Attendance should be mandatory for Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich’s extraordinary documentary theater piece that has thankfully landed on Broadway two years after its NYC debut at New York Theatre Workshop. Conceived and directed by Kaufman (and devised with members of the Tectonic Theater Project), Here There Are Blueberries proves both a riveting detective story and profound examination of what Hannah Arendt so memorably described as the “banality of evil.”
The Pulitzer-nominated piece centers on the real-life story of how the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. received a very unusual donation in 2007. It was an album, found in the attic of an abandoned German home by a U.S. military officer in 1946, featuring 116 candid snapshots. But these were no ordinary photos: they were, in fact, pictures of the administrators and workers at the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp, in varying states of relaxation and recreation. There were no photographs of the victims of their atrocities. Save for the Nazi uniforms worn by many of the subjects, it could have been taken for a photo album of an adult summer camp.
This presented the museum officials with a moral dilemma. Should an institution dedicated to memorializing the victims of the Holocaust shine a spotlight on the victimizers? Would an exhibition of the photos prove offensive to the survivors and their relatives? “This album belongs here,” argues one of the museum staffers. “Six million people didn’t murder themselves.”
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
There were historical questions as well. Who exactly were the people in the photographs, and what were their roles at the death camp? Some of the subjects were easily identifiable, such as a smiling Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” physician notorious for his fiendish scientific experiments on the inmates, among other things. With some digging, it was determined that the album had belonged to Karl Höcker, the right-hand man to the camp’s commandant Rudolf Höss, whose assignments included writing a daily report of all the recreational goings-on at the camp (not its atrocities).
Utilizing oversized projections of the actual photographs — we are assured that every picture we see onstage is real – the play chronicles the efforts of the museum staff to get to the bottom of the various mysteries presented by the pictures and the ramifications that ensued when the story became public and became a worldwide sensation. One German man, Tilman Taube (Conrad Ricamora), recognized his grandfather, who had served as a doctor in the camp, in several of the pictures. He not only identified him to the museum but also agreed to have his grandfather’s name made public.
The play’s title comes from one of the photograph’s captions, depicting young female camp workers, many of them teenagers, playfully eating bowls of blueberries. They seem innocent enough, with one girl’s sister maintaining that her sibling had no awareness of the camp’s murderous activities. But it eventually becomes apparent that there was no way the young women could not have known, leading us to wonder how they could have possibly justified their roles there.
Similar in its theme to the award-winning film The Zone of Interest, which focused on the domestic lives of Höss and his family who lived directly adjacent to the camp wall, Here There Are Blueberries remains riveting throughout its 90 minutes, never proving dry despite its exposition-heavy narrative style. Kaufman injects arresting theatricality throughout the proceedings, such as the loud shutter clicks that accompany the unveiling of each damning photograph. And the camp’s victims are not ignored, thanks to a climactic, gut-wrenching series of photographs of the inmates, accompanied by a tortured monologue by one of the survivors (Delia Cunningham).
Each member of the eight-member ensemble — including both members of the Off-Broadway cast such as Kathleen Chalfant and Grant James Varjas and well-known newcomers like Michael Cerveris, Montego Glover, Brandon Flynn, and Conrad Ricamora — superbly plays multiple roles, while Bobby McElver’s sound design and David Bengali’s projections play vital roles.
Here There Are Blueberries is currently scheduled to run only through early next year. Let’s hope that this important theatrical history lesson stays around much longer.
Here There Are Blueberries opened November 9, 2026 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre and runs through January 10, 2027. Tickets and information: herethereareblueberries.com
