Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich on the Mystery and Moral Reckoning of Broadway’s Here There Are Blueberries

A photo album arrives at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum containing never-before-seen photographs from Auschwitz. This true story is the starting point for Here There Are Blueberries, the Pulitzer Prize-finalist play conceived and directed by Moisés Kaufman and co-written by Kaufman and Amanda Gronich. Part historical investigation and part detective story, the play comes to Broadway following an off-Broadway run at the New York Theatre Workshop.

The anonymous donation raises questions for the museum archivist, who realizes that there are no victims depicted—all of the pictures are of the people who ran the camp. "It's this incredible momentum of a mystery," says Gronich. "None of the historians or archivists who worked there had ever seen anything like it." Kaufman adds: “It is an incredible glimpse into the life of these people who run the largest killing machine in the history of the human race.”

Running alongside that investigation is another true story, involving a businessman who discovers the photographs online and recognizes his own grandfather. His search for answers eventually leads him to other descendants of Nazis pictured in the album, forcing them to confront what their families did and how that history should be carried forward. “They begin to unravel their own mystery about, how did their families come to this place? What does it mean for them now? How are they going to tell the story of their own families?” Gronich explains.

Kaufman first encountered the photographs in 2007, when one appeared on the front page of The New York Times. Struck by the ordinary scene identified as being from Auschwitz, he contacted the museum about interviewing the archivist. “When she started telling the story, I realized that she was doing detective work,” Kaufman says. “She was trying to piece together the history of what these photos revealed. That was the moment that I decided that we needed to do this play.”

Gronich was skeptical at first, telling Kaufman, “You're out of your mind. This is absolutely impossible.” Looking again at the photographs, however, she began to see how they could become the foundation of a theatrical experience rather than simply historical documentation. “If we can find a theatrical way to bring audience members into the selfies of an SS officer—which is what these pictures are—if we can invite the audience in in this very dramatic and theatrical way, what an unforgettable experience.”

Those images now function as characters in the play, projected throughout the theater as the investigation unfolds. Instead of simply watching the archivists search for answers, audience members find themselves studying faces and details alongside them. “The audience becomes co-detectives in the story,” Kaufman says. “They begin to look at the images and scan the images for clues.”

That intimacy also turns the investigation inward, asking theatergoers to consider how ordinary people become participants in extraordinary atrocities. Gronich says audiences have repeatedly described feeling the historical distance disappear as they confront questions about their own choices and responsibilities. "'How do you make a perpetrator? What is the difference between complicity, complacency and culpability?' These are deeply personal investigations and you can feel everyone in the house asking themselves.”

The co-writers say that the Broadway production will largely preserve the off-Broadway vision, with its central images rescaled for the larger house. Both see the transfer as an opportunity for the material to reach a broader audience. “Raising the conversation to a national level, I think is not only important, but urgent,” says Gronich. “These are the questions we want to be asking ourselves right now.”

For its creators, Here There Are Blueberries is less interested in keeping its subjects safely contained in history than in asking audiences to examine their own moral responsibility. "I think for audiences, it feels very, very immediate, urgent and very relevant to our lives today," says Gronich. Kaufman rejects the comfort of treating the Nazis as unknowable monsters, arguing that recognizing their humanity makes the questions raised by the photographs harder to dismiss. “Then you have to ask yourself, ‘What would I do in that situation?’”

That question is one Gronich and Kaufman hope audiences will carry out of the theater and beyond. For Gronich, gathering together to look at the photographs transforms an archival discovery into something immediate and communal. “We're examining photographs, not so much for what they tell us about what happened 80 years ago, but for what they tell us about what's happening now, what's happening every day that we wake up,” she says. “All of us are asking the questions that the pictures pose. So let's do that in a room together. There's something so powerful and urgent about that.”

Here There Are Blueberries begins performances November 2 at the Barrymore Theatre. Get tickets!