Theater Review: Here There Are Blueberries

                     Here There Are Blueberries

Leave it to La Jolla Playhouse to come up with a new way to look at the Holocaust.

I was sure I knew all I wanted to about that unutterably anti-human time when  whole groups of people - Jews in particular – were targeted for extinction by Hitler’s Nazis.

But now comes “Here There Are Blueberries,” inspired by the 2007 donation of a previously unseen album of photographs of Auschwitz to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The donor  –  an unidentified American counterintelligence officer who lived in Frankfurt in 1945 after the war – found the album in a trash can. He insisted on anonymity.

You won’t see a single inmate or execution chamber here. This play concentrates on showing us the photos of those who were involved with the running of that death camp, taken by the people themselves. The truly horrifying fact is that they seem so utterly ordinary.

Playwrights Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, in a co-production with Tectonic Theater Project, have found eight terrific actors; all play multiple characters, speaking as the voices of the projected images we see, or as their living relatives. Kaufman directs the piece.

The play uses Rebecca Erbelding (Elizabeth Stahlmann), who runs the U.S. Holocaust Museum, as narrator. She takes the album and proceeds to identify as many people as possible.

Rosina Reynolds plays Judy Cohen, another museum employee who helps with the research. Much of this research involved talking to descendants of the Auschwitz staff. She says, “I try to get the facts right. I can’t think about the horror.”

Others discover previously unknown relatives among the Nazi staff. 

There are shots of Dr. Mengele and Rudolf Hess, and of a spiffy chalet (built by captive labor) called Solahütte, where Nazis went to relax. We will also see the Helferinnen, the “racially pure” female radio operators.

They are eating the blueberries of the play’s title.

The other actors – Scott Barrow, Charles Browning, Jeanne Sakata, Charlie Thurston, Frances Utu and Grant James Varjas – play multiple characters, all extremely well.

Bravo to Kaufman and Gronich for this thoughtful piece and excellent presentation.

This show does not rely on scenic design (Derek McLane) or costumes (Dede Ayite) as much as it does lighting (David Lander), sound (Bobby McElver) and projection design (David Bengali), but all are done excellently.

This is a play like no other, and I recommend it because it is so very well done, but I wonder about its longevity as a theatrical piece. The topic itself (“Oh, another Holocaust piece?”) may not inspire a stampede for tickets, and the main point that the Nazis weren’t monsters but just regular people gone wrong is almost too horrifying to contemplate.

But the last line tells the tale when the man who finds the album says “I share the album because time passes on and the gathering of knowledge is so precarious.”

The details

“Here There Are Blueberries” plays through August 21, 2022 at La Jolla Playhouse’s Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive in La Jolla.

Shows Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.; Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 and 7 p.m.

Tickets ($25 to $62): (858) 550-1010 or lajollaplayhouse.org

COVID protocol: Masks required indoors