Here There Are Blueberries Keeps This Moment at Arm’s Length

Moisés Kaufman 1st saw the photographs that prompted the development of Below There Are Blueberries in 2007. He to start with contacted Rebecca Erbelding, the archivist and historian who introduced the photographs to light-weight, in 2010. The play — a documentary-type piece grappling with the visuals, which give a Nazi’s-eye see of Auschwitz — was penned by Kaufman and Amanda Gronich and designed by Kaufman’s Tectonic Theater Project above additional than a decade, constructing on exploration, interviews, and the company’s signature devising course of action of “moment get the job done.” Right after premiering at La Jolla in 2022, it went to D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Enterprise, just a small wander across the Nationwide Shopping mall from the Holocaust Memorial Museum, wherever Erbelding is effective and where by the photographs reside in the archives far more just lately, in the course of its previews at New York Theatre Workshop, the participate in grew to become a Pulitzer finalist. There’s nothing at all hasty about In this article There Are Blueberries — it has been built, piece by intentionally laid piece, over a long time, and its run at NYTW will come augmented with a complete series of talk-backs and scrupulously prepared postshow discussions.

And nonetheless, at the very least in my expertise of the clearly show, there’s the hovering feeling of a little something not getting dealt with. Here we are, at the theater the place the playwright Victor I. Cazares launched a individual strike declaring that they would prevent having their HIV meds right until their onetime “artistic home” named for a ceasefire in Gaza (NYTW never ever did inventive director Patricia McGregor responded with this letter). And right here we are at the end of a theatrical time that has felt specially crowded — even by the requirements of the variety, which is usually really present in New York — with Holocaust performs. A clearly show the two can and are unable to support the second it lands in. Development processes acquire months, or, as with Blueberries, many years. But even the most slapdash productions do not go up in the exact earth in which they were conceived. Each and every play, and every single team of artists, owes something to alone: Are we telling the tale we established out to explain to? And, to some diploma, to the context in which it finds by itself: What does this tale, no matter what our unique intentions, indicate now? By keeping away from any very clear allusion to Gaza, not even a nod in its copious program resources, Here There Are Blueberries provokes a nagging emotion of double vision. By a person eye, you’re observing an earnest, solidly crafted show in which a team of great actors dissects a fascinating and appalling historical artifact. As a result of the other, you are watching a production, a theater, and a theater globe that, on the full, nonetheless by some means just cannot bring alone to make its parallels explicit — to say out loud, That was an atrocity and so is this. A genocide transpired then, and a person is occurring now. Cease fireplace.

Angering theatergoers has to be alright, has to be a thing we halt fearing. Comparison is over and above fraught when it will come to the Holocaust, but the real truth is that comparison — which, counter to some arguments, is not necessarily diminishment — is already implicit in each piece of historic theater. We are offered with lenses by means of which to witness our have moment. Situations, no make a difference how monumental or horrific, grow to be factors of reflection, no matter if or not we are eager to replicate.

What’s placing is that In this article There Are Blueberries appreciates as significantly. Its protagonist — the loaded-voiced Elizabeth Stahlmann’s thoughtful evocation of Erbelding — continuously pauses to check with herself, “What would I have done?” or “Who are we in the tale?” Erbelding is guiding us via the Höcker Album, a selection of pictures that a retired U.S. lieutenant colonel introduced to her notice in late 2006. Taken by Karl Höcker, adjutant to the Nazi commandant Richard Baer, the pictures depict working day-to-working day lifestyle at Auschwitz as seasoned by the camp’s officers and communications employees (females recognised as Helferinnen, who labored the switchboards). There are everyday lunches and workers outings, people today stress-free in lawn chairs, taking part in the accordion, laughing in the rain, eating blueberries. There is not a solitary prisoner in the 116 illustrations or photos. Like Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Desire, the Höcker Album horrifies as a result of its sunlit mundanity, its blithe — and, in this situation, indisputably factual — illustration of mass murderers and their accomplices not as monsters but as smiling, pie-confronted family members gentlemen and rosy-cheeked younger women. “​​A lender clerk, a sweet-maker, an accountant,” states the curator Paul Salmons (Scott Barrow), listing the prewar professions of Höcker (also embodied by Barrow) his manager, Baer and Josef Kramer, who ran the extermination center at Birkenau. In the encounter of these types of a doc, the credo “Never again” gets not only a contact to resist authoritarianism, or even to be awake to the continued scourge of antisemitism, but a warning to ourselves about ourselves: See how straightforward it is to stay as if you and all those closest to you are the only real human beings in the environment?

Zadie Smith wrote not long ago, and with substantially ensuing ire, about “that fantastical, linguistical, conceptual, unreal place” where public intellectuals, and absolutely plenty of private citizens, truly feel pressured to plant a “rhetorical flag” regarding Palestine and Israel. In my personal way, so did I. I sympathize with Smith’s addiction to humanism — in the brutal, reductive currents of the globe, I much too come across myself clinging to complexity and nuance as a everyday living raft. But why must that raft turn out to be a shield or a mask? Why should really a belief that folks are folks, that heritage is a thousand-thread knot, and that words are remarkably imperfect resources end us from indicating and executing all we can in the services of what’s correct? As it stands, “all we can” also generally feels like subsequent to practically nothing, nonetheless continue to we be reluctant. Is an particular person play, artist, or establishment accountable for creating distinct community statements over and above the broader template of values expressed in their do the job? I really do not know the respond to, or irrespective of whether it is an response that is always the exact same, a single second to the subsequent — I suspect not. I suspect that, at times, invisible thresholds are crossed, and beyond these shifting traces, not talking gets to be in itself a kind of speech.

This is why Listed here There Are Blueberries is one particular engage in in an inventive vacuum and an additional in, perfectly, the environment. Aspect of the problem is that, in plays that consider us wherever Kaufman and Gronich’s does, we’re working with content material that the two is and is not metaphor. Just one viewer will see the Höcker images — and all those from the Auschwitz Album, which stand in sickening distinction to Höcker’s — and will hear Holocaust historian Stefan Hördler (Nemuna Ceesay) speak about how “for the Nazis, the total process of killing individuals [was] about dividing responsibilities” or she will listen to Stahlmann, speaking in the person of Holocaust survivor Lili Jacob about staying torn from her household, all of whom had been murdered, and she — this viewer — will assume, We are performing it all over again. Destroying family members, killing little ones, and spreading the complicity as slim as we can to lower the sting. A different viewer will see and listen to all the very same photos and words and will believe, This celebration stands alone and usually will, and this is particularly why Israel requires to exist and to defend by itself. 

The demonstrate tends to make area for both these audience associates and these in among, and probably this is exactly what it desires to do some may well even argue that this kind of multi-partisan inclusivity is a person of theater’s vital jobs. But I am hesitant about the number of productions I have witnessed this calendar year alone that, in their retreading of our shared historical past, seem to be to be offering their audiences not so much an possibility for challenging reflection and feasible transform of brain as for affirmation of the thoughts-set they walked in with. When, in his a great deal-misunderstood Oscars speech, Jonathan Glazer resolved the “dehumanization” of both “the victims of October 7 in Israel” and of “the ongoing assault in Gaza,” he expressed the pain of obtaining “Jewishness and the Holocaust [be] hijacked by an occupation.” What is happening now is that with every new production that returns us to these subjects and these areas without the need of some kind of defiance of Zadie Smith–ian take out, this hijacking is getting permitted to carry on. While Kaufman and Gronich nevertheless have their obligation to their personal approach and story in its more contained, theatrical sense, there will have to exist additional choices than persisting in maintaining that story’s current resonances so pointedly constrained. It’s not about radical rewrites — a assertion in the software, a gesture from the phase, a coda of some sort, 1 postshow dialogue that mentions Gaza? Absolutely, this is a various participate in than the a single that opened at La Jolla in 2022 surely, the behind-the-scenes discussions have been frequent, extensive, and complicated. Why not bring additional of that change and issues to the phase?

It is a disgrace not just in this broader perception but in a much more finely targeted 1 that In this article There Are Blueberries is haunted by an aura of contextual diffidence for the reason that so a great deal that’s persuasive is taking place in the output. Derek McLane’s established design riffs on the layout and tools of an archival-research lab, and its fluid conversation with David Bengali’s projections makes an eerily tasteful backdrop for the Höcker Album’s procession of serene, awful images. Stahlmann, Ceesay, Barrow, and the relaxation of the ensemble (like the excellent Kathleen Chalfant as Erbelding’s supervisor, Judy Cohen) under no circumstances overgild or sentimentalize their many pieces, and in a handful of striking moments, they bring the shots to lifestyle with jolts of awful vitality. “Rain from a obvious sky,” reads the translation of one particular picture’s caption: We see a collection of shots of the Helferinnen posing with Höcker, their grinning manager thunder claps, and then the candids exhibit the group scattering in a shock summer downpour. Beneath the looming projected photographs, the girls in the solid stand in a line, guffawing and shrieking with delight.

“Feigling,” suggests Heinz Baumkötter (1 of the Nazi officers in the images, played with square-shouldered inscrutability by Ceesay). “Maybe I was … Feigling. A coward. Probably I was a coward at moments, and for this reason, I didn’t do what I should’ve done.” It’s some thing Baumkötter’s grandson, Tilman Taube (played by Jonathan Raviv), remembers him indicating, and of all the words and phrases spoken in Listed here There Are Blueberries by figures portrayed in the Höcker Album, these experience the most honest, the the very least self-protecting — the easiest, and most frighteningly so, to track down inside of one’s own soul. They raise the exact query that lurks in the silent hole in which this and so several tasks and institutions, whether consciously or not, draw the line of their present-day political engagement: What are we so afraid of?

Right here There Are Blueberries is at New York Theatre Workshop by way of June 16.