‘Here There Are Blueberries’ Broadway Review: Evil As Banal As A Bowl Of Fruit

Here There Are Blueberries, the exceptional Pulitzer finalist docu-drama that opened Off Broadway two years ago to great admiration, finally makes its Broadway debut tonight at the Barrymore Theatre. The play, about a mysterious real-life cache of one-of-a-kind Auschwitz photos submitted to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007, remains as intriguing as ever – and with source material as grotesquely mesmerizing as these candid snapshots, how could it not?

In fact, the sheer emotional heft of that photo album and everything it suggests dominates Blueberries to an extent that the play itself can seem rather thin at times, not entirely unworthy of the material at hand but not on equal footing either. Revelations about the banality of evil carry a force no matter how familiar we are with the concept, but familiar we are, and Blueberries can feel somewhat naive at times in its presumption that no one in the audience has ever heard of Hannah Arendt.

But in the grand scheme of things, and in light of the historical tale being told here, those quibbles with dramaturgy shouldn’t diminish the real achievement that is Here There Are Blueberries. The play is vital and more often than not riveting.

Performed by an excellent cast – any production that features the great Kathleen Chalfant is an opportunity not to be missed – Here There Are Blueberries is, at its core, a detective tale. In 2007, a young Holocaust museum archivist named Rebecca Erbelding (Delia Cunningham) receives a letter at her D.C. office from a man who wants to donate a cache of WWII snapshots.

The offer isn’t unusual – the museum serves as a repository for such keepsakes – but the nature of his collection most certainly is. The photo collection long in the man’s possession is more than a rarity, it’s absolutely unique: The images are of Nazi officers – including some of the highest ranking and most notorious, from Mengele to Höss – in their living quarters just over the wall from the camp’s atrocities. Some are of an almost surreal vacation lodge a few miles away, where officers, SS guards and female office workers alike would be treated to days of rest and relaxation for jobs well done. One officer is given five days there for his murder of two Jews attempting to escape the camp.

Such images had never been observed in photographs before, and their discovery is nothing less than historic, generating headlines across the globe, with much of the public fascination falling on the young German female camp office workers enjoying their vacation lodge days and food-and-drink treats. “Here,” says the caption (in German) of one such photo, “there are blueberries.”

The play is structured as an investigation, lead by the young archivist, as the museum staff seeks to uncover the circumstances under which these snapshots were taken, who took them, who is pictured, and, perhaps most intriguingly, how on earth did they survive when all over such evidence was destroyed by the Nazis themselves as the regime fell?

One such question – how did the man who possesses the photos discover them? – is easily answered: A retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel (Michael Cerveris) found the album in the abandoned apartment he briefly inhabited while stationed in Frankfort at the end of the war. Why he kept them in his possession, and did so secretly, is unknowable – he died shortly after making the museum donation.

Other questions posed by the photos are of a more philosophical nature. Did those seemingly carefree young women at the lodge have any idea that the office work they were doing contributed to the genocide next door? And if so, how could they?

Blueberries, for all its demands on facing harsh truths, plays a bit coy in feigning shock at the answers, as if Judgment At Nuremberg never existed, an excusable but still noticeable manipulation. A bit more difficult to overlook are other red herrings seemingly designed to give the play momentum, such as will the museum board accept the donation of the Nazi photos when its mission is to chronicle the victims, not the victimizers? It’s a stick man argument.

Blueberries is on sturdier dramatic ground when new characters – the relatives of the Nazis and camp workers in the photographs – begin arriving mid-show to offer their perspectives. The sister of an office worker sticks with the usual denials, but others are revelatory, not least the grandson of Rudolph Höss, who relates an unnerving tale of his family’s complicity and his own struggles with the violence he fears is an inheritance.

The grandson’s tale is riveting, as is Brandon Flynn’s performance, a stand-out in a uniformly excellent cast that, in addition to those mention above, includes Conrad Ricamora, Scott Barrow, Michelle Beck and Montego Glover, all playing a variety of roles. Derek McLane’s stark set design, dominated by the many tall-legged stand-up desks used by the museum archivists to study the photos, is stellar, as are the crucial projections (designed by David Bengali) that allows us to see what the archivists are seeing. The photos projected onto the walls would be transfixing even without the superb lighting design (David Lander) and sound design (Bobby McElver) that further an entirely earned mood of dread and even despair, never more so than during a late scene that finally gives all those unseen victims their moment in this story, and in a manner so wrenching it won’t be spoiled here except to say that another photo album enters the story, and its story of survival is every bit as astonishing as the first.

In the end, Here There Are Blueberries has sailed past its own here-and-there shortcomings to land on a final thought, artfully told and with clarity of conviction: Just imagine how many untold boxes of forgotten family memorabilia and grim relics are waiting to be discovered, with secrets as efficiently hidden as those sealed away in the human heart?

Title: Here There Are Blueberries
Venue: Broadway’s Barrymore Theatre
Conceived and Directed By: Moisés Kaufman
Co-Written By: Kaufman and Amanda Gronich
Cast: Scott Barrow, Michelle Beck, Michael Cerveris, Kathleen Chalfant, Delia Cunningham, Brandon Flynn, Montego Glover, Conrad Ricamora
Running Time: 1 hr 30 min (no intermission).