‘Here There Are Blueberries’ review: Holocaust docu-drama is chilling and gripping

“Here There Are Blueberries” is a risky title for a commercial Broadway play. For the uninitiated, it suggests calm and pastoral surroundings and doesn’t initially tell you much about what it denotes. “Death of a Salesman” doesn’t have this problem.

But this apparent harmlessness, hiding something much darker and horrific, is what is so powerful about Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich’s chilling spectacle of the Holocaust that opened Monday night at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.

Much like the film “The Spotlight,” it tells the story of how the Nazis lived a happy life just steps away from the massacre of Jews and other targeted groups taking place at Auschwitz in Poland.

Halfway through, a black-and-white snapshot of beaming German girls is projected onto Barrymore’s stage. The handwritten caption from 1944 is “Here there are blueberries.” The chilling, unwritten addendum that we now know: “There is a concentration camp there.”

Kaufman and Gronich’s gripping docu-drama concerns a 2007 photo donation to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. There were a lot of unusual things in this album. Photos of Auschwitz are rare. The Nazis did not want the outside world to know about the crimes taking place there.

Stranger still, these images did not depict the camp’s inmates or the atrocities taking place there. Instead, they showed smiling Nazis and their families playing games, relaxing and partying. Often they pose on beautiful lawns or are photographed by a nearby river. The book was written with care and affection by someone who clearly wanted to remember this period of his life. Hard to imagine.

On Broadway, the stage is coldly covered with desks equipped with lamps and magnifying glasses, and various surfaces become screens. Delia Cunningham plays Rebecca Erbelding, the museum archivist who is first shown these photos, sparking a controversy in her office.

These objects are extraordinary, no doubt, but isn’t the museum’s mantra to “focus on the victims, not the perpetrators”?

She retorts: Isn’t it our job to present the story unvarnished and allow people to confront it and draw their own conclusions? Don’t these images say something vital?

When they are finally posted and make headlines around the world, a shocked German named Tilman Taube (Conrad Ricamora) recognizes his grandfather in several photos and, in an unusual move for a Nazi relative, agrees to help the searchers.

And this begins a series of mysteries. Who was Karl Höcker, the man who owned the book? And why did the SS officers at Auschwitz seem to be having fun just weeks before the camp closed? Majdanek had just been liberated by the Soviets, and it was only a matter of time. And, more upsetting still, what did all these people casually relaxing really know?

Gronich and Kaufman, who of course created “The Laramie Project” with the Tectonic Theater Project, choose a clinical and incisive approach, placing themselves in the shoes of analysts who remain emotionally removed from their difficult subject in order to better illuminate it.

Playing them, as well as Nazi descendants and Auschwitz workers (through transcripts of post-war testimonies), the cast is superb.

Cunningham plays Rebecca with journalistic fierceness and an open heart, much like Holly Hunter on “Broadcast News.” Although, unsurprisingly, there is no humor in “Blueberries.” Kathleen Chalfant gives gravitas to smart colleague Judy Cohen, and as Taube, Ricamora is world-weary and poses as a man who questions his memories of his grandfather. Ricamora is an actor who has always had the ability to naturally traverse different times, places and cultures.

Such is the caliber of this hard-hitting ensemble that it also includes Michael Cerveris, Montego Glover, Michelle Beck, Brandon Flynn and Scott Barrow.

Although “Blueberries” is not, by design, a giant WWII sentiment drama, there is a moving speech near the end from Lili Jacob, a Holocaust survivor who also came across a collection of photos – these poignantly depicting the day she arrived at Auschwitz at exactly the same time as the idyllic images in Höcker’s album.

Kaufman and Gronich surely thought it was necessary to give the victims a strong voice in this story. And Jacob’s difficult memory of seeing the faces of the family she lost adds a sense of wholeness to the play.

This moment once again testifies to the power of photography, memory and history. And that confronting a painful past – even in an office in a meticulous, modest and methodical way, even with photos of little boys in toy cars and girls eating blueberries – is essential to not repeating it.