New York — In 2007, the USA Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., obtained an album of pictures documenting the expertise of those that labored at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The pictures present a singular perspective on the Holocaust, chronicling S.S. officers going about their day by day actions in a way totally divorced from the truth of the mass homicide that was going down close by.
“Here There Are Blueberries,” a play by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich that was a 2024 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama, tells the story of this picture album in a stage manufacturing that makes the painstaking work of historic inquiry appear to be the best detective story ever written. Uncovering the identities of the figures within the photographs is a central a part of the investigation, however the larger thriller is what might have allowed abnormal Germans to grow to be a part of the forms of demise that resulted within the extermination of roughly 6 million Jews.
The corporate of “Here There Are Blueberries.”
(Tectonic Theater Challenge)
Kaufman, who conceived and directed the play for his New York-based firm, Tectonic Theater Challenge, was sitting in a Midtown Manhattan workplace with co-writer Gronich simply a few days earlier than they left for Los Angeles, the place “Here There Are Blueberries” might be carried out on the Wallis Annenberg Middle for the Performing Arts by March 30 earlier than it heads to Berkeley Rep in April. How did they conceive the concept of constructing a theater piece round an album of photographs?
“I saw the front-page article in the New York Times and was struck by a photo of the Nazis with an accordion,” Kaufman recalled. “Both Amanda’s family and my own are Holocaust survivors. I’ve always wanted to tackle a Holocaust play, but the Holocaust is a singular event in history, and one of the most addressed in literature. What is there new to say? But when I saw these pictures, I saw something we hadn’t seen before. And I thought, how can you eat blueberries and sing a song accompanied by an accordion when your daily job is to kill 1.1. million people?”
Kaufman, a 2015 Nationwide Medal of Arts recipient, reached out to Rebecca Erbelding, a younger archivist on the museum who was talked about within the New York Occasions story. He modestly assumed she wouldn’t know who he was, however she informed him that “The Laramie Project,” the 2000 play he wrote with members of Tectonic Theater Challenge investigating the killing of Matthew Shepard (and nonetheless one of the crucial produced works within the American theater), had been not too long ago carried out at her school. An interview was arrange, and Kaufman sensed he was sizzling on the path of a brand new challenge.
“So I had the hunch, but I thought, ‘How do we make a play about this?’ ” he stated. “The mission of Tectonic Theater Project is to explore theatrical languages and theatrical forms. When I got to America, I was so bored with America’s fascination with realism and naturalism. I had come from Venezuela and had experienced the work of Peter Brook and Pina Bausch. There was a really good international theater festival. So I was trained in a rigorous kind of experimental theater. Many people call Tectonic a documentary theater company, and some of our works are based in reality. But we’re much more interested in what we do with the art form. What is a theatrical language? What is theatricality? And so the question, the formal question for me was, can you make a play in which the photographs occupy one of the central narrative lines?”
Barbara Pitts, Luke Forbes and Delia Cunningham in “Here There Are Blueberries.”
(Tectonic Theater Challenge)
Throughout his interview with Erbelding, Kaufman was struck by how dramatic the work of an archivist could possibly be.
“When Rebecca was telling me the story of the album, I felt that she was so passionate about discovering who everyone was, what they were doing or celebrating,” he stated. “As soon as I realized that this was a detective story, I knew how to write the play. So I called Amanda, another member of Tectonic, who’s not only a brilliant writer and creator but also has an incredible amount of knowledge about the Holocaust, and asked if she wanted to join me in this.”
Gronich didn’t want a lot persuading, however she did have issues. As she recounted, “When Moisés first talked to me in regards to the concept of constructing a play about an album of pictures I stated, ‘That’s inconceivable. You may’t make a play about an album of pictures. And also you significantly can’t make a play about this album of pictures.’ However then I took a breath and stated, ‘Wait a second. If we really think about how to explore this theatrically, there could be something truly extraordinary here. And for me, the opportunity to tell the story through theater was enormously exciting and thrilling and daunting and scary.”
Kaufman and Gronich met at NYU, and when he was founding Tectonic Theater Project she became a “proud early charter member.” Gronich has extensive experience as a writer of nonfiction television but said she never worked on anything about World War II. “Because of my family history, [working on ‘Here There Are Blueberries’] was deeply private for me,” she stated. “But echoing Moisés, I wondered how to tell the story in the 21st century in a way that feels new and explores the vocabulary of how we engage an audience.”
Jeanne Sakata in “Here There Are Blueberries.”
(Tectonic Theater Challenge)
The play, which premiered at La Jolla Playhouse in 2022, brings audiences viscerally into the gumshoe work of archivists and researchers who authenticate, make clear and protect artifacts of historical past. If this sounds dry, I can’t bear in mind once I skilled such intense concentrate on the a part of theatergoers. The enthralled hush on the La Jolla Playhouse matinee I attended was engulfing. What precisely did these frolicking SS officers and help workers perceive about their work? How did they handle their ignorance or justify their data? These questions don’t ever really feel distant. “Here There Are Blueberries” implicates the current and the longer term as a lot because it does the previous.
At a time of rising antisemitism and Holocaust denialism, when salient political and cultural figures are flirting with Nazi identification, the play sounds an alarm from historical past. What occurred in Europe within the Thirties and ’40s can occur right here. Demonization and dehumanization are tried and true ways of demagogues in each period. Genocide, as one of many consultants introduced forth within the play factors out, “starts with words.”
“The desire to distance yourself from things that you perceive as evil is very human,” Kaufman stated. “We all want to say, ‘I’m not like that.’ And with the Holocaust specifically, we have spent decades saying the Nazis were monsters, as opposed to the Nazis were humans who did monstrous things.”
He pointed to {a photograph} of a bunch of ladies, secretaries and auxiliary employees, having fun with blueberries as an accordion participant serenades them on the deck of a leisure resort that was a reward for the German camp workers of Auschwitz.
“They are eating blueberries,” Kaufman stated. “I like blueberries. It’s lovely when you have an accordion player at a party. Seeing the quotidian nature of their daily lives prevents the audience from distancing themselves. We bring you, the audience, into the room to look at this together, to entice your curiosity, to see these people playing with their pets, talking to their children.”
The purpose isn’t to normalize however to interrogate with clear eyes.
“The play unwraps and unravels an artifact of history,” Gronich stated. “There is literal, irrefutable evidence on stage.”
The story of historical past, she continued, relies on what historical past leaves behind. Nevertheless it’s additionally contingent on our willingness to confront what’s uncovered with braveness and honesty.
The Firm of “Here There Are Blueberries.”
(Tectonic Theater Challenge)
It seems that the picture album was the private property of a high administrator of the camp who had risen from the lowly ranks of a financial institution teller and was happy with his elevated standing. Loyalty was prized over benefit by the Nazis, and these photographs are what Gronich calls “the selfies of an SS officer.”
“When we look at the pictures, what we’re seeing are the people who believed they were going to be the victors,” she stated. “You see the world that they can’t wait to inhabit. It’s this performative celebratory energy in those pictures, and what they’re reveling in is their vision of the thousand-year Reich, and that is a world free of all of the so-called undesirables. And so there are these young women flirting with these men in this bucolic setting. Meanwhile outside the frame, 1.1. million people are being sent to their deaths.”
Response to “Here There Are Blueberries” has modified because the political panorama has shifted for the reason that play had its premiere lower than three years in the past. It’s been a tumultuous time in America and the world, to say the least. A pandemic, wars in Europe and the Center East, frenetic technological developments, hovering financial inequality, oligarchic shamelessness and elections which have empowered aspiring authoritarians. Kaufman sees theater as an invite to audiences to carry into the venue what’s taking place outdoors of it. In performs akin to “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde,” “The Laramie Project” and “33 Variations,” Kaufman has been intent on creating constructions that enable the previous and current to work together within the public discussion board of the theater.
Gronich doesn’t imagine that is the time to draw back from tough dialogue. “Everyone, the working class and the professional class, doctors, lawyers, journalists, business people and the clergy had to participate to facilitate [the Holocaust]. This mentality, the hatred that has to be in place, is a cancer in society, but then what do you do? What position do you take? The play looks at this continuum of culpability, complacency and complicity, and examines where all these people fall in that continuum.”
“You can look at anybody in the world and we all fall within that continuum,” Kaufman mirrored with somber acceptance.
Kaufman and his collaborators don’t take away themselves from scrutiny. “Here There Are Blueberries” convenes us to look collectively by the filter of historical past at one thing frighteningly near house — human nature.
