The play “Here There Are Blueberries,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist about museum archivists wrestling with photographs of Nazi social life, is coming to Broadway this fall.
The drama reconstructs the true story of how the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum responded when the troubling photographs — which show concentration camp workers at leisure, and not their suffering victims — were gifted to them in 2007. The Pulitzers described the play as “an elegant and harrowing work of documentary theater that examines the provenance of a photo album from Auschwitz and probes the unsolvable mystery of how individuals can insist on normalcy while atrocity lurks outside the frame.”
The play is written by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich of Tectonic Theater Project, a nonprofit in New York best known for “The Laramie Project.” Kaufman, who conceived the play, is its director; the Broadway production is scheduled to begin previews Nov. 2 and to open Nov. 9 for a 10-week run at the Barrymore Theater.
In a joint telephone interview, Kaufman and Gronich described the play as a “detective story,” in which the audience follows researchers as they try to understand what they are looking at, and what the images reveal about history and about the human condition.
“There’s something unique about Broadway, where a play on Broadway opens up a national conversation, which is so thrilling for us, because we really do think that the issues that the play raises belong in a national conversation,” Gronich said. “Each day that goes by, it feels more and more urgent.”
“Here There Are Blueberries” has been embraced by America’s nonprofit theater scene — it was workshopped at Miami New Drama in 2018, before the coronavirus pandemic, and then began its postpandemic production life in 2022 at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego.
It was staged at Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington and New York Theater Workshop in Lower Manhattan, returned for a full run at Miami New Drama, and a small touring production had runs at McCarter Theater Center in New Jersey, the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts and Berkeley Repertory Theater in California, and Seattle Repertory Theater.
The play was also staged earlier this year at Stratford East in London.
The Broadway production, a commercial venture, has a producing team led by Tectonic Theater Project and Brian and Dayna Lee. Casting has not yet been announced.
