You don’t count on a digital camera to be the very first thing you see in a play concerning the Holocaust. But even earlier than “Right here There Are Blueberries” begins, a highlight illuminates a Leica on a pedestal. A interval commercial projected behind it promotes it as “the digital camera of recent occasions.”
That’s apt for a dramatized documentary that appears at its topic from an uncommon angle: the invention of pictures taken at Auschwitz and the archivists who introduced them to gentle.
“Blueberries,” which opened on Monday at New York Theater Workshop in a co-production with Tectonic Theater Venture, focuses on the so-called Höcker album, which the USA Holocaust Memorial Museum acquired from an nameless donor in 2007. Uniquely, not one of the album’s 116 pictures depict victims of the Nazis — solely the Nazis themselves, going concerning the banal every day enterprise of residing and having fun with their lives on the camp.
That the play takes an analogous strategy, holding the victims largely out of body, is a blessing and an issue. A blessing as a result of in so doing it avoids each lively horror and the cynicism of Holokitsch, wherein the homicide of six million Jews is appropriated to zhuzh some emotion that may in any other case be absent.
However in backgrounding the tragedy, even with the noblest intentions, “Blueberries” (conceived and directed by Moisés Kaufman; written by Kaufman and Amanda Gronich) will get caught in a special dramatic downside: an issue of ethical scale. What it’s about, nevertheless worthy, is a lot smaller than what it insistently isn’t.
It’s not simply that the album on the middle of the story, being the memento of an assistant to the commandant of Auschwitz in 1944, makes no reference to main atrocities in its portrayal of minor pleasures just like the title blueberries. We don’t see — as we do within the movie “The Zone of Curiosity,” which options a few of the similar characters and places — smoke from crematories or glowing evil gentle at evening. In step with the museum’s efforts to “keep away from undue consideration to the perpetrators,” the play’s Nazis are characterised virtually as little as their victims.
That is smart in deference to survivors, however, in a play, the dependence on implicit distinction (have a look at the Nazis enjoyable!) moderately than demonstrated battle wears skinny. There’s solely a lot drama to be wrung from two-dimensional representations of villains. Tectonic finesses the issue, because it did extra efficiently in “The Laramie Venture” and different productions, by making a spherical robin of strange heroes.
The heroes, set just like the Leica on a pedestal, are the archivists. It’s their story we observe in 31 quick scenes that Tectonic calls “moments,” a time period suggesting snapshots but additionally the corporate’s hallmark means of growing new work with an emphasis on efficiency as an alternative of simply textual content.
In “Blueberries,” this produces a form of dramatic pointillism, the moments gathering into a bigger picture because the archivists be taught of the album, purchase it, research it obsessively and resolve whether or not it needs to be publicized and displayed. (Ultimately it was worldwide information.) The whole lot the archivists do is high-minded and considerate; even their desks, the primary characteristic of Derek McLane’s set, glow with intent below David Lander’s heat lighting.
All this uprightness will get a bit stiff, within the method of a lecture-demonstration for highschool college students. (Although I hope “Blueberries” turns into simply that.) In any case, it’s a reduction each time the eight actors (all good) change out of archivist mode to tackle different roles, together with the donor of the album and folks reacting to it. Generally the solid even supplies reside foley results, animating the images with the sound of giggles, footsteps and spoons scraping bowls of blueberries.
Although all that is exact and clever, the general impact is weirdly slim and never precisely information. That nice evil was finished by probably the most strange folks ought to come as a shock to nobody. Past that, I discovered it laborious to share the joy of discoveries that, nevertheless necessary they’re to historical past, stand at a take away from historical past itself. Dramatizing the identification of a person within the background of {a photograph} just isn’t the identical as dramatizing what he did.
That downside is compounded by a few of the play’s in any other case welcome opening out moments, as when it explores the impact of the publication of the pictures on a number of Germans who’re shocked to acknowledge relations in them. The query of the inheritance of culpability, even perhaps the genetic predisposition to sociopathy that certainly one of them fears, is definitely value investigation. However giving such characters prominence right here pushes the story’s precise victims additional into the background.
Solely close to the tip of this 90-minute play will we hear from a Holocaust survivor. Maybe due to the deprivation of drama earlier, this testimony, which I gained’t spoil, lastly and absolutely engages us straight. (Elizabeth Stahlmann is riveting within the position.) Even so, I couldn’t assist feeling that the character exists in “Blueberries” solely as a result of she too has an album — and thus aligns with the play’s thematic self-discipline.
Like all disciplines, that creates a form of tunnel imaginative and prescient. One of many archivists, performed by the always-gripping Kathleen Chalfant, acknowledges it as a part of her personal work: “I put blinders on, and I focus in on the small print,” she says, in order not to consider the horror of what she sees. One other wonders whether or not the Nazis at Auschwitz did a lot the identical factor, compartmentalizing their ethical consideration.
The comparability is pungent however inapt: Archival work just isn’t loss of life work. Likewise, a play just isn’t a museum. That’s a part of why, whereas admiring Tectonic’s intentions and approach in “Blueberries” — not for nothing was it just lately named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama — I discover it much more unbalanced right now than I did after I noticed it final 12 months in Washington.
Then, it appeared merely disproportionate to historical past, coaching its marvelously sharp lens on a far nook of the image. However after the Oct. 7 assault on Israel, the deaths of greater than 30,000 Gazans, and the antisemitism that has roared absolutely awake ever since, it feels disproportionate to the current as properly. So when, within the play’s epilogue, an archivist says that the album “adjustments our understanding of that point … and of ourselves,” I can’t assist however surprise, as a Jew: How so? It merely confirms mine.
Right here There Are BlueberriesThrough June 16 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Operating time: 1 hour half-hour.
