Tom Hanks, Playwright (Part 2)

 

[Below are three reposts that constitute Part 2 of “Tom Hanks, Playwright.”  The first piece is excerpts from the interview of well-known film star Hanks by Stephen Colbert, host of CBS’s Late Show, on 3 November 2025.  Following on that posting are two reviews of the Off-Broadway production, the première of This World of Tomorrow, the play cowritten by Hanks with James Glossman, which ran at The Shed from 18 November to 21 December 2025.

[In Part 1, which I recommend reading before the installment below, I posted three articles from the New York Times announcing the coming production, covering the opening night, and presenting Hanks’s own discussion of his inaugural venture as a dramatist.  Those articles contain information that will be referenced below and explanations and commentary from me, including the background and details of the play, that I have not repeated in the second part.]

STEPHEN COLBERT INTERVIEWS TOM HANKS
3 November 2025
(Late Show with Stephen Colbert; Season 11, Episode 31)

[Below are excerpts from the guest appearance of Tom Hanks on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (CBS-TV; Channel 2 in New York City) of 3 November 2025.  Hanks talks extensively about This World of Tomorrow, which was in previews at the time of the broadcast, but he talked also about a number of other, unrelated subjects as well.  I have, therefore lifted only the passages concerning the Off-Broadway play for this posting. (Omitted sections of the show are marked with ellipses.)

[There is no video of this LSSC episode that’s in one take, so this post is taken from YouTube, which posted the show in segments, four of which are devoted to the Hanks interview.  (When the show was broadcast. Colbert did his customary opening, including a monologue, before the first break and after the Hanks interview, he had a musical guest, Mavis Staples, a rhythm and blues and gospel singer and civil rights activist, who performed the last segment of the show.)

[The YouTube videos are broken into separate posts at each point in the show when Colbert takes a commercial break.  (The link above, for those who want to view the whole interview, is the first segment (“It’s ‘Tom Hanks Riding The Subway’ Season In New York City”); the following three segments are at: #2 – “‘They Are Gonna Have A Real Hard Time Firing Me’ - Tom Hanks On His Play ‘This World of Tomorrow’"; #3 – “If You Could Spend 12 Hours In The Past, Where And When Would You Go? - Tom Hanks”; #4 – “Why The Original ‘Toy Story’ Movie Had To Be Thrown Out - Tom Hanks.”  I didn’t look for videos of the opening or closing segments, Colbert’s monologue and Staples’s performance.)

[The transcript published on Rick On Theater is based on the verbatim transcript from YouTube, which is computer-generated.  It’s full of inaccuracies, omissions, and mistranscriptions, so I emended it myself from the audio of the recordings, creating a hybrid.  It’s more accurate and complete than the ones accompanying the YouTube videos online.]

Stephen Colbert: Hey, welcome back, everybody! Give it up for Louis Cato and the Late Show Band, everybody!

Ladies and gentlemen, my friends – you know my first guest tonight, because he is Tom Hanks!

[cheers and applause]

Tom Hanks: Thank you, thank you!

. . . .

Hanks: I’m doing a play right now called – down at . . . uhh –

Colbert: I’m doing it right here [takes out playbill for this world of tomorrow].

You’re in town – you’ve cowritten and starred in a new play, This World of Tomorrow.

There you are – there it is. It’s at The Shed –

Hanks: It’s at The Shed. Directed by Kenny Leon and cowritten by James Glossman. I can’t tell you how much we love the cast.

But – you say you’re on Broadway and everybody knows where Broadway is. We are on Broadway right now. 

[The Ed Sullivan Theatre, where The Late Show is recorded, is a 1927 theater at 1697 Broadway at West 53rd Street, formerly a legitimate Broadway house first named Hammerstein’s Theatre (and then under various names). The Columbia Broadcasting System leased it in 1937 as a radio studio; it was converted for television use in 1949. The theater housed The Ed Sullivan Show from 1953 to 1971, as well as other CBS shows; it was renamed after Sullivan (1901-74) in 1967. The Sullivan was purchased by CBS in 1993 and has housed The Late Show since that year, first under David Letterman, then under Colbert since 2015.]

Colbert: You’re literally on Broadway.

Hanks: Anybody in the world can come to New York and say, ‘Take me to Broadway.’ Or they can walk to Broadway themselves if they know where it is.

You come to New York and say, ‘Come to The Shed,’ and they’re like, ‘What? For discount garden tools?’

It’s an art installation – it’s a space for art and it’s downtown in Hudson Yards. But letting everyone know where The Shed is, is a bit of a challenge. So if I could have a slight shuffle beat.

[scats a beat for the band. the band joins in.]

Yeah, okay.

Ready?

[rhythmic chant. hanks, seated, keeps time with hand and arm gestures as he shifts his upper body and makes animated facial expressions.]

It’s The Shed
Off the High Line
By the Vessel
In Hudson Yards.
It’s The Shed
By the Vessel
Off the Highline
In Hudson Yards.
Wanta see
A show
At The Shed?
Well, just head down
To Hudson Yards.
It’s The Shed
Off the Highline
By the Vessel
In Hudson Yards.

There you go.  So, come on down!

[The High Line is an elevated public park and greenway in New York City, built on a disused freight rail line on Manhattan’s West Side. It extends from Gansevoort Street at Washington Street in Greenwich Village to West 34th Street and 12th Avenue near Hudson Yards.

[The Vessel is an interactive public landmark and art installation in Hudson Yards. The structure is 150 feet tall (equivalent to about 12-15 stories) and consists of 154 interconnected flights of stairs, nearly 2,500 steps, and 80 landings, forming a massive, climbable, honeycomb.

[Hudson Yards is a real estate development on the far West Side of Midtown Manhattan, built over a functioning rail yard, a storage yard for Long Island Rail Road trains. The 28-acre site includes, aside from The Shed and the Vessel, a landscaped public plaza, high-rises with both residential apartments and corporate offices, and a seven-story mall with shops and restaurants. Most of the offerings are strictly high-end.]

Colbert: We have to take a quick break, but we will be right back with more Tom Hanks, everybody. Stick around.

. . . .

Colbert: Hey, everybody, we are back with the star of This World of Tomorrow at The Shed, Mr. Tom Hanks.

Tell the people what it’s about, if you don’t mind.

Hanks: it’s from a collection of short stories. Jim Glossman – I published some short stories. And Jim Glossman said we could string these together under the theme of – let’s just say time travel.

It’s about a guy who decides to – a franchise out of what is now the Milford Plaza Hotel.

[Renamed the Row NYC in 2014, the Milford Plaza Hotel (at 700 Eighth Avenue, between 44th and 45th Streets, in Midtown Manhattan) opened in 1928 as the Hotel Lincoln. It changed hands many times, and was renamed by each new owner. In 1956, it became the Hotel Manhattan; in 1969, it operated as the Royal Manhattan; and it reopened in 1980 as the Milford Plaza Hotel.

[Somewhat typical of the reviews the hotel received over its lifetime, New York magazine said in 2022 that “the reason most people stay here is location; its proximity to the city’s brightest [Broadway theater] marquees ensures theatergoers can be in bed shortly after the curtain drops. Otherwise, the 1,300 rooms are slightly antiquated."]

You may not know this. The Milford Plaza Hotel used to be the Lincoln Hotel and it’s at Eighth Avenue and West 45th Street, and Room 1114 has what is called volume authenticity to allow access to a 12-hour time-bond echo to June 8th, 1939.

[I tried to decipher what Hanks is saying here, thinking he’s using standard or recognized mainstream science fiction terms. According to one source, he isn’t. He’s using terms like “volume authenticity” and “time-bond echo” as technobabble—invented scientific language—to explain the mechanics of his character’s time travel.

[“Volume authenticity” is a fictional scientific requirement in the play. It refers to the idea that for a “time jump” to work, the physical space (i.e., Room 1114 of the Milford Plaza) must perfectly match the historical details of the destination date. The more “authentic” the room’s physical “volume” (decor, smell, newspapers, and atmosphere) is to 1939, the easier it is to “tether” to that time.

[“Time-Bond Echo” is the play’s term for the actual window or “link” between two points in time. It describes a temporary connection (a bond) that allows someone from 2089, the play’s “present,” to interact with the “echo” of 8 June 1939.

[In the play, there is also a 12-hour limit for Bert Allenberry’s (Hanks) technology to allow him to access this “echo” before he is pulled back to his own time, which is why he must keep returning “again and again” to the same day to see the woman he loves (Kelli O’Hara).]

So you can go back to the World’s Fair on June 8th, 1939. And I play a fellow who does that again and again and again, because he just cannot get enough of the World’s Fair.

Now – this is a game around the dinner table. I’m gonna tell you right now, okay – here’s the rules of the game. You get to go to any time in the past you want to for 12 hours. Name the place, name the event. However, homicide is not allowed. You can’t go back and – you know.

Colbert: April 1865, Ford’s Theatre and I prevent a homicide. Is that legal?

[laughter and applause from the audience.]

[President Abraham Lincoln (b. 1809; 16th President of the United States: 1861-1865) was assassinated by actor John Wilkes Booth (1838-65) on 14 April 1865 as he and the First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln (1818-82), were attending a performance of Our American Cousin, an 1852 farce by English playwright Tom Taylor, at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.

[Ford’s Theatre ceased presenting plays for 103 years after Lincoln’s death. It became a museum dedicated to Lincoln until 1968, when it was restored and reopened. The presidential box remains as it was in the 1860s, but is never occupied. Since its reopening, the theater has not restaged Our American Cousin, and has said that it never will out of respect for the assassination.

[(This vow is attributed to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall (1920-2010; in office: 1961-69), whose department includes the National Park Service, which is responsible for the physical stewardship, preservation, and historical interpretation of the Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site, which includes the government-owned theater building. The non-profit Ford’s Theatre Society oversees the site’s artistic programming and educational initiatives.)]

Hanks: Here’s the problem with that. I believe that show was sold out.

Colbert: So I cannot get a ticket.

Hanks: And those laws [are] adhered to. You don’t just get to appear magically. You have to eat the food and go to the bathroom and take a shower – and if you break a leg, you’ll have a broken leg.

So those are the rules. But the fellow I play cannot stop from going back to 1939, for reasons that are evident once you come see the play.

Colbert: That is the World’s Fair, 1939. Did you have a particular fascination with the World’s Fair?

Hanks: Something about the World’s Fair.

Here’s a question. There was a line from the “Futurama,” which was the most attended attraction at the fair, run by our good friends at General Motors.

Colbert: Cars of the future.

Hanks: It was 1939, showing you what 1960 was going to be like and it had this fabulous line that said: “The present is but an instant between an infinite past and a hurrying future.” And if you think about it, that’s a great theme that Jim Glossman and I’d been working on.

[The General Motors exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair was titled “Highways and Horizons.” The core attraction and most popular attraction at the fair was a massive, immersive diorama and ride called “Futurama.” Designed by theatrical and industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958), the exhibit presented an idealized model of the world 20 years into the future (around 1960), characterized by vast suburbs and extensive, automated highway systems.

[Visitors sat in moving, sound-equipped chairs that conveyed them over a massive, 35,000 square-foot scale model of the American countryside and cities. The Futurama exhibit fit closely with the fair’s overall theme of “The World of Tomorrow” and is credited with popularizing the concept of modern interstate highways.]

You cannot do anything about our infinite past. That’s gone, baby, gone, right? And the future’s going down the pike. Who knows what’s gonna go happen [sic]?

But the present, we have a little bit of control over that, don’t we? And we also know what you’re hurrying future’s going to be, don’t we [a reference to Paramount’s cancellation of The Late Show after May 2026]. And you can’t do nothin’ ’bout the things that got you in trouble, my friend.

So you’re just going to have to make hay right here, right now.

Colbert: Exactly.

Hanks: That’s right.

. . . .

Colbert: We have to take another break here, but stick around. We will be right back with more Tom Hanks, everybody.

. . . .

Colbert: Hey, everybody! We’re back with the star of This World of Tomorrow, Mr. Thomas Hanks.

You’ve done lots of theater.

Hanks: I’ve done just enough, sir, to call myself a professional actor.

Colbert: And last time you were live on stage here in New York, it was 2013.

Hanks: Yes, we did Nora Ephron’s Lucky Guy at the Broadhurst Theatre – yes.

Colbert: Now you’re back at The Shed, and we know where that is.

Hanks: Where’s The Shed again? Well, I’ll tell you where it is. It’s –

[chants as the band comes in.]

By the Vessel
And the High Line.

Colbert: Is it different to go on stage knowing that you wrote it?

Hanks: Yes, it is. Number one, because they are going to have a real hard time firing me. If I screw up.

Colbert: Have you gone up on your own line?

[In theater, ‘to go up’ means to forget one’s lines on stage during a performance or rehearsal.]

Hanks: Oh, God, yeah, year. I disappeared the other night, as a matter of fact. And when it happens, Kelli O’Hara on stage, or Ruben Santiago-Hudson – they all just kind of look at me and go, ‘Come on, Man.’

Colbert: If you don’t know it –

Hanks: ‘If I learn my lines – You haven’t – [why] haven’t you learned yours?’

The huge difference between film and stage is, in film, the director is the governor of the story. He can change it, not say it, don’t say that, don’t say this.

On the stage, if it’s not on the page, it is not on the stage. The writers are the definitive arbiters of what is being said.

So, on one hand, you have a discussion. ‘What – what sounds better: “Hey, guys, we better get going because we have a problem,” or, “Hey, guys, we better get going because we have a situation”’?

We had some previews the other night. Kenny Leon said when we’re in rehearsal, the play is ours; when we are performing, the play is theirs. Meaning, that audience gives you something that is just undeniable. And we were out there and we had a difference between blah-blah-blah-blah problem – and the audience was like hmm [making a hand gesture indicating “flat”] – blah-blah-blah-blah situation, and they go, ‘Oh, a situation?’ And this is where you start playing around with it. It’s a very, very malleable, exciting thing.

And being one of the cowriters is just a pleasure and a joy, but it is also as terrifying an experience as I have ever had.

Colbert: Why terrifying?

Hanks: Well, because you just wake up and – ‘problem,’ ‘situation,’ ‘problem,’ ‘situation’ [making hand gesture of weighing two alternatives].

And will they know how to find us. You know how they find us – well,

[chants and snaps his fingers.]

By the Vessel
Off the High Line
Is The Shed
In Hudson Yards.

Colbert: We’re gonna take another break here.

Hanks: I think we should.

Colbert: We’ll be right back with more Tom Hanks, everybody.

. . . .

Colbert: Hey, everybody.  You know who that is, that’s Tom Hanks.

. . . .

Colbert: So, Tom – wonderful to see you, as always.

Hanks: Thank you so much.

This World of Tomorrow is currently in previews at The Shed [30 October-18 November 2025]. And where’s The Shed?

Hanks: I will tell you right now, The Shed is . . .

[chants]

By the Vessel
Off the High Line
Is The Shed
In Hudson Yards.
By the Vessel
In the High Line

Colbert: Officially opens November 18th.

Hanks:

[continues]

This World of Tomorrow
Is a play you all can see
Where? At The Shed
By the Vessel
Off the High Line
In Hudson Yards.

Colbert: Tom Hanks, everybody.

We’ll be right back with a performance by Mavis Staples.

*  *  *  *
TWO REVIEWS OF THIS WORLD OF TOMORROW

“THE WORLD OF TOMORROW REVIEW –
TOM HANKS RETURNS TO THE STAGE 
FOR TIME TRAVEL CHARMER”
by Benjamin Lee

[Of the two reviews of This World of Tomorrow I selected to repost, the one from The Guardian of 18 November 2025 was the more positive.  The critical reception of the play was mixed, most giving some form of praise for the performances accompanied, but less enthusiasm, as you’ll read in the second example, for the production (that is, directing and design) and the script.]

The actor indulges his love of the past in a breezily enjoyable play about a man falling for a woman from the 1930s, played by a standout Kelli O’Hara

Tom Hanks [b. 1956] is a star who’s always had one foot squarely in the past. As an actor he’s forever been likened to James Stewart [1908-97; years active: 1932-91], a reincarnation of the charming, essentially good American everyman, a from-another-era lead who’s increasingly been more comfortable in period fare (in the last decade, he’s appeared in just four present-day films [see note below]). As a producer, he’s gravitated toward historical shows such as Band of Brothers [2001; HBO], John Adams [2008; HBO] and The Pacific [2010; HBO] his directorial debut was 60s-set music comedy That Thing You Do! [1996; Twentieth Century Fox] and his undying obsession, outside of acting, is the typewriter, collecting and writing about its throwback appeal.

[Between 2015 and 2025, Hanks’s “present-day” films (out of 19 productions, including the animated Toy Story 4) have been A Hologram for the King (made in 2016, set in 2010; Lionsgate, Roadside Attractions, Saban Films), Sully (made in 2016, set in 2009; Warner Bros. Pictures), Inferno (made and set in 2016; Sony Pictures Releasing), and A Man Called Otto (made in 2020, set in 2020 – with flashbacks to 1960s and mid-2010s; Sony Pictures Releasing).]

In his new play, The World of Tomorrow [sic], his fondness for the “good old days” has led to the inevitable, a story about a man with a fondness for the “good old days” who actually gets to experience one of them for himself. It’s a loosely familiar tale of time travel, based on a short story written by Hanks that tries, and half-succeeds, to bring something new to a table we’ve sat at many times before.

[Several press outlets mislabel the play by substituting ‘The’ for ‘This.’  As I note in Part 1, the play’s title, This World of Tomorrow, is distinct from the official motto and theme of the 1939 World’s Fair, which was “The World of Tomorrow.”  The choice by Hanks and Glossman was deliberate to distinguish their creative work from the historical event it depicts and to shift the focus from a broad, corporate vision of the future to a specific, personal reality experienced by the characters.]

The gimmick here is that while time travel might be possible in the future, it comes with hard restrictions. Firstly, it’s prohibitively expensive, leaving it up to the select few to take advantage (asides about the state of the world in 60 years time are . . . not optimistic). Secondly, it’s only possible to go back to specific places at specific times, reliant on certain spaces remaining the same and certain “echoes” allowing for movement. Hanks plays Bert, a scientist whose trips to the 1939 world fair in New York become more frequent after he meets Carmen (Kelli O’Hara), a local woman treating herself to a day off with her precocious niece (Kayli Carter, a 32-year-old actor fighting a losing, and increasingly grating, battle playing an 11-year-old).

It’s not just love at first sight that keeps him going back, it’s also his fetish for nostalgia (Newspapers! Lower prices! People saying “swell”!) and the alluring promise of a future that never really came. Each time he returns to the present, after a strict cutoff of 11pm [sic], he regales his skeptical colleagues with ideas of how to forge ahead differently. While whimsy is mostly prioritized [sic – British spelling], the dark shadow of reality often threatens to intrude. Bert’s fawning over the past is briefly interrupted when Black colleague and longtime friend M-Dash (played by the wonderful Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who tries hard to add weight to a lightly written dynamic) tells him that the idea of travelling back is less appealing for him, a sharp reminder that the good old days weren’t that good for many people (as he predicts, almost all of the service jobs during Bert’s visits are taken on by Black workers). It’s also the summer of 1939, just weeks away from the second world war [German troops invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, marking the start of World War II in Europe], and Nazism has already started to appear in the US, the dreaded swastika showing up on pin badges.

But Hanks, as ever, chooses light over dark and his focus, with co-writer James Glossman, is the thrill of an impossible romance, a choice that takes a little time to convince (the setup, like in his classic romcoms Sleepless in Seattle [1993; TriStar Pictures] and You’ve Got Mail [1998; Warner Bros.], could have easily warped into a creepy thriller). Before intermission, it’s hard to fully understand why Bert would make the expensive, and increasingly dangerous, choice to keep going back for Carmen, as effervescent as O’Hara might be (like many an adaptation, the writing often suffers without the gap-filling depth of a narrator).

Yet in a far superior second half, after she’s gifted with a piercing monologue, we’re whisked along with them. Visually, the journey is smooth throughout thanks to Tony-winning director Kenny Leon guiding the way. While his recent take on Othello [2025; Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Broadway; see “Film Stars Twinkle on the Great White Way, Part 1” (27 March 2025)] might have underwhelmed on many levels, his decisions here are far more astute, working with what seems like another blockbuster budget but this time allowed to spend it on more than just A-list casting. The stage is filled with rectangular pillars switching between various video-screened backgrounds, from a futuristic conference room to a pokey Bronx apartment, and despite one hiccup (a prop that wouldn’t budge that Hanks himself helped to save), it felt as sleekly transporting as something the actor would have made for the big screen. Its commerciality does also make it an easy fit for a Hollywood transfer, perhaps one that could easily tighten the script, excising the scene-sinking niece and some extraneous diner and home scenes (it’s over two hours and could benefit from being under).

Hanks, who was last on the New York stage in Nora Ephron’s 80s-set newsroom drama Lucky Guy, develops real last-act chemistry with O’Hara, who manages to perfect period intonation without becoming schtick-y. He’s comfortably in his wheelhouse here (also nailing the delivery as expected), but there’s none of the autopilot laziness we often get from actors known for sticking to certain character types. He might be stuck in the past, but it’s hard not to get stuck there with him.

[Benjamin Lee is the east coast arts editor at Guardian US, based in New York.  He was previously deputy editor of the style and culture website ShortList.com.]

*  *  *  *
“DAWN OF A DULL DAY:
TOM HANKS IN THIS WORLD OF TOMORROW”
by Jackson McHenry 

[The review on Vulture (the online platform of New York magazine) that was posted on 18 November 2025 was a largely negative assessment of the Hanks-Glossman play.  As you’ll read, reviewer Jackson McHenry had numerous objections to This World of Tomorrow, both to the script and Kenny Leon’s production.]

Whatever is happening at the Shed right now, it’s not really a play. It’s play-shaped, and actors put on costumes and wander around onstage for a couple of hours, repeating words they’ve memorized. But I’d be more comfortable calling the staging of This World of Tomorrow — starring Tom Hanks, written by Hanks and his collaborator James Glossman, directed by Kenny Leon, and based off elements of Hanks’s short-story collection, Uncommon Type — something more along the lines of “a flight of fancy,” “a doodle on a napkin,” or “a college-drama-club project with the express purpose of making one person happy.” There are plenty of talented folks around Hanks who have been roped into making this, and plenty of people in the audience who might be paying a lot to see him, but they don’t factor into the equation. This thing is entirely about admiring its star. Hey, at least there are some fun hats.

This World of Tomorrow is not malicious in its intent. Tom Hanks, the moral nice-guy mayor of Hollywood, is the closest thing the film industry has to a Jimmy Stewart, and I’m happy to believe that his forays into writing have developed out of genuine artistic interest in good-hearted Americana. (Inevitably, a character speaks admiringly about a typewriter.) Whether a theater company should spend its time and resources developing and staging what he has written is another question. (No.) This World of Tomorrow, largely based on the Hanks story “The Past Is Important to Us,” has him playing Bert Allenberry, a rich tech titan from around the year 2100 who keeps taking expensive daylong trips to the 1939 New York World’s Fair via a company called Chronometric Adventures. He justifies the cost by telling his colleagues that he’s enthralled by the way the past imagined a better future than the one we got, but it becomes clear very quickly that he’s really doing it because he’s infatuated with a winsome divorcée named Carmen Perry (Kelli O’Hara, at home in any role where she wears gloves). Carmen is visiting the fair with her spunky niece, Virginia (Kayli Carter, fumbling for any texture to play and landing on “loud”), and Hanks runs into her by accident, then comes back again and again. In each time loop, Carmen doesn’t remember Bert, he so [sic] keeps reseducing her, using a little more information each time, an unsettling dynamic that’s a blend between Groundhog Day [1993; directed by Harold Ramis; Columbia Pictures], Midnight in Paris [2011; directed by Woody Allen; Sony Pictures Classics], and maybe even the deranged sci-fi drama Passengers [2016; directed by Morten Tyldum; Sony Pictures Releasing], all films that aren’t known for their sensitivity toward women’s agency.

There’s where you might expect a play to develop some dramatic friction, perhaps as a commentary on the dangers of nostalgia or on one extremely rich man’s sense of entitlement. Any such turn might be a current, if obvious, direction for a play like this. But one thing you can say about This World of Tomorrow is that it doesn’t do much of what you might expect. There’s little tension anywhere or really any significant attempt to undercut Bert’s rosy gaze on the past. Hanks and Glossman have written a few throwaway lines that acknowledge the racism of the 1930s — Black members of the ensemble are often called upon to roll their eyes at Bert’s cheeriness about 1939 — and in the play’s announcement, Alex Poots, the Shed’s artistic director, told the New York Times [see Part 1] that “there is reference to the rise in authoritarianism,” which I can translate as “there is a line about how Bert should have used time travel to kill Hitler.”

I wouldn’t say that This World of Tomorrow embraces Bert’s nostalgia, either, so much as it just lets his quest for Carmen happen. The script is too rudderless to navigate toward any specific theme, and Leon, who has become the go-to director for soggy celebrity-driven drama, hasn’t pushed his cast toward any specific idea. (According to a conversation in your program, Leon said the play is about “time and love”; one is a concept an actor can’t play, and the other is something no one is convincingly playing.) Somehow, despite what must have been a substantial budget, the set looks cheap. Derek McLane’s design resembles a cybernetic wilderness, a spare set of moving columns that indicate new locations and settings through screens and projections. If Bert’s so enamored with the innovations of the World’s Fair, couldn’t we see re-creations of a few of them onstage? Why not show us the famous robot or the celebrity cow?

Instead, in the space of where it could allow for wonder and enthusiasm, This World of Tomorrow tends toward overexplanation. The script is remarkably heavy on the technobabble and the scenes in which Hanks’s colleagues from the future throw nonsense time-travel-related nouns around while wearing Star Trek outfits. I couldn’t care less about the acids that supposedly accumulate when you go back and forth in time. The script’s most engaging indulgence is a series of scenes that occur in the second act as Bert and Carmen meet in the 1950s at a Greek diner, which is run by a grumbly Jay O. Sanders. Sanders almost convinces you that you’re watching a real play about a real man, commanding the stage with a gruff bark and mining humor from his character’s insistence on teaching everyone Greek vocabulary as he picks up some English. I’m not sure how his presence is supposed to relate to the rest of the story or why Hanks felt it was necessary to include it — perhaps his wife, the Greek American actress and producer Rita Wilson, had his ear — but at least it’s an interestingly idiosyncratic gesture.

Yet the audience isn’t at the Shed for idiosyncrasies. Hanks is the be-all and end-all of This World of Tomorrow, and, sure, when you’re sitting in the audience a few dozen yards away from him, it’s hard to deny his loping movie-star magnetism. He has something of the energy of a beloved and aging family dog, padding up to you to lay his paws on your lap. It’s hard to judge Hanks’s strengths as a stage actor given that this script gives him so few challenges, but when he delivers several jokes about Bert’s discovery that they have real milk at the World’s Fair — presumably, an unspoken environmental collapse has eliminated dairy — he is deeply charming. In those moments, the audience lets out a sigh of relief, as if to say, Ah, yes, the celebrity we’re here to see is giving us the performance we wanted. It’s his own persona he’s performing, not a character. We come to see plenty of stage actors for a taste of their familiar forms, from Kristin Chenoweth to Laurie Metcalf, but perhaps putting a movie star onstage and asking them to actually perform in a play is an extra hurdle we needn’t ask them to clear. Why not just revert to something more direct, more medieval and churchy? Do away with the scripts, with the directors, with the rest of the ensemble, with the pretense. Have them stand there, in pristine and golden-lit silence for two hours at the center of the stage, and bask in the awe and admiration. Audiences could think of it as a pilgrimage to visit a holy relic — or its own act of sacramental theater. He’s not performing, after all. You are.

[Jackson McHenry is a Vulture critic covering theater, film, and TV.  He’s been covering theater, film, and television since 2015, with a focus on arts and entertainment, pop culture, and cultural movements.  In addition to Vulture, Jackson’s work has been featured in Variety, Magzter, and Entertainment Weekly.]

'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.]