In 2007, a mysterious album featuring Nazi-era photographs arrived at the desk of a U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum archivist. As curators unraveled the shocking truth behind the images, the album soon made headlines and ignited a debate that reverberated far beyond the museum walls. Based on real events, Here There Are Blueberries tells the story of these historical photographs—what they reveal about the perpetrators of the Holocaust, and our own humanity.
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.
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.
2024 | Off-Broadway |
NYTW Off-Broadway Premiere Production Off-Broadway |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
---|---|---|---|
2024 | The Pulitzer Prize | Pulitzer Prize for Drama | Moisés Kaufman |
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