HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES Comes to the Wallis

 In Here There Are Blueberries, performing for 17 performances only at the Bram Goldsmith Theater of the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts March 13 to 30, 2025, a mysterious album featuring Nazi-era photographs arrives at the desk of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archivist Rebecca Erbelding.
 
As Rebecca and her team of historians begin to unravel the shocking story behind the images, the album soon makes headlines around the world and ignites a debate that reverberates far beyond the museum walls. Based on real events, Pulitzer Prize Nominee Here There Are Blueberries tells the story behind these historical photographs—what they reveal about the perpetrators of the Holocaust and, ultimately, about our own humanity.
 
This new piece from Tectonic Theater Project (The Laramie Project) is conceived and directed by Tony and Emmy nominee Moisés Kaufman and co-written by Emmy nominee Amanda Gronich.  Here There Are Blueberries is produced by Tectonic Theater Project in partnership with Brian and Dayna Lee and Sonia Friedman Productions."

Here There Are Blueberries was named a 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Drama, the focus of a top-rated CBS “60 Minutes” piece by Anderson Cooper, and became the highest-grossing production in the 45 year history of New York Theatre Workshop during its celebrated limited engagement. An international tour is set to launch in 2025 with engagements in London and Germany. 
 
The cast includes Scott Barrow, Nemuna Ceesay, Delia Cunningham, Luke Forbes, Barbara Pitts, Jeanne Sakata, Marrick Smith, Grant James Varjas, Anna Shafer and Sam Reeder.  Tickets at TheWallis.Org.
 
“The purpose of this play is to show in a very specific way that the people who did this were not raised to do this,” Moisés Kaufman said to the San Diego Union Tribune.  “They were people like you and me, and through a series of very specific things, they learned how to do it. I refuse to believe the Nazis are monsters. The moment you label them as monsters you can separate yourself from them. They were regular human beings, which makes it all the more frightening.”
 
“Those photos pose questions about culpability and also complicity. Those issues are important in American culture right now. The play is very timely. This is my most American play. It speaks about how do we coexist when tremendous injustices are being committed. And how do we leave our daily lives when everything about our country is in perilous danger?”
 
In Playbill, Kaufman continued, "Both Amanda and I have a family who died in the Holocaust. It is the event that has been most written about in the history of literature. I always questioned what else there was to say. And then I saw these photographs … we spoke at great length about what happens when you center the perpetrators in the narrative, and yes, we were very daunted by that. We heard a lot of people saying, 'Well, don't humanize the Nazis.' And my response to that was, 'I don't have to humanize them. They're human'. There's a line in the play, 'Six million people didn't kill themselves.' It's important that we are also studying the psychology of the people who did this."
 
"The whole time we were writing, we felt survivors and victims and their families sitting on our shoulders, constantly," Gronich adds. "These SS officers are frolicking and having fun on their days off and eating blueberries, and just outside the frame is the killing of 1.1 million people. While we were working on the play, we had the opportunity to show the photos to survivors who had actually been at Auschwitz, when photos were taken. And, without exception, every one of them said, 'You must tell this story.' They were not surprised by seeing that human beings are capable of this dichotomy, between having fun on their days off and committing genocide. They felt so powerfully that people didn't know this, and that they needed to see it."
 
Adds Gronich: "I've never, in all my decades working in and out of the theatre, seen audiences so laser focused on the play, and on the questions the play raises. You can feel people's deeply personal connections to the conversations that it elicits.  We make a point to say, 'The photographs you are about to see in this play are real.' You are watching a team of people using the scientific method to incredibly rigorous standards. They are historians. They are fact checking and they are looking to make sure that every detail of the information that they are sharing with the public is true and factually based. Sharing the rigor of that process with the audience restores this sort of nobility to it while also illuminating and saying, 'In our truth-deficient world, there are people out there who are warriors, who are on the front lines every day making sure that the truth of the story or as close to it as we can get is revealed and shared."

From 2007, when Moisés Kaufman  read The New York Times article ‘In the Shadow of Horror, SS Guardians Frolic” about the photos, he has been thinking about how this story could have a full expression as a work of powerful theatre.  Nine years later Kaufman and Amanda Gronich seriously explored the theatrical potential of this story through a series of workshops and readings, even travelling to Poland and Germany to visit the sites in the album and interview descendants of Nazis photographed within.  The 2022 world premiere was at La Jolla Playhouse, followed by performances in Washington DC, the spring 2025 New York Theatre Workshop production. Now in 2025 there are engagements at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey January 24 to February 9 and Berkeley Rep April 5 to May 11.
 
Evan Henerson in Broadway World said, “A beautiful and significant new play. A high-stakes detective story. ‘Here There Are Blueberries’ should be staged in every major city in America.”
 
Charles Isherwood in The Wall St. Journal wrote, “The play, featuring a superb 10-member cast in multiple roles, dramatizes how the museum staff grappled with that question … it ultimately becomes a searching historical examination of the people we see in the photos, and how they represent, in microcosm, the larger German population, the millions who either participated in the atrocities or simply lived their ordinary lives while ignoring, or pretending to, the horrors being committed in their midst. But among the many harrowing moments in the play, a single line remains most fixed in the memory, when Tilman Taube recalls that his grandfather once confessed to him, eyes twinkling, that his tenure at Auschwitz was “the best time of my life.” 
 
Peter Marks said in the Washington Post, “It is a gripping exposé of the depraved human inclination to convince oneself that nothing is amiss when everything is in fact horrifically, monstrously wrong. Made compellingly theatrical by the virtuosic visual instincts of director Moisés Kaufman, this documentary drama reveals how ephemeral events — the purchase of a camera, the discovery of a discarded keepsake, the mailing of a letter — can align to enlighten the world.  It is a meticulous illumination of the work of historians at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.  It’s a play in other words that Ken Burns fans can love.  I spent the 90 minutes in Harman Hall with my heart in my mouth.”
 
The design team of Here There Are Blueberries features scenic design by Tony Award-winner Derek McLane, costume design by Tony Award nominee Dede Ayite, lighting design by Tony Award nominee David Lander, sound design by Bobby McElver, and projection design by David Bengali. Ann James serves as Intimacy Coordinator & Sensitivity Specialist, with Amy Marie Seidel as Associate Director & Dramaturg and Jacob Russell as Stage Manager. Casting is by Stephanie Yankwitt, TBD Casting.