Here There Are Blueberries Off-Broadway Reviews

The comparison is pungent but inapt: Archival work is not death work. Likewise, a play is not a museum. That’s part of why, while admiring Tectonic’s intentions and technique in “Blueberries” — not for nothing was it recently named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama — I find it even more unbalanced today than I did when I saw it last year in Washington.

For a historian or student of World War II, such details will not be surprising—or new. Audiences who prefer a dramatic treatment of similar material can stream Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which fixes an unnervingly calm eye on the home life of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz. (The movie’s loosely based on a Martin Amis novel but overlaps with the Höcker album.) Even though at times Here There Are Blueberries seems less a play than a live PBS documentary (and, at worst, an infomercial for the Holocaust Museum), it’s still a compelling 90 minutes. That’s down to strong cast, anchored by the luminous Stahlmann, a grimly determined angel bringing light and a sword into darkness. Derek McLane’s spare but effective scenic design—work desks and screen—neatly cradles David Bengali’s elegant projection design, integral to the impact. In the end, the piece asks what the camera caught and what it excluded. We have seen the carnage of the death camps. That ultimate horror is the result of countless steps from everyday civility to desensitized inhumanity.

Presented without an intermission – clearly, Kaufman wants no interruption of the mounting intensity – the documentary is an invaluable addition to Holocaust literature. It’s made even more so by the excellent ensemble, all conveying the Tectonic Theater Project’s gravity.

Taube eventually takes up as a personal mission to contact and convince other relatives, as it turns out, to little avail. The scenes with these others, in avoidance or in denial, are among the most difficult – until the end, when the show moves from this album, to a different set of photographs. These are among the very few taken of the Jews at the camp, and includes testimony by one of the survivors who is pictured in one of them, alongside her family members who did not survive. It is as if Moisés Kaufman, who is the son of Holocaust survivors, and his co-writer Amanda Gronich, shared some of the initial concerns of the Holocaust museum staff: A play about the Holocaust, even one that focuses on its perpetrators, cannot completely exclude its victims.

Kaufman and Gronich’s play was recently made a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama. It is yet another example of a work of art being awarded for its subject matter, not its execution. That said, the photographs are worth a visit to the New York Theatre Workshop where “Here There Are Blueberries” is a coproduction with Tectonic Theater Project.