World Theatre Day 2026

Friday, 27 March 

[World Theatre Day was created in 1961 by the International Theatre Institute (ITI), and is celebrated annually on March 27 by global ITI centers and the international theatre community. Various national and international theatre events are organized to celebrate an international message and remarks from national cultural leaders. The Global Theater Initiative (GTI), a partnership between Theatre Communications Group (TCG) and the Laboratory for Global Performance & Politics (the Lab), encourages U.S. theatres, individual artists, institutions and audiences to celebrate the occasion annually on the 27th of March. 

[Since 1962, World Theatre Day has been celebrated by the circulation of the World Theatre Day Message through which, at the invitation of ITI, a figure of world stature shares their reflections on the theme of Theatre and a Culture of Peace. The first World Theatre Day international message was written by Jean Cocteau in 1962. Succeeding honorees have included Arthur Miller (1963), Ellen Stewart (1975), Vaclav Havel (1994), Ariane Mnouchkine (2005), Sultan bin Mohammad Al Qasimi (2007), Augusto Boal (2009), Dame Judi Dench (2010), Jessica A. Kaahwa (2011).

[In GTI's role as the U.S. center of ITI, a U.S.-based author is chosen to circulate a national message for World Theatre Day in addition to the international message. Past U.S. honorees have included Mildred Ruiz-Sapp and Steven Sapp (2021), Indigenous Direction (2019), Heather Raffo (2018), Kwame Kwei-Armah (2017), Ping Chong (2016), Diane Rodriguez (2014), Jeffrey Wright (2011) and Lynn Nottage (2010). 

[In 2022, for the first time, GTI invited a U.S.-based Emergent Artist to pen a message and that author was storyteller/activist Jasmin Cardenas. This is now a continuing feature of the U.S. celebration of World Theatre Day.

[To learn more about World Theatre Day, visit the official website at www.world-theatre-day.org.  —"About World Theatre Day,” Theatre Communications Group website.]

INTERNATIONAL MESSAGE
by Willem Dafoe

[Willem Dafoe (actor, theater maker; b. 1955), Artistic Director of the Theatre Department at La Biennale di Venezia, was among the founding members of The Wooster Group.  Based at The Performing Garage in New York (1977-2004), they developed a distinctive approach to avant-garde theater.  

[He then went on to collaborate with Robert Wilson (1941-2025; director and playwright of experimental theater), Marina Abramovic (b. 1946; Serbian-born conceptual and performance artist), Richard Foreman (1937-2025; avant-garde experimental playwright and director; founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater), and Romeo Castellucci (b. 1960; Italian theater director, playwright, artist, and designer).  

[In the early 1980s, he also began working in cinema and since earned international acclaim for his versatility across both independent and mainstream films.  He has received four Academy Award nominations and was awarded the Coppa Volpi for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival in 2018.  

[As an actor, he’s received numerous accolades including nominations for four Academy Awards (1987 Best Supporting Actor nomination for Platoon [1986]; 2001 Best Supporting Actor nomination for Shadow of the Vampire [2000]; 2018 Best Supporting Actor nomination for The Florida Project [2017]; 2019 Best Actor nomination for At Eternity’s Gate [2018]), a BAFTA Award, four Critics' Choice Movie Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, four Critics' Choice Movie Awards, and five Screen Actors Guild Awards.  

[He received four Independent Spirit Award nominations winning twice for Best Supporting Male for his roles in Shadow of the Vampire and The Lighthouse (2019).  On 8 January 2024, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

[Dafoe’s commitment to theater continues to shape his artistic vision and performance practice.]

I am an actor principally know as a film actor. But my roots are deeply in the theatre. I was a member of the Wooster Group from 1977-2003 creating and performing original pieces at The Performing Garage in NYC and touring throughout the world. I have also worked with Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson and Romeo Castellucci. Now, I am the Artistic Director of The Venice Theatre Biennale. This appointment, the events in the world, and my desire to return to theatre work has strongly formed my belief in the unique positive power and importance of the theatre.

At the humble beginning of my time in The Wooster Group, the NY based theatre company, we would often get very little public at some of the performances at our theatre. Often the rule was if there were more performers than public we could choose to cancel. But we never did. Many of the company were not trained in the theatre but were people of different disciplines that came together to make theatre—so “the show must go on” was not really our mantra, however we felt an obligation to keep our meeting with the public.

We would also often rehearse during the day and in the evening show the material as a work in progress. We would sometimes spend years on a show while sustaining ourselves with touring of older performances. Working years on a piece would often become tedious for me and I found rehearsals somewhat trying but these works in progress showings were always exciting—even if the tiny public was a damning judgment of the level of interest in what we were doing. It just made me realize how no matter how few people, the audience as witness gave the theatre its meaning and life.

Like the sign in the gambling hall says “YOU MUST BE PRESENT TO WIN.” Shared experience in real time of an act of creation, that may be scored and designed but is always different, is certainly the obvious strength of the theatre. Socially, politically, theatre has never been so important and vital to our understanding of ourselves and the world.

The “elephant in the room” is new technologies and social networking, which promises connection but seemingly has fragmented and isolated people from each other. I use my computer daily even if I have no social media, I have even googled myself as an actor, and have also consulted AI for information. But you have to be blind not to recognize that human contact risks being replaced by relationships with devices. While some technology can serve us well the problem of not knowing who’s on the other end of the circle of communication runs deep and contributes to a crisis of truth and reality. While the internet can raise questions, it very seldom captures a sense of wonder that theatre creates. A wonder based in attention, engagement and a spontaneous community of those present in a circle of action and response.

As an actor and theatre maker I remain a believer in the power of theatre. In a world that seems to get more divisive, controlling and violent, our challenge as theatre makers is to avoid the corruption of theatre solely as a commercial enterprise dedicated to the entertainment by distraction or as the dry institutional preserver of traditions, but rather to foster its strength to connect peoples, communities, cultures and above all to question where we are going. . . . . .

Great theatre is about challenging how we think and encouraging us to imagine what we aspire to.

We are social animals and designed biologically for engagement with the world. Every sense organ is a gateway for encounter and through this meeting we achieve greater definition of who we are. Through storytelling, aesthetics, language, movement, scenography— theatre as a total art form can make us see what was, what is and what our world could be.

*  *  *  *
U.S. MESSAGE
by Moisés Kaufman 

[Moisés Kaufman (Venezuelan-American theater director, filmmaker, and playwright; founder of Tectonic Theater Project based in New York City, and co-founder of Miami New Drama in Florida; b. 1963) received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama (b. 1961; 44th President of the United States: 2009-17) in 2016.  

[Kaufman’s a Tony and Emmy-nominated director and playwright whose Broadway credits include Paradise Square (2022; 10 Tony Award nominations), Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song (2018), Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo with Robin Williams (2011; Pulitzer Prize Finalist), The Heiress with Jessica Chastain (2012), 33 Variations with Jane Fonda (2009; wrote and directed, Tony nomination Best Play), and Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife (2003; Tony Award, Pulitzer Prize).

[Other productions include: Pulitzer Prize finalist Here There Are Blueberries (2018), Velour: A Drag Spectacular (2024), Las Aventuras de Juan Planchard (2023), Seven Deadly Sins (2021; Drama Desk Award).  He is the co-writer of The Laramie Project (2000) and the writer of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1997).  He’s an Obie and Drama Desk award winner and a Guggenheim fellow.]

Hello everyone, I’m Moisés Kaufman, I am a playwright, director and Artistic Director of Tectonic Theater Project and I am honored to have been asked to address you on World Theater Day 2026. 

Hola, soy Moisés Kaufman, soy escritor, director y director artístico de Tectonic Theater Project. Y me siento honrado de haber sido elegido para dirigirme a ustedes en este Día Mundial del Teatro 2026.

There are moments in history when the world feels as though it is breaking apart — when language itself becomes unstable, when facts are contested, when communities fracture along lines of fear and suspicion. In such moments, we may ask ourselves: What is the role of theatre?

I was born in Venezuela and came to the United States as an immigrant. To leave one’s country is to experience rupture — of language, of belonging, of certainty.

It was through this experience of displacement that I began to understand theatre not simply as performance, but as a space of encounter. A place where identities can be examined rather than assumed. A place where complexity is not feared, but honored. My life between cultures taught me that the act of listening across difference is both fragile and transformative.

When we founded Tectonic Theater Project, we were driven by a simple curiosity: How do we understand the world through the stories of others? How do we gather narratives from the real world, fragments of memory, contradiction, silence — and shape them into something that allows us to see more clearly?

So we asked how a group of artists might come together not merely to interpret a story, but to examine the forces beneath it, to gather voices, to sit with contradiction.

This process has taught me something essential: theatre is not the art of certainty. It is the art of inquiry.

Theatre, at its most urgent, is an act of investigation.

When we created The Laramie Project from the voices of a small American town grappling with an act of violence, we discovered that the stage could become a civic space. Audiences did not come simply to watch; they came to witness. They came to confront grief, anger, confusion, compassion — sometimes all at once. The theatre became not a courtroom and not a pulpit, but a gathering place.

That experience changed me. It revealed that theatre can hold complexity without sacrificing community.

In our time, public discourse often demands that we choose sides quickly. It rewards outrage and punishes nuance. Yet theatre insists on something different. It asks us to dwell in ambiguity. It reminds us that a single story rarely contains the whole truth. It invites us to encounter the humanity of those we might otherwise reduce to categories.

This is not a passive act. It is a courageous one.

To sit in the dark beside strangers and listen deeply is a form of resistance. It resists isolation. It resists dehumanization. It resists the temptation to turn away.

In a world mediated by screens and algorithms, this shared tribal experience is radical. It cannot be paused, scrolled, or muted. It unfolds in real time, and we are accountable to one another within it.

I have often reflected on the word “tectonic.” It refers to the forces beneath the earth’s surface — slow, invisible pressures that eventually reshape landscapes. Theatre works in a similar way. It may not create immediate transformation, but it exerts pressure. It shifts perception. It unsettles assumptions. It opens cracks through which empathy can enter.

And empathy is not a sentimental concept. It is an ethical practice.

When actors embody other people — when they carry their words, their cadences, their hesitations — they ask us to imagine what it feels like to inhabit another life. That imaginative act is foundational to democracy. A democratic society depends upon our capacity to see beyond ourselves.

Peace, too, depends on that capacity.

Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is the presence of understanding. It is the willingness to engage difference without erasure. It is the courage to hear a story that challenges our own.

Theatre does not provide solutions to global crises. It does something both more modest and more profound: it creates the conditions for intimate encounters.

Within the space of a stage, we practice holding multiple truths. And we train in empathy. 

These practices are not separate from civic life; they are essential to it.

On this World Theatre Day, I think of theatre-makers across the globe — in grand institutions and in makeshift spaces, in cities and in villages, in times of stability and in times of conflict. I think of artists who rehearse under threat, who speak when silence would be safer, who gather communities even when resources are scarce. Their work affirms something fundamental: the human need to tell stories and to hear them is irrepressible.

Today, let us honor the rehearsal rooms where questions are asked with rigor and humility. Let us honor the actors who risk vulnerability. Let us honor the designers who shape worlds from light and shadow. Let us honor the crews and theater staffs that make the work possible.

And let us recommit ourselves to the slow, tectonic work of listening.

If the forces beneath the surface are powerful enough, landscapes shift.

May our stages continue to shift the landscape of the human heart.

Let us keep asking questions.
Let us keep listening.
Let us keep gathering in the dark — believing that when the lights rise, we may see one another more clearly.
Thank you.

*  *  *  *
U.S. EMERGENT ARTIST MESSAGE
by Banna Desta

[Banna Desta (she/they; late 20’s-early 30’s) is an Eritrean- and Ethiopian-American writer for the screen and stage who crafts stories about and for the African diaspora.  She is the author of The Abyssinians (Audible, 2024); Midnight in Abyssinia (La MaMa’s CultureHub, 2024); Red Taxi (2025); Bygone Fruit which premiered at the 2024 Women in Theater Festival (6-24 June 2024 in Greenwich Village, New York City) and Pining which premiered at Rattlestick Theater (New York City) and was published by Samuel French in 2019.  

[Desta’s work for the stage has been supported and workshopped by Atlantic Theater Company, The Apollo Theater, National Black Theatre, The New Group, and the Dramatists Guild Foundation.  She has held residencies at SPACE on Ryder Farm, Art Omi, Marble House Project, and Tofte Lake Center.  She was a staff writer for the BET+ series First Wives Club (Netflix Top Ten, 2019-22).  

[Desta has assisted multiple television series in both the writers’ room and on set, including FOX/NBC’s This Is Us (2016-22), and Amazon Prime’s Harlem (2021-25).  She’s held fellowships with Sun Valley Writers Conference, Marcie Bloom Fellowship in Film, and The Gotham Film and Media Institute.  She is a writing professor and arts educator at New York University, Rehabilitation through the Arts and Harlem Children's Zone.]

My name is Banna, and I am the emergent author for the International Theater Institute in the United States. Happy World Theater Day to theater makers across the country and around the world. It is my belief that storytelling is the bloodline of humanity, pumping empathy and understanding, reinforcing purpose and preserving culture and legacy in our hearts. Many of us have been shaped and inspired by the stories we’ve heard, whether they’re passed down from previous generations or absorbed through other mediums. Most forms of storytelling share theater’s DNA. They’re fleshed out through performance with tones of drama, comedy or both.

Coming from an Eritrean and Ethiopian household, storytelling was one of the ways I was able to hold on to my ancestral lineage being born and raised in the United States. Whether they were stories that illustrated the natural beauty and simplicity of African life or the tragedies of the civil war that delivered my parents to the U.S.[1974-91] , tales of the past were embedded in me and undoubtedly inspired me to indulge my own imagination and nurture my own creative inventions. They inspired me to explore my own history, sourcing facts to support the fiction in my plays The Abyssinians and Red Taxi, and influencing my love of realist fiction to write contemporary Black narratives in my new play, Nightlife. Like so many people in America, my life has been global and so, my stories reflect that.

Becoming a theatermaker wasn’t a straightforward journey, as the conventions of modern life felt like they required a more traditional vocation. I ignored the call to be an artist. However, in college, theater was my very first class, Monday mornings at 9am, my freshman year. It was there that I discovered Paula Vogel [b. 1951], re-explored Shakespeare, Moisés Kaufman and a number of other classic and contemporary artists and their work. No matter when their plays were published and how many years had passed since, their work felt urgent, and as a result so did my need to tell stories. I could no longer ignore the call. I took my writing more seriously, using it as a means of connecting with myself and sharing my work in the hopes of connecting with others.

Discovering theater was where my life felt most romantic, where I felt most comfortable to wrestle with the world’s competing contradictions. When I moved to New York to pursue storytelling more seriously, I was astonished by the depth of artistry, the grit and grace of theater’s artisans and the immense compassion theater inspired in me. I sat in the audience of plays like Is God Is at Soho Rep [by Aleshea Harris, 2018], In the Blood at Signature Theater [2017] and Hamlet at St. Ann’s Warehouse [2020], awestruck at the blend of rigor, chemistry and collaboration that made these experiences possible. I felt eager to create, to experiment, to court risk.

Most important of all, theater taught me that we must lean on each other. The life of theatermakers, theaters and their audiences depends on us working collaboratively towards our united future. We must protect each other’s dignity. One does not have to look too far to witness the theatrics of daily life, whether that be in our politics, our communities or even on our phones. Today, as I address you in 2026, the dominant narrative from the highest seat in office, as well as our national leaders, is encouraging us to be cruel to each other. Their intent to erase history, misinform us and keep us at odds with one another is more clear than ever before. Their messaging is sinister, divisive and harmful. It is an assault on our collective dignity.

Despite the fearmongering, despite their deepest wish to separate ourselves from each other, it is our responsibility as theatermakers to have the courage to rewrite this narrative. In order to reclaim the narrative, we must turn to our foundation. Theater is foundational to many, if not all, of the ways we exchange stories in the world today. It is where we can seek more thoughtful provocations about our times, it is where our heartbeats synchronize, it is where we enter the dark to feel the light. We must be fearless and relentless in protecting this sacred space and to attempt at making the connection.

On this World Theater Day, may we recommit to the truth, may we guard our foundation, and may we keep humanity's bloodline alive, in and outside the theater.

[I don’t repost the World Theatre Day messages each year, but I have done so for several of the recent ones.  You can check back on these sets of messages: “World Theatre Day 2012” (24 April 2012), “World Theatre Day: 27 March 2022” (4 April 2022), “World Theatre Day 2023” (27 March 2023), and “World Theatre Day 2024” (28 March 2024).

[In addition, I’ve posted a version of a report on another ITI event, the 1986 Theatre of Nations festival in Baltimore, Maryland, the first and so far only appearance of TON in North America.  “Theatre of Nations: Baltimore, 1986,” which was originally written for The Drama Review in 1987, was republished on Rick On Theater on 10 November 2014.

[ITI, the International Theatre Institute, is an agency of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).]

'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.] 

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[“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.]