Review: HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES Disturbs the Comfortable at McCarter Theatre

Here There Are Blueberries opens at McCarter Theatre Center with a deceptively cheerful accordion tune, as a woman enthusiastically recounts the advent of portable cameras in 1925. The introduction of the Leica I camera in Germany would prove darkly significant, enabling both candid documentation and carefully staged propaganda. This juxtaposition immediately establishes the production’s central tension between the mundane and the monstrous.

Derek McLane’s minimalist scenic design transforms the stage into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s research room through a series of archival desks and materials. David Lander’s lighting design reinforces this liminal space — dusky archive lighting alternates with stark spotlights that deny audience members any comfortable emotional distance. David Bengali’s sophisticated projection mapping allows the Höcker Album photographs to appear on uneven surfaces throughout the space, making historical evidence immediate and inescapable.

Director Moisés Kaufman and co-writer Amanda Gronich, utilizing Tectonic Theater Project’s Moment Work™ technique, construct a narrative that constantly challenges institutional doctrines about how to handle perpetrator histories. When archivist Rebecca Erbelding (played with compelling moral urgency by Delia Cunningham) receives an album showing Nazi officers at leisure near Auschwitz, she confronts whether these images deserve preservation and exhibition. The museum‘s initial reluctance to spotlight perpetrators collides with the urgent need to understand how ordinary professionals could normalize participation in genocide.

Kaufman’s direction employs instances of stillness and silence, while Scott Barrow’s portrayal of Karl Höcker, an adjutant to the commandant of Auschwitz, avoids both simplistic judgment and excuse-making. Almost all actors seamlessly transition between Nazi officers, their descendants, and contemporary researchers. This Brechtian technique disables audiences from maintaining a comfortable distance — we come to recognize how easily ordinary people can be swept into extraordinary evil through seemingly innocent daily choices between courage and convenience.

A revelatory sequence connects the Höcker Album to Lilly Jacob’s collection of victim photographs, creating a detective story that keeps audiences intellectually engaged while denying them emotional escape. When a former SS officer casually remarks those were the “best years of [his] life,” his words gain devastating power through contrast with his grandchildren’s anguish. The production refuses to offer catharsis or easy answers about human nature.

The production’s most powerful threads explore how subsequent generations process this legacy. Tilman Taube (played by Luke Forbes), a German man discovering his grandfather’s photo in the album browsing news during his lunch break, must choose between family loyalty and historical responsibility. Another character never changes his surname, in an attempt to become who he wants to be, despite inheriting guilt as the grandson of a “mass murderer.”

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