very different way.

[✵The Nazi doctor’s grandson Gronich refers to here is Tilman Tauber, a German filmmaker. He’s featured in the 60 Minutes segment that is Part 1 of this series.]

Will you take the play to Europe?

MK: Yes. We’re in conversations with the German Consulate in America because they came to see it in Washington and responded very positively.

AG: I’ll be so curious to see this experience with a German audience.

[Gerard Raymond is a travel and arts writer based in New York City.  His writing has appeared in Broadway Direct, TDF Stages, the New York Times, the Village Voice, and other publications.]

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“A TALK WITH A HOLOCAUST HISTORIAN AND
THE ACTOR WHO PLAYS HER
IN ‘HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES’ AT STC”
by Chad Kinsman 

[For a change of pace, I’m posting an interview of two different subjects: an actor in the cast of Blueberries and the real-life woman she portrays.  It gives an inkling of the work not of the creators of the script of this verbatim play, but of the performers who will recreate it on the stage. The interview appeared on DC Theater Arts, a website that covers performing arts, including reviews, features, and news in Washington, D.C.; Baltimore; and New York City, on 7 May 2023.]

Elizabeth Stahlmann stars as Dr. Rebecca Erbelding, the real-life archivist who received a mysterious album of Nazi photographs. 

An old theater adage says actors must be their character’s best friend. For Elizabeth Stahlmann, that’s not too hard these days. The actor is returning to her role as Dr. Rebecca Erbelding in Here There Are Blueberries at Shakespeare Theatre Company, after starring in its premiere at San Diego’s La Jolla Playhouse last summer. The play centers on a mysterious album of photos sent to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum showing Nazis at leisure. To prepare, Elizabeth spoke with a real-life archivist and historian at the USHMM, Dr. Rebecca Erbelding. The two hit it off.

Written by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, directed by Kaufman, and devised with members of the Tectonic Theatre Project, Here There Are Blueberries is a work of documentary theater. The company developed the play over a dozen years from interviews with Dr. Erbelding, the families of Holocaust survivors and perpetrators, and others. The full story of the real photo collection, known as the Hoecker album, reveals profound questions about the nature of atrocities, legacies, and the act of keeping, and telling, stories themselves. The play won the 2022 Theater J Trish Vradenburg Jewish Play Prize.

In a joint interview with DC Theater Arts, the connection between Stahlmann and Erbelding was as clear as it was joyous. Read on for their discussion of the play’s origins, their first meeting, and their thoughts on bringing this powerful story to the nation’s capital.

DCTA: What was your experience of the play’s beginning, Dr. Erbelding?

Dr. Rebecca Erbelding: Moisés reached out to me via Facebook Messenger in the fall of 2010. I knew who he was because I had done theater in high school and college. He said he had read about the Hoecker album and was coming down to DC for something else, could he come over to the museum and talk about it? He said something like, “I think there’s a play in this.” I kind of ignored that part because I thought “There’s not a play in this,” but I would still get to meet Moisés and talk to him about this album I find fascinating. So he came down the Friday before Thanksgiving. I took him into the basement of the museum, where our conservation labs were at the time. I don’t know how long he had thought we were going to be there but it was at least two hours. Then he went away. Over the next 13 years, he would do other productions but keep returning to this story, keep coming back into my life. He would ask for more interviews or email about one specific thing. In 2018, there was a reading in Miami, which was the first time I saw anything. I went in completely cold, a wild experience. Then they said it was going to La Jolla, where I got to see it with the amazing cast out there. It actually became a play!

What was your first reaction, Elizabeth, to reading Here There Are Blueberries?

Elizabeth Stahlmann: I was on vacation, in Miami in 2021, and got an audition for the next day. I was like, “What?” I read the script. There was a little bit of Becky in there, but the script was really just taking us through the pictures. It was kind of a skeleton. What I hadn’t realized was, in true Tectonic form, they had been developing a whole visual vocabulary and a whole sonic vocabulary that help tell many aspects of this story.

What about playing a character based on Dr. Ebelding?

Stahlmann: I immediately Googled Becky, like, “Who is this woman? She’s amazing!” There wasn’t a lot of time to encapsulate her, but as it turns out that wasn’t the point of the production. It isn’t about just emulating Becky. They extracted her curiosity, her passion, and her essence and put that in the play. But there are lots of verbatim aspects to the play. When I say words that Becky has actually said, I’m able to access a point of view and a perspective.

When did you two first meet?

Dr. Erbelding: It was a preview night at La Jolla. Did you know I was going to be there?

Stahlmann: I’m one of those weird actors who like to peek at the audience before going out so I can know who’s out there. I was so excited you were there.

Dr. Erbelding: My husband, Matt, and I watched the show. I was talking with Moisés afterward when I saw Elizabeth. Matt took a photo of the two of us minutes later and we’re in the same pose, laser-focused on each other. We mind-melded.

Stahlmann: It was so cool. As an actor, I jump into these worlds and I try to learn as much about these worlds as humanly possible. Then suddenly I’m standing in front of not only the person who I play, so I get to ask questions about her experience, but also a leading expert on the subject matter. How could I not pick her brain about every aspect of this play? It’s thrilling to know her. She’s remarkably smart and articulate, not to talk about her as though she’s not here [laughs].

What’s your experience watching a character based on yourself, Dr. Erbelding?

Dr. Erbelding: I got to sit in on some rehearsal when the actors came to town. At one point, Elizabeth and Moisés were trying to decide some motivation and what the character knew at a particular moment. And finally, they just kind of looked over at me. “It’s what Elizabeth said.” I was very excited to be able to provide my own motivation.

Stahlmann: Two weeks ago, Moisés gave this direction like, “You know when Becky does this. Add that.” And I’m not going to tell you what it is [laughs].

Dr. Erbelding: My husband’s going to notice it. There are a couple things already where he’s like, “Oh, that’s from you.” I will say when [the company] adds something they’re not sure about for my character, they send it to me. At one point I gave them a list of all my favorite archival supplies for props, certain folders, and boxes I like best. Before La Jolla, they asked me what I was wearing in 2007, when the events of the play take place, for the most part. I was a poor 25-year-old grad student. I put together some pictures in which I tried to look cool and sent them to the costume designer, Dede Ayite, who is very cool. Thankfully, the team decided the show is in the present and so ignored all of my fashion choices. But there was a debate in La Jolla about whether I would wear khakis or jeans.

Stahlmann: We went with really nice pants.

Dr. Erbelding: I even talked with Elizabeth about wearing my actual work badge.

What are your thoughts about having Here There Are Blueberries in DC?

Stahlmann: When I was first cast, my fiancé, Andrew, and I drove down to the Holocaust Memorial Museum. I immediately thought this play needs to be done in DC. As a theatergoer, it’s so rare to have a play where the primary source is right down the street. It’s really powerful to witness the collaboration between these art forms and these three national institutions, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Tectonic, and the Museum.

Dr. Erbelding: The play has been part of my life for 13 years. My colleagues have helped out at various points, but I’m really excited and anticipating what they are going to think seeing their work represented. I hope I’ve done them justice. I also think the play asks profound questions about collaboration and complicity that are relevant not just in DC but to all Americans. How do we make decisions and how do we justify things that maybe we shouldn’t be justifying?

Stahlmann: One of the things that continually astounds me is that one of the ways the Holocaust happened is certain procedures were made legal. To do this play in our nation’s capital, where our laws are created, is a really important opportunity for us to really recognize and also question what we are participating in.

[Chad Kinsman is a Washington, D.C.-based dramaturg, theater administrator, and writer.  Before D.C., he worked for professional and local theaters in Connecticut for ten years, including Westport Country Playhouse, Bridgeport Theater Company, Elm Shakespeare, the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, and Yale Repertory Theatre.  He has also worked with the Island Shakespeare Festival in Puget Sound off Seattle.  He is a graduate of Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, and Yale School of Drama.]

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[Coming up on Tuesday, 4 June, will be Part 4 of this short series, focusing on the critical reception of Here There Are Blueberries.  I hope readers will come back when I post reports and reviews of the seminal productions of the play: the Miami Beach workshop, the La Jolla première, the Washington, D.C., production, and the New York City début.]