‘Blueberries’ examines the ordinary behind the extraordinary
A CHORUS OF CRIMINALS: The cast of Here There Are Blueberries examines newly discovered Nazi photos on stage at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Roda Theatre through May 11. Photo by Matthew Murphy
World War II officially ended 80 years ago. Its impact, and especially its horrors, continue to reverberate. The Holocaust has never left us, nor should it ever, with its psychological and emotional weight still being too much for many of us to bear.
When it comes to the Holocaust in popular storytelling, be it Schindler’s List on screen or The Diary of Anne Frank on stage, it can be difficult to turn our attention to such pain and devastation and yet it’s also hard to turn away. We need constant reminding of what we humans are capable of doing to our fellow humans, knowing that the crazier the world gets, the more we need to learn from the past. This is especially true when there are forces our there that would like to erase the past, bend the facts or simply re-write history to favor their own agenda.
Like all the cast members, Marrick Smith plays multiple roles (and the accordion!) in Here There Are Blueberries, which was inspired by a photo album depicting the ordinary lives of administrators at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Photo by Kevin Parry Photography
Consumption of these “entertainments” can feel difficult, but ultimately for the best, but some simply feel like they’ve seen enough and don’t want to partake. I know I felt like that when the movie The Zone of Interest came out in 2023 depicting what life was like for the staff of Auschwitz, living lovely, well-appointed lives with their families in beautiful homes located right next to the death camp.
I finally watched it anyway and was glad I did, even though its quiet, slow-churning horror still chills me. Some of the same people in that same horrible place in German-occupied Poland appear in the play Here There Are Blueberries, now at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in a co-production with La Jolla Playhouse (where the play had its world premiere in 2022).
Conceived by Moisés Kaufman, who also directs and co-authored with Amanda Gronich, this 90-minute piece of documentary theater was inspired by the discovery of a photo album belonging to Karl Höcker, the right-hand man to the commandant of Auschwitz, Richard Baer, and how that album ended up in the collection of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The story, then, is not really about the atrocities at Auschwitz, although that oppressive pall hangs over the entire enterprise. Rather, Kaufman and Gronich’s play examines how people can lead seemingly normal lives – taking holidays at a mountain chalet mere miles from the camp, eating bowls of fresh blueberries, decorating Christmas trees, celebrating the successful completion of big work projects – even while they are operatives in a well-functioning genocide.
The play also delves into the work of the archivists at the Holocaust Museum and how they use their expertise to unravel the mysteries of the photo album, identify its subjects (look, there’s Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death”) and determine whether the album, which concerns the perpetrators and not the victims, should be included in the museum’s exhibitions. It’s interesting to note that in this particular moment, when it feels like the jobs of archivists and the people trying to preserve facts and artifacts are in terrible jeopardy, the cool efficiency and staggering intelligence of these compassionate experts feels heroic.
Delia Cunningham plays (among others) Rebecca Erbelding, a researcher at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., in Here There Are Blueberries co-written by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich. Photo by Kevin Parry Photography
What plot there is comes from archivist Rebecca Erbelding (played by the superb Delia Cunningham), the first person to come into contact with the photo album when it is shared by a rather evasive American who had been stationed in Germany after the war and found it in an abandoned apartment. From there, Rebecca and her colleagues delve into what is really going on in (and around) the photos and with their subjects. All the while, we see photos from the album splashed by projection designer David Bengali across Derek McLane’s utilitarian set – it’s like the archivist’s shared workspace fluidly becomes any kind of space or projection surface required for the storytelling.
Rebecca falls deeply into her research and identifies especially closely with the young women who served as secretaries in the camp. They were roughly her age, and she wonders – on her own behalf as well as ours – what she would have done in their place. Could she have ended up working for the SS? Were these women simply clerical workers or did they know what was actually going on in the camps? And if they did know, how did they do their work, giggle while eating bowls of fresh blueberries and live with themselves?
Here There Are Blueberries exerts a fascinating hold on its audience, with past, present and possibly the future all swirling through a process that feels at once academic and deeply emotional. The cast is uniformly excellent, all playing multiple roles, from archivists to descendants of Auschwitz employees to, and this is when the full weight of the story really comes to bear, a survivor of the camp. As with most of Kaufman’s work devised with his Tectonic Theater Project, the piece is at once theatrically compelling and as deeply moving as it is thought provoking.
This is a Holocaust story told from a remove, a different angle that asks where we might have fit into the world of 1930s and ‘40s Germany and how, if that kind of authoritarianism reared its ugly head again, what – if anything – we might do about it.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich’s Here There Are Blueberries continues through May 11 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St., Berkeley. Running time: 90 minutes (no intermissions). Tickets are $25-$134 (subject to change). Call 510-647-2949 or visit berkeleyrep.org.
