The new Broadway play Here There Are Blueberries possesses a seemingly benign title that belies weightier issues — and a very dramatic true story — underneath. When a mysterious Nazi photo album, now known as the Höcker album, arrived at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007, its contents baffled and shocked the world. Here were pictures of Nazi officers and their auxiliaries smiling, laughing, drinking, and eating blueberries — enjoying their leisure time while down the hill lay the Auschwitz concentration camp where Jewish prisoners were being exterminated.
These seemingly incongruous images gripped the museum’s archivist, Rebecca Erbelding, who enlisted her fellow staff members to uncover the mystery behind these pictures that had been hidden away for more than 60 years. That quest is now portrayed on stage in the latest play from two-time Tony nominee Moisés Kaufman, whose acclaimed works include The Laramie Project and 33 Variations.
“At its heart it’s a detective story,” the playwright and director tells Gold Derby. “This archivist receives this strange, mysterious donation, and it says these are photographs from the concentration camp Auschwitz. She expects to see the imagery that we’re used to seeing about Auschwitz, but when she opens the album, what she sees are photographs of the officers who ran the camp. There is not a single victim in any of the photographs, and that launches a detective journey that lasts about two years, where she tries to figure out everything that the album can tell us.”
“We’re looking at the selfies of an SS officer who worked at the Auschwitz concentration camp. How does that change how we understand the story?” adds co-playwright Amanda Gronich, who was nominated for a 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Blueberries alongside Kaufman. “We learn something about perpetrators, about the camp, about all of our complicity, culpability, complacency. All of us, when we look at these pictures, we say, ‘Who would I have been in that story?'”
Here There Are Blueberries first debuted as a work-in-progress at Miami’s Colony Theatre in 2018, then premiered at San Diego’s La Jolla Playhouse in 2022 with Kaufman and Gronich’s script. The following year, it was performed at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., then made its off-Broadway debut at the New York Theatre Workshop in 2024, followed by a U.S. tour in 2025. It has received past Drama League Award and Outer Critics Circle Award nominations. The show premiered in the UK earlier this year before launching its limited run at the Barrymore Theatre this week.
The play was co-created by Scott Barrow, who portrays Karl Höcker on Broadway, and Grant Vargas, who understudies Tilman Taube, Peter Wirths, and others and played them previously. “The danger of this type of material, because it’s so information heavy, is that we’re going to be doing basically a TED talk,” Barrow says. “In that first performance, we realized it was a theatrical event, not just a TED talk, not a presentation of information.”
Vargas notes that despite knowing the evil acts that lurk outside of the frames of these photos, people can relate to the everyday activities that are being depicted. “You’re having a drink. You’re talking to people at work. You’re playing with your dog,” he says. “All these things that we do every day, and we never think that we’re capable of the things that these people were capable of. But if they’re just like us, then we have to question: What is in me? What do I do every day? What decisions do I make every day that can affect the outcome of something much larger than me?”
Two-time Tony-winning actor Michael Cerveris explains that the cast’s principal roles are as archivists at the Holocaust Memorial Museum “That’s who we are at all times,” he says. “But we also then will step into [what] Scott [Barrow] likes to call ‘conjuring’ the different figures who are quoted in the piece.” Some of the actors play multiple roles. Cerveris also plays Peter Wirths whose father Eduard was the chief SS doctor at Auschwitz and was the superior of the abominable physician Josef Mengele, famously known as the “Angel of Death.”
“We like to think that we would recognize evil immediately when we see it, and I think what this play does painfully well is show that that is probably untrue,” Cerveris muses. “I think that is the heart of what this piece asks you to examine — the fact that multiple things can be true at the same time, and it is not nearly as clear as we think. And the answers to what we would do are possibly not as clear as we think they are.”
Delia Cunningham portrays real-life archivist Rebecca Erbelding from the Holocaust Memorial Museum and got to know the real Erbelding while preparing for the role. “She is just an incredibly brilliant person, and she is an incredibly forward-thinking historian who understands the significance of something that might not on its face look like it teaches us a lot about the crimes of this genocide. It teaches us about humanity,” the actress says.
“We’ve talked a little bit in rehearsals about how the play is a prism in which you can see lots of different events throughout history,” adds Michelle Beck, who plays Charlotte Schünzel, one of the Nazi women believed to be in the Höcker album. “One thing that I hope audiences get from it is to really take a look at humanity and what humans are capable of, and to see the ways in which maybe we are currently complicit in events [of a similar nature].”
Tony-nominated actress Kathleen Chalfant portrays Judy Cohen, the former director of the museum’s photographic archive. “It’s quite an amazing cast,” Chalfant declares. “As one of the OGs [of past productions], I have to say that these new people who have come have embraced the process, which is not a normal process. Since the play existed, people are being made to move at great speed. But these people are brilliant and illuminate the material.
“There’s still time to ask questions,” Chalfant adds. “It’s very exciting to watch the new part of the ensemble come, and to watch how not only the people who are principals in the company, but the people around it, our understudies who have all been involved in the making of it, all fold together.”
The cast has access to replica props of the photo albums onstage which help immerse them in the story. The images are projected on “every single square centimeter of the stage,” Kaufman explains, to give them a three-dimensional quality. In essence, the audience is seeing frames within frames.
“The photos are characters in the show,” emphasizes Brandon Flynn, who plays Rainer Höss, the grandson of Auschwitz’s chief architect, Rudolf Höss. “The audience gets to see them firsthand in a very special, sublime way, and the actors are interrogating them in front of your eyes. They are a huge help to me to have as a visual guide through the complexity of how you look at these photos and try to find the facts and the truth of what is happening there.”
The production is taking other steps to ensure the Holocaust remains in our living memory. The production recently hosted 19 survivors of German concentration camps, who got the chance to speak with the cast and creative team. Additionally, the Blueberries team is launching a landmark student-ticket initiative that they intend will bring 7,500 students and educators to Broadway.
“As we were working, we were constantly aware of the victims, the survivors, and their descendants and their families,” Gronich notes. “Were we doing their story justice? Were we honoring them? There’s a scene I’m not going to give away in which we explore that.
“I think that what was so remarkable was to discover that all of the survivors who were shown these photographs, who were there at Auschwitz at the time these pictures were taken, they all say the same thing: Show them,” Gronich concludes. “Let audiences see them for themselves. Let audiences ask the questions they pose and reach their own conclusions. We felt that responsibility to make sure that we did that.”
Watch interviews with the cast and creative time of Here There Are Blueberries below.
