Harry Potter at Hoboken High School

 

[On the local evening newscast, News 4 New York at 11, of 14 May 2024 on WNBC, Channel 4 in New York City, I watched an account by reporter Checkey Beckford of the selection of Hoboken High School to be the first in the United States to present the high school version of the current Broadway hit Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.  

[What I heard in the report interested me enough to do a little more checking.  Below is the result of my reading, and I think you’ll also find the story engaging.

[As most readers of Rick On Theater will know, I’m an avid supporter of arts in our schools, both as an activity and as an academic subject.  (I have taught both middle and high school theater, as well as college and even a few guest appearances in elementary classes.  I’ve also directed middle and high school productions and served as advisor to a high school theater group.)

[Past posts on ROT concerning theater and arts in schools (some of which cross over into another frequent topic I blog on: the censorship of artistic expression/the First Amendment and the arts) include “Degrading the Arts,” posted on 13 August 2009; “The Relation of Theater to Other Disciplines,” 21 July 2011; “Arts & Music Education,” 21 March 2014; “Arts in Schools,” 18 November 2015; “Musical Theater Programs for Kids,” 18 May 2018; “Music Theater Programs for Kids,” 5 February 2023; “Censorship on School Stages,” 30 July 2023; and “‘The Courage to Produce: A Conversation on High School Censorship,’” 21 April 2024.]

In November 2023, Broadway Licensing Global, the New York City-based rights-holder for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the current stage hit on Broadway and London’s West End, announced that the high school edition of the play is available for licensing (License Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (licensecursedchild.com)).  BLG held a contest, dubbed Wands at the Ready, to select the first schools in the United States to present the play. 

Entrants were asked to describe why their school or community is the most “magical” place to produce the début of the play in a U.S. state or territory.  High schools participating in the competition “should think of ‘magical’ as demonstrating how their school or drama program shows a passion for commitment to the arts, student inclusion and diversity,” the Broadway Licensing website suggested, “and ways they plan to promote the production within their communities.”

The competition ran until December 2023 and the performances would be staged between 15 October and 10 November 2024.  In February 2024, BLG announced that 29 schools from across the country had been selected to stage Cursed Child.  The locales stretched from Connecticut and Florida to California and Alaska—even a school in Puerto Rico gained the right to present the play. 

There was a school in New York, one in Pennsylvania, and one in Delaware . . . but none in New Jersey.  So how did Hoboken High School in Hudson County get the honor of being the first U.S. school to perform the play?  Well, the answer turns out to be quite simple. 

Hoboken High, along with one other secondary school in the United Kingdom, was chosen for a developmental pilot run of the new version of the play outside the Wands at the Ready competition.  Broadway Licensing went through a month of extensive searching and assessing of the applications of numerous schools to select Hoboken High School in the North Jersey region of the state (directly across the Hudson River from Manhattan), and Riverside School in Barking, a town in East London (Barking Riverside is a development within Barking).  

Riverside School, a state school, which is much like our public schools in that it’s tax-supported, presented its production of the play last 20-23 March.  Both schools selected are public or state institutions because BLG wanted to see that the script can be realized under a budget that isn’t supplemented by private endowments or subsidies. 

(The Wands at the Ready competition was open to all schools in the United States and its territories, including charter, private, and arts schools.  After the competition and the productions of the 29 chosen schools this fall, licenses will be available or all amateur productions.  Interested groups should check the BLG website to keep abreast of releases and updates regarding licensing

(The 29 schools from the Wands at the Ready competition still got to call their production “the first,” explained BLG and Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender, the professional play’s producers, irrespective of the pilot productions preceding them.  It was sort of like the Artist’s Proof of a print or lithograph not being counted in the official numbered run of the artwork—or, more appropriate, perhaps, the preview performances of a Broadway show that aren’t counted in the official length of the production’s run.)

Sometime in May 2023, Danielle Miller, the Fine and Performing Arts Supervisor for middle and high school on the Hoboken Board of Education, received an e-mail from BLG asking if the school was interested in being the U.S. pilot for the trial.  Evidently, she said yes.

The Hoboken Public School District has a very active theater program.  The district has three full-time, certified theater teachers and, says Miller in the WNBC news report, every student from kindergarten to 12th grade “gets a theater education.”

The district puts on an annual District Musical—this year, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which is characterized as a “play with music” but isn’t a musical, was performed instead of the musical—and all students in the district, from ages 5 to 18, are eligible to participate.  High schoolers play the adult characters (such as Harry, Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger, Draco Malfoy, and other characters from the seven novels) and middle schoolers the other leads (Harry’s and Draco’s sons, and Ron’s daughters, for instance); creating the props and sets are the jobs of 6th to 12th graders.  

It was this diversity, equity, and inclusion that attracted BLG to Hoboken High as a potential pilot for Cursed Child.  Sean Cercone, founder and CEO of BLG, said that Hoboken was chosen for the North American pilot because “It’s the most diverse, loving, creative community we could have found, and it was right in our own backyard.”  The Hoboken community, including local businesses and residents, “really embraces the arts,” said Cercone.

As Miller is avid to point out, “Many of the most involved students, many who do the best in their classes, are all involved in theater.  It just teaches students to feel comfortable with who they are, to discover more things about themselves . . . .”  I’m not sure how much this means to the corporate rights-holders, but it’s a major point in my arguments for keeping the arts, including theater, in the schools.

The pilot productions were essential to ensure that each participating school could effectively convey the magic of the show within their budgetary and technical constraints.  Developed by the work’s original creative team, the school edition includes solutions that make the professional production’s high-tech wizardry possible regardless of a school’s budget size.

The pilot program was intended to set a high standard to reveal lessons for future productions in analogous circumstances.  Cercone said that “it was critical to us that we identify schools with facilities and resources most similar to the greatest number of schools worldwide.”  He continued, “These pilot productions are a learning process for us, to ensure that any school, regardless of its resources or budget, can produce this show with success.” 

Before I get to the High School Edition and Hoboken High’s production, let me run down the facts of the original play.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was written by playwright Jack Thorne (Let The Right One In, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn, 2015; Christmas Carol, Broadway, 2019; King Kong musical, Broadway, 2020; also films and streaming) from an original story he wrote with J. K. Rowling and John Tiffany (who also directed the stage adaptation; Off-Broadway: Once, 2011; Broadway: Once, 2012; Macbeth, 2013; Glass Menagerie, 2013).  

The story’s set 19 years after the events of the 2007 novel Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and last in Rowling‘s series about the young wizard.  (It’s essentially a sequel, since Deathly Hallows ends with an epilogue that’s set 19 years after the events of the episode showing Harry dropping his sons Albus and James off at the train for Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.)  According to CNET, a computer website that’s affiliated with CBS International, the play “is officially the eighth story” in the Potter series.

The play follows Albus Potter and his friendship with Scorpius Malfoy, the son of Harry’s rival, Draco, in their first year at Hogwarts.  This friendship sparks a new journey for the older generation of the novels and their progeny—with the power to change the past and future forever.  There are spells, a race through time, and an epic battle to stop mysterious forces, all while the future of the Wizarding World hangs in the balance.

The world première production (which is still running) opened at the Palace Theatre in London’s West End on 30 July 2016.  It received 11 nominations for Laurence Olivier Awards in 2017 and won a record-breaking nine, including for Best New Play.  The Broadway production opened at the Lyric Theatre on 22 April 2018 and received 10 Tony Award nominations that year and won six, including Best Play.

The play was originally presented in two parts which theatergoers could attend in the afternoon and evening of the same day, or over two evenings.   After the pandemic shut-down, the Broadway production was restaged as a single, 3½-hour show in November 2021. 

In 2022, productions in San Francisco (December 2019-September 2022), Melbourne (February 2019-July 2023), Toronto (June 2022-July 2023), and Tokyo (in Japanese; July 2022-Present) also adopted the one-part format, and the German-language version in Hamburg (December 2021-Present) followed in 2023.  The West End production alone continues to play the original two-part version.

(Three upcoming productions have also been announced: Chicago, September 2024-February 2025; Los Angeles, February-June 2025; and Washington, D.C., July 2025-TBA.)

For the one-part version of Cursed Child, over 1½ hours of content was cut.  Also, while it’s not explicitly stated, Albus Potter and Scorpius Malfoy definitely exhibit romantic interest in each other, and other character relationships have been altered.  These changes have been incorporated in the two-part version of the play as well.

The high school edition of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was announced in September 2023.  According to the Broadway Licensing website:

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child High School Edition is a special adaptation of the beloved worldwide hit.  Tailored for high school and secondary school theatre productions, it provides young actors the opportunity to play Harry, Hermione [Granger], Ron [Weasley], and all of their favorite characters on their very own stage and bring the wizarding world to life for their communities.  Your students will be empowered to conjure the magic through their own creativity, making it a truly exciting and engaging experience for students and audiences alike.

The Rowling Library, which isn’t affiliated with the Harry Potter author or any individual or company that’s engaged in the publishing or producing of the Potter books or films, asserts that “the high school version of the production has been condensed compared to its professional counterparts and incorporates innovative special effects adaptable to any school environment, irrespective of its lighting, sound, or stage infrastructure.”

I specifically went in search of some comment from BGL or the play’s producers regarding the school version’s adult or potentially controversial content, particularly the suggestion that Albus Potter and Scorpius Malfoy might be headed for a romantic relationship.  (It’s the subject of much Internet chatter, and the production’s been accused of “queerbaiting,” a marketing ploy in which creators hint at same-sex romance or other LGBTQ+ themes to entice an LGBTQ-friendly audience without explicitly depicting them.)

It was my experience, when choosing and staging middle and high school plays, that one of the first questions the principals and, most often, vice-principals asked in order to approve my selection was, ‘Is there any sex in it?’  Alongside religion, even the suggestion of sexual content was the topic that most likely would set off some parents.  The schools in which I worked were generally pretty liberal culturally, so I can’t but assume that the same concern would obtain in all the schools on BLG’s list.

I’d have expected there to have been some statement of assurance regarding controversial material in the script, but there was very little, and most of what I found was suggestive without being definitive and clear.  For instance, the Broadway Licensing site states that the school edition of the play is “tailored for high school theatre productions” without specifying what that addresses. 

The character description for Albus says that he “forms a close friendship with Scorpius Malfoy,” but leaves the implication ambiguous.  (There’s no parallel statement about Albus in Scorpius’s character profile.)

The high school version requires 16 men, 14 women, and 4 actors who may be any gender.  The play runs from 1½ to 2 hours (in contrast to the 3½ hours of the Broadway production.)  The script is adjusted for the standard stage lighting and sound capacities of typical public school theaters and auditoriums.  A perusal copy of the script is available for $20 from the license-holder (check their website, above).

(Broadway Licensing clearly states on its site that there are no restrictions on casting, including cross-gender casting: “Any student of any gender identity, race, etc. can play any role so long as the roles stay as written.”  See the FAQ’s on the webpage indicated above.)

Once Hoboken High was chosen, as revealed at a special event on 7 September 2023, Miller and her colleague, Jessica Fasolino, the Board of Ed’s Fine and Performing Arts Supervisor for kindergarten through 5th grade, sent out a district-wide announcement of the production schedule and procedures.

There was an audition registration period on the school’s website that ran until 17 November 2023, then the auditions themselves took place, grouped by grade, from 11 to 15 December.  There was even a “Mock Audition Fundraiser” on 9 December “to help prepare your child for the audition process.”  It sounded to me like a theater-games session for any student interested in trying out but who’d never participated before.

Miller reported that 300 to 350 Hoboken District students from kindergarteners to high school seniors auditioned for the play.  Of these, she assembled a cast of over 100 for the production.  This is apparently not uncommon for Hoboken’s inclusive program, and I gather it works for them.

(I’ve never had a cast that large, though I have swelled the companies for my middle school shows, as I imagine many secondary school theater teachers/directors do, but never more than 15% of that number.  My main question for Miller is: where do you put them all back stage?  I’ve never even seen a school theater, even where I did my MFA, whose back-stage area was exceptionally huge.)

Rehearsals started on 16 January 2024, with the final dress on Monday, 13 May.  At that session, Miller had arranged a surprise for the company that I’m sure was an immense thrill: the Broadway cast paid them an unannounced visit!  Following the rehearsal, reported BLG, the pros celebrated on stage with the students, giving high fives and sharing in the excitement.

(One of the benefits BLG and the professional show’s producers touted for selecting Riverside School in London and Hoboken High School in northern New Jersey for the pilot outings of the new adaptation of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was that both schools were in proximity to two important professional productions.  One might suspect they meant that this gave the young cast and potential audiences the opportunity to see the West End and Broadway mountings—but the surprise attendance by the Broadway actors might have been a lagniappe they, like the student actors and crew, hadn’t considered.)

At the same dress rehearsal, Miller invited faculty and theater students from other New Jersey school districts to provide “a platform for sharing experiences and fostering a sense of community among theatre educators and students alike.”  At the end, the guests, who in other circumstances—sports or academic competitions—might be rivals, the visitors’ Gryffindor to Hoboken’s Ravenclaw, stood and cheered their peers.

After a day off on Tuesday, the 14th, the second-ever production of the High School Edition of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the first in the U.S., opened at Hoboken High School on Wednesday, 15 May 2024.  It ran through Sunday, 19 May.  The Hoboken pilot showcase, like its U.K. predecessor, was sold out for all five performances.  In Hoboken, most of the seats were sold by Thursday.

Danielle Miller was the director of the Hoboken High staging of Cursed Child, but she teamed with theater teacher and stage director at the high school, Derek Kinnear, who served as technical director of the production.  Kinnear was responsible for, among other things, the magic and wizardly effects of Hoboken’s Cursed Child.

“Our challenge,” explains Miller, “was to innovate within the constraints of a well-known universe.”  Broadway Licensing repeatedly states that as long as the text is spoken the way it’s written (unless permission to make changes is obtained in writing), schools are allowed, even encouraged, to make adjustments in other aspects of the script, including casting, movement, or effects.  “We had to reimagine sets, costumes, props, and even the choreography of movements in a way that was fresh yet familiar,” Miller added.

The pilot shows were meant to establish the standards for schools around the world that will perform it afterwards.  Miller acknowledged that she and her team were “keenly aware of their responsibility not only to meet the standards associated with the franchise but also to showcase the potential of public school theater programs.”

Kinnear, the TD, observed, “We knew we didn’t want to try to copy the effects done on Broadway.”  So the tech team created “unique magical moments that were feasible within their budget,” and they added “little but precise effects” intended to engage the spectators without exceeding the school’s finances or taxing the team’s capabilities.

For example, Hoboken High’s Cursed Child put student actors into harnesses for flying and produced digital scenic projections.  From the photos I saw online, these effects looked as good and as convincing as any I’ve seen in Broadway and top-line rep company productions. 

“Our goal was to create a sense of wonder that was uniquely ours, without trying to replicate the high-budget effects of Broadway,” the tech director explained.  Kinnear and his techies apparently pulled it off.  Whatever his budget was, it seemed well spent. 

I was hoping that there’d be some kind of report of the performance, from audience members or a local journalist who followed up on all the pre-performance coverage of this singular occurrence.  I kept checking the ’Net after the 15th, but there wasn’t anything to speak of.  The only “after-action” record I found was on one blog, David Barrineau.

The eponymous blogger describes himself as “a Creative Director/Art Director for over two decades.  Most of my career has focused on Arts and Culture advertising, especially Theatre.”  He has a BFA in theater from New York University, and one of his advertising clients was Harry Potter and the Cursed Child—the Broadway production, I presume.  Barrineau, who doesn’t seem to have any connection to the school, BLG, or the New York production, posted this reaction of opening night at the Hoboken High show:

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Student Edition Premieres

May 15, 2024

The first student production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child premiered at Hoboken High School and it’s ADORABLE!  And the talented cast is so enthusiastic and charming.  The Broadway production is so technically stunning, I couldn’t imagine how they would be able to scale it down for student productions, but — wow!  There was so much creativity that went into the staging.  They even had a student fly on a broom across the stage, which the Broadway production doesn’t even do — maybe they should add it?

On the day after the London production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child premièred, the published text of the play was released.  (Note that the release date, 31 July 2016, corresponds to the birthdays of Harry Potter author, J. K. Rowling—her 51st—and Harry, himself—his 36th.)  This is the script of the play, not a novelization, which has not been created.

There are two versions of the published script, released by Arthur A. Levine Books (an imprint of Scholastic Corporation, the U.S. publisher of the Potter novels).  The authorship credits are the same as for the play, itself: written by Jack Thorne from a story by Rowling, John Tiffany, and Thorne.  The first version is now labeled “Special Rehearsal Edition” and is the text of the play’s previews and early performances, and, like them, is in two parts.

A “Definitive Collector’s Edition” was published on 26 July 2017, and incorporated changes that were made in the text.  This edition is closer to the final version of the script as currently performed on stage.

(Note that these publications are the adult versions of the play text.  As of now, there is no commercially available published text of the high school edition.  Perusal copies, which are not complete acting editions—no stage directions, for example—are available for prospective licensees from BGL, and full acting editions will be available to licensees once the contracts have been signed.)

Just as no novel adaptation of the play is being contemplated, there is no film version of Cursed Child in the works at this time.

Rumors of a film adaptation began to circulate almost as soon as the play opened in London.  Warner Bros., the studio that produced all the Harry Potter films (and the related works that followed) has expressed interest in making a Cursed Child movie, especially if they can get the original actors who played the now-adult characters in the eight original films to reprise those roles now as adults—but so far Rowling, who must sign off on any adaptation of her work, has said no.

“[T]o set the record straight once and for all,” says Rowling: “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a stage play, it was conceived and written as a stage play, it was always intended to be a stage play and nothing else, and there are absolutely no plans for it to become a movie, a novel, a puppet show, a cartoon, a comic book series or Cursed Child on Ice.”

Of course, Rowling has said no on previous occasions . . . and later changed her mind.  As Fats Waller often said: “One never knows, do one?”

"Subscriptions Are Dead, Long Live Subscriptions"

by Rosie Brownlow-Calkin

A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series

[As most theatergoers know, the regional repertory theaters in the United States depends heavily on subscriptions for their audiences.  The programs may vary from company to company and even from season to season as marketing tactics change or someone comes up with a new concept, but some kind of subscription plan has been the mainstay for regional theater since the movement began, essentially following World War II. 

[In recent decades, however, theater audiences began to shrivel.  Potential audience members aged and younger people didn’t sign up to replace their elders.  The reasons vary, of course, but the repercussions have been a whittling-away of the base of the rep companies’ principal source of attendees and, thereby, their income base.

[The latest issue, Spring 2024, of the Theatre Communications Groups American Theatre, which has become a quarterly magazine since returning to print after going online during the pandemic shutdown, carried a couple of articles dealing with this and related issues. 

[As part of my ad hoc series on the regional theater in the U.S., focusing on its significance in our culture and the problem it currently faces, I’m republishing Rosie Brownlow-Calkin’s “Subscriptions Are Dead, Long Live Subscriptions!” on Rick On Theater.  The article originally appeared in AT in the spring issue and was posted on the website on 4 June 2024.]

Theatres are taking a hard look at a well-worn patron model, and coming to different conclusions about its usefulness.

When Amy Kaissar wrote her graduate thesis on the topic of nonprofit theatre subscriptions [“Theatre Subscriptions in a Changing World,” MFA thesis, Division of Theatre, School of the Arts, Columbia University, 2005], her basic argument was: They’re not dead; we just haven’t invested in them. Now, 19 years wiser, and after 15 years in leadership positions, Kaissar, the current co-producing director at Bristol Riverside Theatre [BRT] in Bristol, Pa., confessed, “I’m not sure I would 100 percent agree” with her earlier assessment.

The hedging is important here—it’s not that her outlook has done a 180. But so much in the intervening years has complicated her earlier certainty, including, of course, the pandemic lockdown of the past few years, which impacted every aspect of the industry. But even without that bumpy chapter and its even rockier aftermath, the outlook for subscriptions has long been multilayered. Even now, for all the public hand-wringing about the state of the theatre, artistic leaders, audiences, and a quantitative survey of 84 companies from across the U.S. conducted by American Theatre presents a remarkably multifarious picture rather than a uniformly bleak one.

The complexity begins with the very definition of subscriptions. Butts in seats is an easy number to measure (How full is the house? Down about 25-30 percent nationwide, on average), but what makes a subscription a subscription? Trinity Rep in Providence, R.I., and Shotgun Players in Berkeley, Calif., to name two examples, have embraced the flexible models that have gained traction in recent years (pay in advance for a set number of tickets and redeem for the best available seat for any performance on any day in the show’s run), while 4th Wall Theatre Company in Houston and Oregon Contemporary Theatre in Eugene are leaning into what many in the industry refer to as the “standard” or “traditional” model (pay in advance for the same seats on the second Thursday of every run, say). The REV Theatre Co. in Auburn, N.Y., has ditched flex passes entirely.

Road Less Traveled Productions in Buffalo, N.Y., and Dobama Theatre in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, like several others in the survey, are rolling out what they call “memberships,” but nearly all of these differ from flex subscriptions in name only—with the notable exception of Open Stage in Harrisburg, Pa., which offers a pay-by-the-month model patrons can cancel any time (and for the record, Open Stage says it’s doing great—subscriptions are up 296 percent since 2019). Omaha Theater Company has a new rolling membership “similar to museums” that allows patrons to jump in at any point in the calendar year. To add to the variety of the picture, Local Theater Company in Boulder, Colo., produces three shows in a season, while Sierra Rep in Sonora, Calif., produces nine, and both offer subscriptions. You’re hardly comparing apples to apples the way you can with single-ticket purchases.

So broadly speaking—if we can speak broadly at all—what are the trends? Are subscriptions in free fall, and if so, what does that mean for the continuing health of theatres? Are subscriptions still a viable model, for either audiences or companies?

On their face, the numbers aren’t great. Of the 66 companies responding to the survey that offer subscriptions and provided complete data, 42 percent said the numbers are way down, with 30 percent or more of their subscribers gone since the pandemic, and 21 percent of companies said they are somewhat down (between 11 and 29 percent subscriber attrition). This is almost a photonegative of numbers for audience attendance in general: As measured in a previous AT survey, many more companies are down moderately in overall attendance than are down significantly.

But the bright spots are brighter too. More companies are doing well with subscribers than are doing well with overall ticket sales: 20 percent of companies report more than a 10 percent subscriber increase since 2019, and 17 percent have held steady (which we’re defining here as staying within a 10 percent increase or decrease). Comparatively, only 26 percent of companies report steady or increased attendance numbers overall.

So more than a third of companies in our survey said they’ve weathered the pandemic lockdown and are in stable or better shape, subscriber-wise, since reopening. Burning Coal Theatre Company in Raleigh, N.C., for instance, reported subscription growth of 60 percent over the past five years.

“The subscription model is just fine,” said Burning Coal artistic director Jerome Davis. “Young people aren’t crazy about it, but the nice thing about young people is, they don’t stay young for long.”

At Actor’s Express in Atlanta, managing director Alex Scollon said he wonders if the media bias toward well-resourced institutions is the reason there’s been such one-note, sad-sack media coverage about the state of the theatre field. “Often midsize and smaller organizations are left out of these conversations in favor of doom and gloom stories from LORT [League of Resident Theatres, a professional theater association for regional, non-profit companies],” said Scollon, who said that Actor’s Express’s subscription numbers have held steady. “There is a lot that keeps me up these days, but subscription plans are not one of them.”

Added Jen Uphoff Gray, artistic director of Forward Theatre in Madison, Wisc., “Overall, I am feeling exhausted by the messaging that ‘the subscription model is dead,’ which long predated the pandemic. Any such proclamations ignore the wide differences in theatre companies across the country, and the wide variety of audiences we serve.”

Indeed, the notion that the subscription model has been on the wane isn’t supported by the data we gathered. While none of the nine LORT member theatres [of a total of 75 members] that completed our survey have grown their base significantly, and only two have held steady (both in Florida, with its never-ending stream of retirees), half of the surveyed companies said their subscriptions were on the rise in the decade preceding the pandemic, with another quarter holding steady. Though the survey didn’t directly probe whether numbers had rebounded since the slump most companies experienced in 2020 or 2021, several volunteered the news that they are now trending in the right direction.

In sum, it feels premature to make any pronouncements about whether the contraction in audiences post-pandemic-lockdown is also a death knell for the subscription model. The longer-term data doesn’t indicate a gradual or inevitable trend in that direction for the majority of companies.

Still, if you factor in theatres who consider themselves “holding steady” with subscription losses of under 10 percent, nearly two-thirds of our respondents say they’ve lost subscribers in the past five years. Kaissar’s company, Bristol Riverside, is part of this larger group, with subscriptions down 31 percent since the pre-pandemic idyll of 2019. Though they have regained some subscribers from their lowest point over the last few years, Kaissar said she “wouldn’t call it a recovery at all. The diehards are still here, and we have not succeeded in getting new people in.”

Sheldon Post is one of those diehards. He said via email that he’s stuck with BRT for 35 years because of the variety of programming, “a mix of relatively unknown plays, very well-known plays, and ‘different’ takes on familiar plays,” as well as the perks, including “the ability to change our performance date on the rare occasions that we need to,” and a benefit that “enables subscribers to return on another night to see a play again—no charge.”

That seems like a good deal (though the ability to exchange tickets has recently been extended to single-ticket buyers at several companies for free or a nominal fee). So why have so many at BRT flown the coop, and so precipitously? Kaissar was hesitant to make big pronouncements on the subject. “I worry about anyone who claims to understand the actual causes, given the lack of available high-quality research,” she said, but did recall that in conversations with subscribers, “What we hear most consistently is either age-related things, or they moved, or they didn’t like the work we’re doing anymore. They want the work of the previous generation.” She added that, for the record, her company hasn’t pivoted from feel-good musicals to the work of Sarah Kane, but that it has been more focused on attracting Gen X patrons and other recent empty nesters with titles they might recognize, like their upcoming Big The Musical. Viewed through one lens, that may seem like crowd-pleasing programming, but it all depends which crowd you mean: Baby boomers and above were not that movie’s target audience when it came out in 1988.

[According to Wikipedia: “Sarah Kane [1972-99] was an English playwright, screenwriter and theatre director. She is known for her plays that deal with themes of redemptive love, sexual desire, pain, torture—both physical and psychological—and death. They are characterised by a poetic intensity, pared-down language, exploration of theatrical form and, in her earlier work, the use of extreme and violent stage action.”  Kane died by suicide at the age of 28.]

Other artistic leaders are in agreement with Kaissar, with many citing a greying of their subscriber base as a reason for declining subscription rates. The near-universal agreement is that subscribers, especially to the “standard” models, tend to be older. In the four years since Covid hit, these audience members are more likely to have passed, moved away, become infirm, or simply gotten more cautious about their health. And for whatever reason, Gen Xers and millennials tend not to make plans far in advance. Said Lauren Halvorsen [dramaturg and writer based in Washington, D.C.] of the popular theatre Substack newsletter Nothing for the Group [newsletter devoted to a conversation about pay equity in the theater], “Theatres do not embrace the spontaneity of younger generations.”

So between the thinning older audience and the last-minute-planning younger audience, it’s no wonder that traditional subscription numbers are not rising. “The word subscription scares people off post-Covid,” said Tracy Mitchell, executive director of Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, N.Y. “The current trend of late purchasing has become a habit. As long as there is a seat available, this is going to plague theatres for quite some time.”

Several survey respondents, like Kaissar, did say that a perceived distaste for “newer” programming contributed to the decline in numbers. Still, for all the right-wing media’s eagerness to blame “woke theatre” for this phenomenon, no respondent reported that this audience aversion had an especially political bent. Joe Miller, a one-time Bristol Riverside subscriber, said he cut the cord because he and his wife were “seeing plays that we’re just not that interested in. We like comedies, we like musicals, and some of these are plays we’ve never heard of before,” adding that he found the theatre’s programming overly heavy on drama of late.

There are countless soft or unique factors at play for subscribers who call it quits. For Lori Boswell in Portland, Ore., it wasn’t about programming but parking. She traded in her subscription to a LORT theatre for one at a non-union company in the suburbs; both make “okay” work, she said, but she was done with what she considers the inconvenience of coming downtown.

One area where there is little agreement: money. On its face, it would seem like an obvious driving factor in subscription trends, because younger people who might replace older subscribers are less likely to have the disposable income necessary for a lump sum upfront payment. Indeed, when we asked for comments on Facebook, the floodgates opened, with reflection after reflection from younger industry folks stating in one way or another that they cannot afford to subscribe. One was Kathryn Huey, former business manager for the Blue Man Group, current general manager of D.C.’s Studio Theatre, who said that subscriptions “are expensive, very true. They were nothing I could dream to do when I was younger.” Perhaps driven by necessity, the current crop of theatregoers “more than ever are looking for a deal, or a way to save,” argued Eric Pugh, director of marketing and communications of Asolo Repertory Theatre in Florida.

[Frequent theatergoers may know the name Blue Man Group, but for others: it’s a performance-art troupe, formed in 1987, known for productions incorporating many varieties of music and art. The performers, known as Blue Men, paint their skin blue, always appear in groups of three, and are mute during shows.

[Washington’s Studio Theatre is a company many of whose productions I’ve seen over the years.  See my many reports on this blog for an impression of their work.]

Chad Bauman, executive director of Milwaukee Rep, maintained that his company has retained its substantial subscriber base during the pandemic in part because they offer cheap subscription packages and avoid last-minute deals for single-ticket buyers that “undermine the value proposition of subscriptions.” Milwaukee Rep is in the minority on this point; at most companies, paying upfront doesn’t save subscribers much money in the long run. A recent AT survey found that subscribers save just $1 per ticket vs. single-ticket buyers, on average.

Even theatres where subscriptions offer real savings, like Bristol Riverside, haven’t seen a boost because of it, making it unclear whether cost is really a meaningful signal or barrier. According to Kaissar, it hasn’t been “a winning message when we’ve gone hard on how cheap it is.” At Amphibian Stage in Fort Worth, Texas, said outgoing artistic director Kathleen Culebro, “Our most popular subscription package is actually not our cheapest.” Numbers would seem to side with Kaissar and Culebro, at least on a macro level; our earlier survey found no clear link between trends in audience attendance and trends in ticket pricing over the past five years.

Whatever the driving force, Kaissar understandably views Bristol Riverside’s decline in subscribers as a big problem. Fewer subscribers means that her marketing budget has ballooned; loyal subscribers need only a single email every year to remind them to re-up, but “my single ticket buyer, I need to advertise to.” Articulating a version of the reasoning that, in the decades since Danny Newman’s groundbreaking book Subscribe Now! [1977 (3rd ed., 1981)‎, Theatre Communications Group] made subscription the dominant model for many performing arts organizations, Kaissar noted that without a significant subscriber bloc ponying up for a whole season in advance, each lesser-known title becomes a massive risk. Without a strong base of subscribers, “I don’t know how we make new work. I don’t know how we push the art form forward. I don’t know how we introduce people to things they don’t know. I don’t know how we support playwrights.”

At Theater Mu in the Twin Cities [located specifically in Saint Paul, Minnesota], the subscription numbers aren’t so hot either, but Lianna McLernon, Mu’s marketing and communications director, and Wesley Mouri, the theatre’s development director, don’t see it as a problem. Mu has lost about half of their subscribers since 2019, but single tickets are up twofold. While McLernon is quick to emphasize that the theatre still does offer subscriptions and “they are important to us and we love our subscribers,” Mouri explained that “being an Asian American theatre company is unique in the sense that the Asian diaspora is the most diverse diaspora that exists.” In practical terms that means that Mu audiences are “very specifically keyed into the specific culture of each show. The Hmong audience is not necessarily going to come see the Kung Fu Zombie show [The Kung Fu Zombies Saga by Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay; 22 July-13 August 2023], which was about Lao experiences.”

There are many ways to measure growth, and Mu’s recent efforts to diversify their offerings outside the East Asian community have meant a massive influx of new audiences. Their audiences tend to be younger and more economically diverse than the typical theatregoer too; Mu offers a Pay As You Are program to every performance of every play, allowing patrons to purchase tickets for as little as $10. Institutional giving to the theatre has also doubled, a rarity in recent years, which helps release the pressure on ticket revenue to foot the bills.

While a theatre like Bristol Riverside sees subscriptions as a way to subsidize risk taking, at a theatre like Mu, the opposite is true. As Mouri and McLernon put it, Mu’s “focus on the diversifying of stories and representation” wouldn’t be possible if they were catering to “the same 200 people.” As Bay Street’s Tracy Mitchell put it, “Subscriptions are valuable for some of us, and not for others.”

While some survey respondents, like Mu, still offer subscriptions but have begun to direct their marketing strategies away from retaining and gaining subscribers, Chicago’s Congo Square Theatre “shifted away from subscriptions completely” to focus on “a radical generosity model to combat high costs associated with theatre,” as artistic director Ericka Ratcliff put it. People’s Light in Malvern, Pa., has focused its efforts on engaging regular attendees who are not subscribers. Though subscribers “can be terrific brand ambassadors for us,” as former managing director Erica Ezold put it, “our overall marketing strategy has shifted from subscribers as the first priority.”

But even most theatres who have lost subscribers have not abandoned the model, at least not for now. Many companies are offering perks, like drink tickets, subscriber-only events, and parking passes, to entice people to subscribe. City Lights Theater Company in San Jose, Calif., is emphasizing the value of community and belonging as a primary benefit to subscriptions, writing tailored welcome emails to each new subscriber.

American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco is focused first on bringing in single-ticket buyers, then on converting them to subscribers; similarly, ZACH Theatre in Austin waits until the first show of each season has closed to roll out one of their packages. Cadence Theatre Company in Richmond, Va., is offering early-bird discounts; Amphibian Stage has launched an under-40 package. Weston Theater Company in Vermont said they’re “streamlining” the subscription process. Penobscot Theatre Company in Bangor, Maine, is experimenting with a “three-tiered approach,” including a $20-per-seat package for first-time subscribers and a premium-level “true cost of the ticket” package. TheatreWorks Silicon Valley [Palo Alto, California] is seeing success with smaller packages. Main Street Theater in Houston is rebranding subscriptions as “season tickets,” because “subscriptions is what the monthly charge for streaming is called,” reasoned executive artistic director Rebecca Greene Udden.

Clive Worsley, executive director of Cal Shakes [California Shakespeare Theater] in Orinda, Calif., said he believes that the “days are numbered for the single-entity subscription model,” and thinks the answer lies in “offering membership packages that could get you in the door to multiple locations, like a passport.”

The sheer multiplicity of opinions and data trends is both exhausting and exhilarating. As there is no clear picture on the state of subscriptions, they are a bit of a black box: They can be a financial barrier or a democratic opportunity. They can be flexible or rigid. They can stifle or empower. They can be a massive financial engine, an ancillary benefit, or a distraction. And there is no clear crystal ball about where they’re headed: Many are up, twice as many are down, plenty are recovering. Amid the dizzying variety of approaches, one universal truth is that every company is moving somewhere on this issue; no one is meeting this extraordinary moment by standing still.

As she struggles to figure out what’s driving the drop in subscriptions, Kaissar said, “The model, whether subscriptions or anything else, is outmoded, and we’ve got to get it up to speed, fast. Long term, people clearly want to come together to hear stories; 10 years from now it will look better than it did before.” Pausing on that bit of hopeful thinking, she added, “In the short term, how we get there is terrifying.”

[Rosie Brownlow-Calkin is an Actors' Equity Association actor and assistant professor of theater at the University of Nevada, Reno.  She has written extensively about the economics of the theater industry.]

 

'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.]