THE PICTURES WE CANNOT LOOK AWAY FROM

Moisés Kaufman investigates what
an album of Nazi photographs can tell us
about the people smiling inside them

I’ll see anything Moisés Kaufman puts onstage. From The Laramie Project onward, he has been one of our most adventurous theater makers, particularly when working with documentary material. He knows how to take testimony, documents and historical evidence and make them theatrical without tarting them up. So the Broadway arrival of Here There Are Blueberries, written by Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, is welcome news.

The play begins previews November 2 at the Barrymore Theatre and opens November 9 for a limited ten-week engagement. Kaufman, who conceived and directed the work, returns to direct. Casting has yet to be announced.

The title comes from something deceptively benign. In 2007, an album of Nazi-era photographs arrived at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The photographs were unlike others the museum had encountered, and curators began investigating the people and circumstances captured in them. The album eventually made headlines and sparked a debate extending well beyond the museum.

That is the starting point for Kaufman and Gronich, who follow the investigation into the photographs and what they reveal about the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Who are the people in these pictures? What can an image tell us about them? What can’t it tell us? And what happens when a seemingly ordinary photograph becomes historical evidence?

This is Kaufman territory if ever there was any. His documentary theater doesn’t require an invented hero to lead us through history; the act of examining the evidence becomes the drama. Here, a photograph is evidence, but it is also incomplete evidence. Everything depends upon what can be established about the people inside the frame—and what the photographs cannot explain.

Here There Are Blueberries was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and won the 2025 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play. It premiered at La Jolla Playhouse in 2022 before its 2024 Off-Broadway production at New York Theatre Workshop. The Broadway design team includes Derek McLane (scenic design), Dede Ayite (costumes), David Lander (lighting), Bobby McElver (sound) and David Bengali (projections).

Kaufman and Gronich approach the Holocaust through an unusual piece of evidence: photographs taken by the perpetrators themselves, images whose apparent ordinariness makes them all the more disturbing. Rather than reconstructing events, Here There Are Blueberries examines what these photographs reveal—and what they cannot—about the people behind them. With Kaufman conceiving and directing, that is more than enough to put Here There Are Blueberries near the top of my Broadway list.

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Here There Are Blueberries
Tectonic Theater Project
Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47th St. in New York
previews begin November 2, 2026
opens November 9
strictly limited 10-week engagement
tickets on sale September 8
for tickets, visit Here There Are Blueberries

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