Review: A New Lens on Auschwitz in ‘Here There Are Blueberries’

You do not expect a camera to be the first thing you see in a play about the Holocaust. Yet even before “Here There Are Blueberries” begins, a spotlight illuminates a Leica on a pedestal. A period advertisement projected behind it promotes it as “the camera of modern times.”

That’s apt for a dramatized documentary that looks at its subject from an unusual angle: the discovery of photographs taken at Auschwitz and the archivists who brought them to light.

“Blueberries,” which opened on Monday at New York Theater Workshop in a co-production with Tectonic Theater Project, focuses on the so-called Höcker album, which the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum acquired from an anonymous donor in 2007. Uniquely, none of the album’s 116 photographs depict victims of the Nazis — only the Nazis themselves, going about the banal daily business of living and enjoying their lives at the camp.

That the play takes a similar approach, keeping the victims mostly out of frame, is a blessing and a problem. A blessing because in so doing it avoids both active horror and the cynicism of Holokitsch, in which the murder of six million Jews is appropriated to zhuzh some emotion that might otherwise be absent.

But in backgrounding the tragedy, even with the noblest intentions, “Blueberries” (conceived and directed by Moisés Kaufman; written by Kaufman and Amanda Gronich) gets caught in a different dramatic problem: a problem of moral scale. What it’s about, however worthy, is so much smaller than what it insistently isn’t.

It’s not just that the album at the center of the story, being the keepsake of an assistant to the commandant of Auschwitz in 1944, makes no reference to major atrocities in its portrayal of minor pleasures like the title blueberries. We do not see — as we do in the film “The Zone of Interest,” which features some of the same characters and locations — smoke from crematories or glowing evil light at night. In keeping with the museum’s efforts to “avoid undue attention to the perpetrators,” the play’s Nazis are characterized almost as little as their victims.