Development (continued)
[In the first installment of the section of this series (Part 2, published on Wednesday, 29 May) on Tectonic Theater Project’s verbatim theater production of Here There Are Blueberries, I posted three articles discussing the method writers Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich used to create the text—including the performance text—of the play. One of those articles, from the San Diego Union-Tribune, includes an excerpt from an interview with the two writers.
[I wanted to continue that line of examining this intriguing production, so I’m posting a second “Development” section, Part 3 of the series, that’s exclusively a presentation of published interviews. I’m starting with one that’s solely with Tectonic artistic director Kaufman, who touches on other scripts he’s written since forming the company in 1991, and continuing through two joint interviews with his writing partner Amanda Gronich, and concluding with a different perspective in an interview of one of the cast members, Elizabeth Stahlmann, and the real-life archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum she portrays, Dr. Rebecca Erbelding.
[As I suggested in Part 2, I recommend reading the preceding two parts before engaging in Part 3. (Part 1 was posted on Sunday, 26 May.) The principal reason for that is that I’ve added explanations and identifications in Part 1 (mostly) and Part 2 that will help readers follow the interviews below.]
“MOISÉS KAUFMAN
PLAYS WITH FORM”
by Nathaniel G.
Nesmith
[This American Theatre interview with Kaufman, which was posted on the AT website on 12 May 2023, at the time of the run of Blueberries at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., is an examination of the writer-director’s play-devising methodology. In addition to Here There Are Blueberries, interviewer Nathaniel G. Nesmith asks Kaufman about several of his earlier plays; he also covers some other issues of Kaufman’s theatrical career.]
Both with his Tectonic collaborators and on his own, the playwright-director has always explored the architecture of theatre and its potential social impact.
The multitalented playwright-director Moisés Kaufman is the artistic director and founder of New York City’s Tectonic Theater Project; he is also a co-founder of Miami New Drama at the Colony Theatre in Miami Beach. Beyond earning nominations for Drama Desk, Tony, and Emmy awards, he is a winner of an Obie and a Lucille Lortel Award.
Born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, Kaufman earned an undergraduate business degree from Universidad Metropolitana in Venezuela, where he acted and studied theatre, before moving to the U.S. in 1987 and studying theatre at New York University. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, and in 2016, President Barack Obama awarded him the National Medal of Arts. [There’s a brief biography of Kaufman in my afterword to Part 1.]
The Laramie Project (2000), which he created with the Tectonic Theater, brought him and the company international acclaim. Other major credits include two of his own plays (1997’s Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, a hit Off-Broadway, and 2007’s 33 Variations on Broadway), as well as stints as director of Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo in 2011 [see my performance report on ROT on 11 June 2011], Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song, and Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife. He has worked with many legendary actors, from Robin Williams to Jane Fonda. The last play he directed on Broadway was the musical Paradise Square (2022).
Mr. Kaufman is always exceptionally busy, but he took time
out of a busy schedule to have a Zoom conversation with me last year about his
career as a theatre artist and an art activist. His newest work with
Tectonic, Here There Are Blueberries, had just been staged
at La Jolla Playhouse [31 July-21 August 2022]; it is currently running at
Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre [12-28 May 2023], and will be part
of New York Theatre Workshop’s 2023-24 season [13 May-30 June 2024].
NATHANIEL G.
NESMITH: You were born and raised in an Orthodox Jewish family in Caracas.
Can you tell me a bit about your upbringing, your family, and what your parents
did in Venezuela?
MOISÉS KAUFMAN: My father was a Holocaust survivor. He was born in Romania, and during the war he hid in the basement of a building, and when the war was over, he fled to Venezuela with his brother and his mother. At that time, it was very hard to get a visa for the United States, but it was easier to get a visa for Venezuela. He also had relatives down there, so they went to Venezuela. It’s the immigrant story: They arrived in Venezuela without any money, and my father was at that time, I think 20, and he started working in the back of a deli. He slowly went to university, became an accountant, and learned the trade. Then he opened his own supermarket, and then he owned a few other supermarkets. He was very much a self-made man.
My mother: Her parents were Ukrainian and had arrived in Venezuela in the 1930s. It was a generation before my father’s, also escaping the war. My mother was born in Venezuela, and she met and married my father. The experience was interesting, because I was born in the very Orthodox Jewish community in a very Catholic and very machista country [machista is Spanish for ‘male chauvinist’], and by the time I was 11 I realized that I was gay. Every single cultural artifact around me told me that what I was was diseased, sick, and perverted. From very early on I realized that I was the other, because I was a Jew in a Catholic country. But then, even within the Jewish community, I was the other, because I was gay in a mostly straight environment.
When you were a student at New York University, Arthur Bartow [1936-2021; professional actor, producer, and director; was the Chair and Artistic Director of the Drama Department at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts] was then the dean at NYU’S Tisch School of the Arts. He is the one who advised you to start your own theatre company, which in turn led the birth of the Tectonic Theater Project. As an emerging theatre artist, what other important advice did you get from theatre artists that you respected?
Before I arrived in New York, I went to college in Venezuela and was a member of a theatre company there. After I left NYU, Arthur said, “Go, make your own work.” I think one mistake young artists make is that they try to fight to get opportunities that other people are going to give them. The best advice I got was, “If you don’t find those opportunities, make your own opportunities.” There are basements all over the city. If there’s a basement, there’s a play. You can get a couple of actors together and start doing the work. That’s the most important advice: Do the work. Yes, it’s important to network. Yes, it’s important to find an agent. Yes, it’s important to find other people who will hire you. But it’s also important for you not to wait for that and to do your own work.
After you completed your education at NYU, you and Jeff LaHoste founded Tectonic Theater Project in 1991. Where did the funding come from?
At the beginning we did what a lot of theatre companies do: We would do bake sales, and we would ask for donations. The first play Tectonic Theater Project ever did, we did it in a synagogue. We made a deal with the owner of the synagogue that we would clean the synagogue for three weeks if they gave us three weeks of performance. And they did. We worked for three weeks cleaning the space so that we could perform there. The experiences of those first five years of the company were exuberant and exhilarating, but also terrifying and very depressing. Many times there would be fewer people in the audience than there were people onstage. We once did a play with two actors, and there was only one person in the audience.
It was hard. We dealt with a lot of the same things that many new companies deal with, which is, people don’t know about you, especially in New York. In New York, there are 200 shows every night. It took us a long time to find our audience; it was a slow process. What happened was we did Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde—that was when we broke through. People saw the work, and they loved the work. Things changed from there.
Let’s stay with 1991. On Nov. 22, 1991, a day after your 28th birthday, Mel Gussow did not give you a birthday present with his NY Times review of Women in Beckett [1991; Off-Off-Broadway; review: “Listening to The Women Of Beckett,” sec. C (“The Arts”)], which you directed at Theatre for the New City. What did such a review mean to you at that time?
That production of Women in Beckett was the first production of Tectonic Theater Project. Look, it was devastating. The first legit review of the company, and he didn’t like our production. Yes, I did take a lot of liberties with [Samuel] Beckett [Irish; 1906-89]. One of the things that was important for me was the reason I created the Tectonic Theater Project: because I was bored with a lot of the theatre I was seeing around me. It was all realism and naturalism. You went to the theatre, and you felt like you were in the studio for a sitcom. I thought sitcoms are better done for television and film. What are the theatrical languages we can explore in the theatre? What is it that we can do in the theatre that those other mediums cannot do? During the first five years of the company, we did our own work, but we also staged playwrights who were dealing with those same questions. So we did Beckett and we did Brecht and we did Sophie Treadwell [1885-1970], an American Expressionist playwright. We did young American playwrights who were screwing with form. When we did Beckett, we were having a conversation about form with Beckett, and Mr. Gussow didn’t care for the liberties that we took. In a way it was devastating—and in a way it was kind of liberating. We weren’t surprised, because the work we were doing was daring and pushing the boundaries of what was possible on the stage.
Years later, of course, Ben Brantley at the Times gave you a major thumbs up for Gross Indecency, your first produced play as a playwright and director. The play also won the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Play. Were you prepared for the type of success the play garnered?
No one’s ever prepared for that kind of success. For me, what was exciting was that for the first five years of the company, we were doing other people’s plays. And then I said, If we’re really being daring about theatrical form, it’s not enough to do other people’s plays; we have to write our own plays. So I decided to write this play, the first play I ever wrote, and it became a huge hit. It ran for two years in New York, and then it became one of the most performed plays in America that season. That was very encouraging. As a theatre company, we weren’t prepared. The way that we took reservations was that we had an answering machine in my apartment, and then the answering machine blew up the next day because that review was such a rave that everybody wanted tickets.
The Laramie Project, which you also directed, explored Matthew Shepard’s brutal torture and murder in 1998. His death became a very important cultural and theatrical benchmark, and the play has been extraordinarily successful. Not only did it have many professional productions, but it had many productions in colleges, high schools, and community theatres. If you had to travel this journey again to bring about The Laramie Project, what would you do differently?
Nothing. As you said, The Laramie Project is still one of the most performed plays in America, and so I think, regardless of what one thinks of it as a play, it did exactly what it needed to do.
What is it about The Laramie Project that make[s] it still so relevant, do you think?
I think there are two things: One is the subject matter of the play. Unfortunately, we’re still in the middle of that conversation about gender identity and sexual orientation and rights, and what is the social contract that we live under as Americans. But I think the other thing that was interesting was the form of the play, because it’s not only a play that uses the language of the people of Laramie; it is a play that speaks of a theatre company going to Laramie to create a play. You know how I said before that for me, I created the Tectonic Theater Project to explore theatrical language and theatrical forms; I was bored with the kind of theatre I was seeing. I was really interested in creating a laboratory where I could ask: What is theatrical? How does the theatre speak? And if you look at our plays, whether it was Gross Indecency or The Laramie Project or 33 Variations or, more recently, Here There Are Blueberries, each play is exploring a different form. Gross Indecency was using trial transcripts to explore history. The Laramie Project was done by conducting interviews, having the theatre company go to Laramie, travel to Laramie, spend a year conducting interviews with the people of the town. 33 Variations was written using Beethoven’s musical sketches. Here There Are Blueberries was created using photographs of the Third Reich. So there’s a real desire to write plays that really question what is theatrical.
You made your directing debut on Broadway with Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife [2003], a play that dealt with a gay transvestite’s survival in Nazi Germany and Soviet East Berlin. What was unique about that experience?
Doing that kind of work on Broadway was a very important milestone in my career, because I Am My Own Wife is very much in the world of Gross Indecency and The Laramie Project. It uses found text as a source and then constructs a narrative around it. So to have that kind of work done on Broadway was a gigantic moment, a step forward, because I felt like, “Oh, we are now mainstream if this kind of work can happen on Broadway.”
In 2009, you directed your own play on Broadway, 33 Variations, which starred Jane Fonda as a musicologist obsessed with Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. What can you share about that experience, and about directing Fonda, who hadn’t been onstage since 1963 [Strange Interlude by Eugene O’Neill]?
Again, that was another milestone for me, because it was the first play I had written that made it to Broadway. You know, there’s something terrifying and wonderful about having your play done there. Jane Fonda is a magnificent actor, but also a magnificent human being. I just really loved her and loved working with her. And, as you said, she hadn’t done theatre in 50 years. But she had such craft, such beauty, and such ability to do the work. It was really good.
In 2010 you staged the opera Puss in Boots (El Gato Con Botas) at the New Victory Theatre [on West 42nd Street, specializing in theater for young people]. This was Spanish composer Xavier Montsalvatge’s [Spanish; 1912-2002] 1947 one-act chamber opera, but in your version you combined puppeteers and human actors. At the time you were quoted as saying, “I’ve never been more scared in my life.” What scared you about this project?
I took on an opera that’s usually performed by humans and had it performed by puppets. The puppets were created by one of the most famous international puppet theatre companies, Blind Summit. It was really joyous, really wonderful—but it was just very scary. Again, it was another formal experiment. As you can see, there is a theme emerging in this interview, which is, “tectonic” means the art and science of structure. I’m interested in how things are built, and in what forms you can use on the stage to create new theatrical experiences. For me, doing Puss in Boots with puppets in an opera was part of that formal exploration.
In 2011, you directed Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo on Broadway. What can you share about that experience, including working with Robin Williams?
We all know he was a brilliant actor. He was also a brilliant man. The thing I remember the most about that experience is that there were seven actors in that cast, he and six actors, who had never been on Broadway. They were young people starting their lives, and every day he would go out to lunch with the actors. He was so humble.
Here There Are Blueberries was created in collaboration with Miami New Drama [workshopped, 31 May-3 June 2018]. You conceived, wrote, and directed it, in collaboration with Amanda Gronich and Barbara Pitts McAdams from Tectonic Theater Project. The play explores an album of World War II photographs that was received at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. The play uses first-person accounts, interviews, and historical artifacts to reveal things about the Holocaust. What more can you share about this production?
It was very scary, because we were using photographs taken during the World War about the Nazis in a concentration camp; I was interested in formally asking whether the photographs could carry part of the narrative, and they did. That was very interesting.
Theatre is a collaborative art form. But as a director, how you know when the time for collaboration is over, and it’s time for the big decisions to be made by the main person holding the reins?
It’s a very organic process. With Tectonic Theater Project, we always say that we are a collective because we collaborate in creating the play. But in every project that the Tectonic Theater Project has ever done, there’s always one author. When we did Uncommon Sense, Andy Paris was the one who was, as you say, holding the reins [written and directed by Paris; 2017, Sheen Center for Thought & Culture’s Loreto Theater in Greenwich Village]. He was the one who was making the decisions about the text.
Your body of work has had major impact in the U.S. and abroad. What is it that you feel you have not yet done?
I sometimes feel that I would like to achieve in film what I have achieved in theatre. I think that I and the artists of the Tectonic Theater Project have been successful in, if not changing the paradigm, at least shifting the paradigm of how theatre is made in America, and what kind of plays theatre can create. It would be great to be able to do that in film.
In 2016, you were awarded the National Medal of Arts and Humanities by President Barack Obama. You were the first Venezuelan to receive this award. What did all of this mean to you?
It was a wonderful moment of recognition. Awards in the theatre are usually for one play, until you become very old, and you get the lifetime achievement award. I am not that old; I was 53 when I got this award. So it didn’t feel like a lifetime achievement award, and yet it felt like a recognition of a lifetime of work. So that was really wonderful.
Correct me if I am wrong, but you said that the work that interests you most is work that explores the connection between the personal and the political. If this is true, will you expand on that premise?
I think that every interaction between human beings occurs in a political context. I think that, for theatre to fully realize its potential, it must take that into account.
You have referred to yourself as an “activist in art.” Would you expand on that premise and its connection to your works as a playwright and director?
Every time that you share a story with the world you become an activist, because your story is either reinforcing or questioning the status quo. I think that it’s important for artists to be aware of that power that we have.
You said you are Venezuelan, Jewish, gay, Latino, playwright, director. Spanish is your first language—you have a lot there. Anything I am leaving out?
No, I think that’s plenty. I am often surprised that all of the plays that I have written, I have written in English, which is not my mother tongue. I think all theatre in a way is an act of translation for me.
I know this is a difficult question, but if you had to pick one of your talents, would you want to be known as a director or as a playwright?
I want to be known as a theatremaker.
You have suggested that America is the place to fulfill one’s dreams. Have you fulfilled your dreams?
It depends on the day when you ask me.
[Nathaniel G. Nesmith holds an MFA in playwriting and a Ph.D. in theater from Columbia University.]
* *
* *
“INTERVIEW: IN HERE
THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES,
TELL A NEW
HOLOCAUST STORY”
by David
Gordon
[David
Gordon’s interview with Blueberries co-writers Kaufman and Gronich ran on TheaterMania
on 24 April 2024, during the preview run of the play at the New York Theatre Workshop.]
The detective drama brings an album of Nazi-era photographs to life at New York Theatre Workshop.
In 2007, a photo album made its way to Rebecca Erbelding, an archivist at the United States Holocaust Museum. The book, now known as the Höcker Album, contained more than 100 images believed to have been collected by SS officer Karl-Friedrich Höcker, which depicted Auschwitz commandants Richard Baer and Rudolph Höss, as well as “Angel of Death” physician Josef Mengele, going about their daily lives. [See “In the Shadow of Horror, SS Guardians Relax and Frolic” by Neil A. Lewis in “The Arts” section of the New York Times on 19 September 1990, posted in Part 2.]
When Tectonic Theatre Project founder Moisés Kaufman heard about the album, he instantly imagined a play — a detective story about an archivist unravelling the mystery behind these photographs, where the people in the images become characters themselves. Writing with fellow company member Amanda Gronich, Here There Are Blueberries has had runs at La Jolla Playhouse and Shakespeare Theatre Company, and is now having its New York premiere at New York Theatre Workshop.
This new drama is a cautionary tale, the writers assert, reminding us of the importance of not just remembering the victims, but the perpetrators, too.
The work of
archivists is important, and it’s also one of those jobs where people don’t
understand the complexities. Why was it important for you to immortalize that
in Here There Are Blueberries?
Moisés Kaufman: I find great nobility in their pursuit. To spend hours focusing on the minutiae of history is so moving to me. It’s not dissimilar to what we do in theater, or, at least, the kind of theater that I like to do. We go into a space, and we try to understand something about the human condition. One of the reasons we wanted to write this play was to honor this pursuit.
Amanda Gronich: It’s so important for all of us to participate in the telling of our history, and to examine the artifacts of our own lives and families. The telling of history is in no small part based on what history leaves behind, and if we don’t decipher the evidence and explore the mysteries therein, we don’t get the full story.
This is a play that’s based on a photo album of, essentially, people going about their lives. Until you realize —
Moisés: Until you realize what’s outside the frame. And that struck me. My father is a Holocaust survivor. I always wanted to write a play about the Holocaust, but the Holocaust is the historical event that has been most-written about in the history of humanity. What else is there to say? I saw that photo and I thought “Oh, this is new.” I had a very strong visceral response to the photos because it’s exactly what you said. It looked like any outing any of us could have gone on. I thought there was a play there.
What we do at Tectonic Theatre Project is explore theatrical languages and forms. We started the company because we were bored to death with realism and naturalism. In every play we do, we try to explore a new form. Gross Indecency was based on trial transcripts. Laramie Project was based on interviews. 33 Variations was based on a piece of music. Could we make a play in which photographs carry a large part of the narrative? That was the question.
Amanda: If we can invite the audience to step inside the photo album of a Nazi, what does that look like? From a practical standpoint, this artifact comes out of a box at the beginning of the play, and it begins to take over the stage. The actors are engaging with the pictures like they’re scene partners, and we’re inviting the audience to go on this detective story by stepping into the selfies of an SS officer.
Moisés: When we went to La Jolla, we didn’t know if this experiment was going to work. We didn’t know if the pictures were going to carry the narrative as much as we needed them to. But it was incredible to do it there, because I’ve never heard that kind of silence from an audience. They’re watching the actors, but they’re also scrutinizing the images and forming emotional ties with the people in the photographs. We have been able to make the people in the images characters in the play.
Amanda: I’m always so fascinated by the reactions that we get. When we were writing, the thing that was most terrifying for me was wondering what would happen if survivors came to see this play. You’re going through the full playwright’s angst of “how dare I explore this material in this way?” We had dinner with a remarkable woman who was at Auschwitz during the time these photographs were taken, and Rebecca at the museum spoke with another Auschwitz survivor who was there at the time these photographs were taken, and they’ve both said that this story must be told so the audience can see it for themselves.
What is the story behind the title, Here There Are Blueberries?
Moisés:
This is an album of photographs of Auschwitz, and you’re taking the care to put
all the photographs exactly where you want them. And then you can see that he
carefully wrote down “Here There Are Blueberries.” [In German, the caption
reads: Hier gibt es Blaubeeren.]
Moisés: For a while, we were going to call the play The Album, and everybody hated it. And then we were going to call it The Album — Here There Are Blueberries [the title used for the 2018 workshop in Miami Beach]. And everybody hated that title even more. There are still people who don’t like the title. But then they come see the show and they understand that it’s a really good title.
Amanda: That’s the only title it could have been. Like, how do you look at that picture and that’s the caption you write?
Moisés: For the last 70 years, scholarship has been focused on what happened to the victims. In the last 10 years, there’s been a shift, and more scholarship has been focusing on the perpetrators and how they did it. How can you eat blueberries next to a concentration camp? And I think it’s time. That generation is passing away and it’s time to not forget them, not by retelling their stories, which of course are important, but by looking at how the people who did it, did it.
Amanda: There’s an incredible statistic I came across in my research. In a population of roughly 71 million people at the time, it took one million people to carry out the actions, and 70 million people to look the other way. How did this happen? How did they carry out those actions? And how did they see themselves as they did it? If we portray them as rabid sociopathic monsters, we learn nothing.
Moisés: Not only do we learn nothing, but we perpetuate the idea that they’re different from us.
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
[Born and raised in New York City, David Gordon is a Broadway critic and the managing editor of TheaterMania. He’s also the president of the Outer Critics Circle. Gordon, a graduate of the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College, is a passionate advocate for the Broadway theater community.]
* *
* *
“INTERVIEW: MOISÉS KAUFMAN AND AMANDA
GRONICH
[Slant Magazine, an online publication that features reviews of movies, music, TV, DVDs, theater, and video games, as well as interviews with actors, directors, and musicians, ran this interview with the two writers on 7 May 2024, just under a week before Blueberries opened at NYTW.]
The play examines the provenance of a photo album from Auschwitz.
A photograph in the New York Times, showing a group of people relaxing at a vacation resort, caught the eye of playwright and director Moisés Kaufman in 2007. The seemingly innocuous image was shocking due to when and where it was taken. The picture, dated 1944, depicted a group of Nazi families on holiday at the Solahütte resort, which was situated within the boundaries of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
The snapshot was part of a memory book belonging to Karl Höcker, an SS officer who served at the time as administrative assistant to the head of the notorious death camp. The historical artifact was discovered by a U.S. officer in Germany after the war who sent it, more than six decades later, to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Kaufman is the founder of the Tectonic Theater Project, an innovative theater company whose experimental theater documentaries shed light on pivotal moments in history, reflecting both the time when the events occurred and our contemporary responses. Tectonic is best known for Gross Indecency, based on transcripts from the 1895 Oscar Wilde trials and The Laramie Project, about the 1998 murder of gay university student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. The company’s latest production, Here There Are Blueberries, inspired by the Nazi officer’s personal photo album, is currently running at New York Theater Workshop following acclaimed runs in San Diego and Washington, D.C.
Kaufman co-wrote the play with Amanda Gronich, a charter member of the Tectonic Theater Project who was part of the team that travelled to Wyoming to co-create The Laramie Project. The two writers spoke with me recently about making Here There Are Blueberries.
Tell me about the genesis of the project.
Moisés Kaufman: I’m the son of a Holocaust survivor and I always thought that I wanted to write a play about the Holocaust, but, you know, it’s the single historical event that’s been most written about in the history of literature. So, as a playwright, I didn’t know what else I wanted to say about it. But when I saw the photos of these people frolicking in the woods, eating blueberries and playing an accordion, I kept thinking, “What’s happening outside this frame?” Outside the frame, they’re killing 1.1 million people [at Auschwitz].
So I contacted the archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum who had received the album and asked if I could interview her. Coincidentally, she had just seen a production of The Laramie Project, so she knew of our work. She walked me through the process that she went through trying to figure out who everyone was, what they were doing, and what was happening in the camp at the time the photos were taken. And as she was telling me that, I thought, “I know how to tell this story.” This is a detective story. I reached out to Amanda, who’s been a company member of the Tectonic Theater Project for many years, and we started working.
Amanda Gronich: What was remarkable for me, aside from my Tectonic history, for 10 years I was a writer in nonfiction television. And unlike all of my colleagues, I’d never worked on anything about the Holocaust or World War II. When Moisés showed me the pictures, I said, “Well, it’s impossible to make a play out of this.” But then I thought, if we can figure out a way, what an extraordinary journey for the audience to go on. It begins in a box, this collection of photographs, and as the play progresses the album sort of starts to take over the stage. So, theatrically, we’re inviting the audience to step inside the album. The actors are interacting with the photos, like scene partners. [It’s like] the photos themselves become characters in the play. It’s such a dynamic and exciting way to experience this material [and] unique to theater.
How does this new play fit into the mission of your company?
MK: All of the work that the Tectonic does occurs at the intersection of the personal and the political. And I think that this certainly falls into that category. You know, the key thing about Tectonic is that we’re interested in how the theater speaks; we’re interested in new theatrical forms. Tectonic means the art and science of structure, architecture, architectonic. We started the company because we were really bored with realism and naturalism and we wanted to [explore] other theatrical vocabularies. How do we use theatricality to differentiate what happens on the stage versus what happens on a TV screen or a movie screen? And now here’s this idea of creating a play, half of which is happening in the photographs.
Did you use the same interviewing and collaborative techniques that you’ve used in your previous projects?
MK: Amanda and I both interviewed the people in the play. But more importantly, we got into a room with actors and we used our devising technique, “moment work,” to create the play.
[✵(The previous bracketed inserts have all been from the writer and editor of Slant. This one is from Rick of ROT; I’ll mark any further notes from me with the star.) I have added a brief explanation of the Tectonic terms ‘devising’ and ‘Moment Work’ in the introductions to both Parts 1 and 2. Their use is peculiar to the company.]
AG: The other thing that was very special for us with this production is that we were able to bring designers into the room at a very strategic point in the development. Part of Tectonics’ vision is that designers are a part of the devising process from as early as you can manage it.
How did the technical process evolve as you created the production?
MK: I think we wanted to really articulate the relationship between the archivists and the work they do. So the actors who play the archivists who are trying to delve into this historical artifact would handle the projectors and images that we would bring into the rehearsal room. They would transform the images and articulate them; they would add sound and, you know, zoom in. It became a very organic and visceral way of working with images. But it had to be theatrical.
In the play we see the archivists wrestle with the ethical issue of whether the museum should actually be publicizing the photos in the album. Can you talk a little about that?
AG: What’s so remarkable about this story is [that the] album arrives at the desk of, at the time, the youngest archivist on the team at the museum. And inside are what I like to call the selfies of an SS officer. The album portrays the perpetrators on their days off. There’s not a single prisoner in any of the photos. So [the museum’s] moral dilemma is that they’re a memorial museum and their charter is to tell the story of the victims. And yet, you cannot exclude the perpetrators. There’s a line in the play: “Six million people did not murder themselves.” So how do you tell the story of the perpetrators? What’s so striking to me is the telling of history is in no small part determined by what history leaves behind. And so I think this artifact offered the museum an opportunity to tell the perpetrator story in a very unique way.
Would you say that’s a quandary you faced as well when putting on this play?
AG: Oh absolutely. You know, allowing oneself as a writer—and I’ll speak for myself—to step into the shoes of the perpetrators, to really allow yourself to explore their story from their point of view . . . how do they tell the story of the Holocaust? I constantly feel sitting on my shoulders the survivors, their descendants, all of the victims—the 1.1 million people who died in that camp alone. And yet, you know, every survivor that we’ve shared this material with, without exception, has said, “You must tell the story. We who lived through it, we’re not surprised to see this side of the men and women. But for those who have led a pampered life and have never experienced what it was like to go through Auschwitz, tell this story, show the pictures.”
It’s most upsetting to see the young women in the photos—essentially secretaries [✵SS-Helferinnen – ‘female helpers’ employed by the SS]—who seem oblivious to the horrific death industry of which they are part. Do you think this is because they were indoctrinated as youth to follow the Nazi party, or were they able to compartmentalize their work from their daily lives?
MK: I think that’s very much at the heart of the play. How can you eat blueberries next to a concentration camp? How can you have a perfectly natural normal life when your daily job includes the murder of 1.1 million people? And the way that we think about it is this question: What’s the difference between culpability, complicity, and complacency? Those girls, they were sending telexes telling Berlin what was going on. They were part of the industrial complex, but they didn’t kill anybody. So they were complicit, but they weren’t culpable.
There’s that line in the play that somebody called the archivist and said, “I know I couldn’t be the head of the camp, I know I couldn’t be Dr. Mengele, but could I have been one of these women?” We interviewed an ethicist and he said that the thing about ethics is that, unless you have a strong ethical system before it gets tested, you’re gonna end up constructing an ethical system that justifies your behavior. I think that’s really powerful.
[Those women] probably compartmentalized. I think that might be one of the answers. Another answer is that they were taught that it was the right thing to do so they didn’t need to compartmentalize. Other people did it because it was a good job at that moment when there were no jobs in Germany. There are as many answers as there are people involved in the event.
AG: It’s important for a moral code to be in place if you hope to live through that morality when crisis strikes. The Germans went to great lengths to make all of this legal, to codify it and to make the engine of the “Final Solution” exist within a legal framework. When I was doing research, I uncovered this incredible vibrant PR program to get [the young women] to sign up. It was packaged as this wonderful adventure: “Come, have an adventure in the East; come serve the cause. You’ll meet a husband, you’ll spend time with your friends from the Hitler youth.”
The “normal lives” led by the perpetrators at the camps has become a part of current conversations about the Holocaust. For example, The Zone of Interest [✵2023 film by Jonathan Glazer; see note in Part 2].
MK: There’s been a shift in scholarship. For the longest time, the scholars were focused mainly on the victims and their stories. Now I think there’s more interest in the perpetrator story.
AG: One of the other things the play explores is the story of a businessman in Germany who, when the pictures were broadcast online, he clicks on the link to one and sees his grandfather. He knew his grandfather had been a Nazi doctor, but here he is walking on the grounds of Auschwitz. So he embarks on his own detective story. He begins working with the museum, trying to contact other descendants whose relatives are in the photos. What I’m so fascinated by is they don’t have the luxury of distance, these people. They’re descendants of the Nazis who committed the Holocaust—people who are my age today, the third and fourth generation. Now they’re wrestling with their responsibilities to the telling of this history and their own family’s story. They’re looking at their own artifacts, their own photographs, the things that they grew up with around the house that tell the story of the Holocaust in a very different way.
[✵The Nazi doctor’s grandson Gronich refers to here is Tilman Tauber, a German filmmaker. He’s featured in the 60 Minutes segment that is Part 1 of this series.]
Will you take the play to Europe?
MK: Yes. We’re in conversations with the German Consulate in America because they came to see it in Washington and responded very positively.
AG: I’ll be so curious to see this experience with a German audience.
[Gerard Raymond is a travel and arts writer based in New York City. His writing has appeared in Broadway Direct, TDF Stages, the New York Times, the Village Voice, and other publications.]
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“A TALK WITH A
HOLOCAUST HISTORIAN AND
IN ‘HERE THERE ARE
BLUEBERRIES’ AT STC”
by Chad Kinsman
[For a change of pace, I’m posting an interview of two different subjects: an actor in the cast of Blueberries and the real-life woman she portrays. It gives an inkling of the work not of the creators of the script of this verbatim play, but of the performers who will recreate it on the stage. The interview appeared on DC Theater Arts, a website that covers performing arts, including reviews, features, and news in Washington, D.C.; Baltimore; and New York City, on 7 May 2023.]
Elizabeth Stahlmann stars as Dr. Rebecca Erbelding, the real-life archivist who received a mysterious album of Nazi photographs.
An old theater adage says actors must be their character’s best friend. For Elizabeth Stahlmann, that’s not too hard these days. The actor is returning to her role as Dr. Rebecca Erbelding in Here There Are Blueberries at Shakespeare Theatre Company, after starring in its premiere at San Diego’s La Jolla Playhouse last summer. The play centers on a mysterious album of photos sent to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum showing Nazis at leisure. To prepare, Elizabeth spoke with a real-life archivist and historian at the USHMM, Dr. Rebecca Erbelding. The two hit it off.
Written by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, directed by Kaufman, and devised with members of the Tectonic Theatre Project, Here There Are Blueberries is a work of documentary theater. The company developed the play over a dozen years from interviews with Dr. Erbelding, the families of Holocaust survivors and perpetrators, and others. The full story of the real photo collection, known as the Hoecker album, reveals profound questions about the nature of atrocities, legacies, and the act of keeping, and telling, stories themselves. The play won the 2022 Theater J Trish Vradenburg Jewish Play Prize.
In a joint interview with DC Theater Arts, the connection between Stahlmann and Erbelding was as clear as it was joyous. Read on for their discussion of the play’s origins, their first meeting, and their thoughts on bringing this powerful story to the nation’s capital.
DCTA: What was your experience of the play’s beginning, Dr. Erbelding?
Dr. Rebecca Erbelding: Moisés reached out to me via Facebook Messenger in the fall of 2010. I knew who he was because I had done theater in high school and college. He said he had read about the Hoecker album and was coming down to DC for something else, could he come over to the museum and talk about it? He said something like, “I think there’s a play in this.” I kind of ignored that part because I thought “There’s not a play in this,” but I would still get to meet Moisés and talk to him about this album I find fascinating. So he came down the Friday before Thanksgiving. I took him into the basement of the museum, where our conservation labs were at the time. I don’t know how long he had thought we were going to be there but it was at least two hours. Then he went away. Over the next 13 years, he would do other productions but keep returning to this story, keep coming back into my life. He would ask for more interviews or email about one specific thing. In 2018, there was a reading in Miami, which was the first time I saw anything. I went in completely cold, a wild experience. Then they said it was going to La Jolla, where I got to see it with the amazing cast out there. It actually became a play!
What was your first reaction, Elizabeth, to reading Here There Are Blueberries?
Elizabeth Stahlmann: I was on vacation, in Miami in 2021, and got an audition for the next day. I was like, “What?” I read the script. There was a little bit of Becky in there, but the script was really just taking us through the pictures. It was kind of a skeleton. What I hadn’t realized was, in true Tectonic form, they had been developing a whole visual vocabulary and a whole sonic vocabulary that help tell many aspects of this story.
What about playing a character based on Dr. Ebelding?
Stahlmann: I immediately Googled Becky, like, “Who is this woman? She’s amazing!” There wasn’t a lot of time to encapsulate her, but as it turns out that wasn’t the point of the production. It isn’t about just emulating Becky. They extracted her curiosity, her passion, and her essence and put that in the play. But there are lots of verbatim aspects to the play. When I say words that Becky has actually said, I’m able to access a point of view and a perspective.
When did you two first meet?
Dr. Erbelding: It was a preview night at La Jolla. Did you know I was going to be there?
Stahlmann: I’m one of those weird actors who like to peek at the audience before going out so I can know who’s out there. I was so excited you were there.
Dr. Erbelding: My husband, Matt, and I watched the show. I was talking with Moisés afterward when I saw Elizabeth. Matt took a photo of the two of us minutes later and we’re in the same pose, laser-focused on each other. We mind-melded.
Stahlmann: It was so cool. As an actor, I jump into these worlds and I try to learn as much about these worlds as humanly possible. Then suddenly I’m standing in front of not only the person who I play, so I get to ask questions about her experience, but also a leading expert on the subject matter. How could I not pick her brain about every aspect of this play? It’s thrilling to know her. She’s remarkably smart and articulate, not to talk about her as though she’s not here [laughs].
What’s your experience watching a character based on yourself, Dr. Erbelding?
Dr. Erbelding: I got to sit in on some rehearsal when the actors came to town. At one point, Elizabeth and Moisés were trying to decide some motivation and what the character knew at a particular moment. And finally, they just kind of looked over at me. “It’s what Elizabeth said.” I was very excited to be able to provide my own motivation.
Stahlmann: Two weeks ago, Moisés gave this direction like, “You know when Becky does this. Add that.” And I’m not going to tell you what it is [laughs].
Dr. Erbelding: My husband’s going to notice it. There are a couple things already where he’s like, “Oh, that’s from you.” I will say when [the company] adds something they’re not sure about for my character, they send it to me. At one point I gave them a list of all my favorite archival supplies for props, certain folders, and boxes I like best. Before La Jolla, they asked me what I was wearing in 2007, when the events of the play take place, for the most part. I was a poor 25-year-old grad student. I put together some pictures in which I tried to look cool and sent them to the costume designer, Dede Ayite, who is very cool. Thankfully, the team decided the show is in the present and so ignored all of my fashion choices. But there was a debate in La Jolla about whether I would wear khakis or jeans.
Stahlmann: We went with really nice pants.
Dr. Erbelding: I even talked with Elizabeth about wearing my actual work badge.
What are your thoughts about having Here There Are Blueberries in DC?
Stahlmann: When I was first cast, my fiancé, Andrew, and I drove down to the Holocaust Memorial Museum. I immediately thought this play needs to be done in DC. As a theatergoer, it’s so rare to have a play where the primary source is right down the street. It’s really powerful to witness the collaboration between these art forms and these three national institutions, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Tectonic, and the Museum.
Dr. Erbelding: The play has been part of my life for 13 years. My colleagues have helped out at various points, but I’m really excited and anticipating what they are going to think seeing their work represented. I hope I’ve done them justice. I also think the play asks profound questions about collaboration and complicity that are relevant not just in DC but to all Americans. How do we make decisions and how do we justify things that maybe we shouldn’t be justifying?
Stahlmann: One of the things that continually astounds me is that one of the ways the Holocaust happened is certain procedures were made legal. To do this play in our nation’s capital, where our laws are created, is a really important opportunity for us to really recognize and also question what we are participating in.
[Chad Kinsman is a Washington, D.C.-based dramaturg, theater administrator, and writer. Before D.C., he worked for professional and local theaters in Connecticut for ten years, including Westport Country Playhouse, Bridgeport Theater Company, Elm Shakespeare, the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, and Yale Repertory Theatre. He has also worked with the Island Shakespeare Festival in Puget Sound off Seattle. He is a graduate of Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, and Yale School of Drama.]
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[Coming
up on Tuesday, 4 June, will be Part 4 of this short series, focusing on the
critical reception of Here There Are Blueberries. I
hope readers will come back when I post reports and reviews of the seminal
productions of the play: the Miami Beach workshop, the La Jolla première, the Washington,
D.C., production, and the New York City début.]
