You won't find traditional song-and-dance numbers or flashy illusionism in Moisés Kaufman's latest theatrical triumph. Instead, you'll find a harrowing documentary-style interrogation of human nature that demands your full, undivided attention. Here There Are Blueberries is officially making its way to Broadway, sliding into the Ethel Barrymore Theatre for a strictly limited engagement starting this November. If you missed its acclaimed runs off-Broadway or at the La Jolla Playhouse, grab a ticket the second they drop. This isn't just another historical drama you sit back and passively consume. It's an active, unsettling mirror held up to our collective conscience.
The story kicks off with a bizarre archival mystery from 2007. An unmarked album of World War II photographs lands on the desk of a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archivist. These aren't the standard, grain-heavy liberation photos we've all seen in textbooks. These images show Nazi officers, guards, and administrative staff at Auschwitz laughing, hosting social gatherings, listening to accordion music, and casually eating blueberries.
Written by Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, and developed by the renowned Tectonic Theater Project—the creative masterminds behind The Laramie Project—the play tracks how museum curators unraveled the provenance of these photos. It exposes the chilling banality of evil. The men and women smiling in these snapshots weren't movie monsters with horns. They were fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters who could spend their day orchestrating mass industrial slaughter and their evening unwinding over a bowl of fresh fruit.
Why This Play Resonates Right Now
We live in an era where historical denial and revisionism are creeping back into the mainstream. People love to view historical atrocities through a neat, binary lens. Good guys versus bad guys. Monsters versus heroes. Here There Are Blueberries shatters that comforting illusion completely.
The play forces you to sit with an uncomfortable truth: ordinary people easily slip into complicity. Through verbatim transcripts, real interviews, and actual projections of the haunting photo album, the production plays out like a high-stakes detective story. You watch historians wrestle with how to catalog, display, and contextualize these artifacts without humanizing perpetrators to an offensive degree.
The creative team didn't invent snappy dialogue or dramatic license to manufacture tension. They relied on reality. The script is an architectural assembly of actual investigative work, featuring sound design by Bobby McElver, projection design by David Bengali, and set design by Derek McLane. Every technical element serves to keep the focus locked on the visual evidence. The photographs themselves act almost like characters on stage, staring down the audience and asking a silent question: What would you have done?
What to Expect From the Broadway Run
Previews begin on November 2, 2026, at the Barrymore Theatre, with opening night officially slated for November 9. Tickets go on sale to the public on September 8. Because it's slated as a strictly limited engagement, seats will vanish fast, especially coming off its massive momentum as a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Drama and winner of the 2025 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play.
Expect a tight, intense 90-minute runtime with no intermission. Tectonic Theater Project knows how to strip away theatrical fat, leaving only the raw bone of the narrative. If you plan on going, don't expect a comfortable night out. Expect to leave the theater talking, arguing, and questioning how easily humanity can look away from cruelty just as long as the berries are sweet and the music is playing.
Secure your spot early, study the history before you sit down, and prepare to confront the parts of human nature we usually prefer to keep hidden in the dark.
