“Here There Are Blueberries” at New York Theatre Workshop (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

In 2007, United States National Holocaust Museum (USNHM) archivist Rebecca Erbelding received a bubble-wrapped package. Inside was a photo album filled with pictures of the Nazis’ largest concentration camp, Auschwitz. But unlike the rare other photographs of Auschwitz that had survived, these were not the haunting shots of suffering, doomed prisoners, but humdrum portraits and candids of the Germans who worked there. There are shots of Germans merrily singing with an accordionist, young women eating blueberries, even someone lighting candles on a Christmas tree.

The USNHM archivists’ effort to decipher the photographs and the decision of what to do with the Höcher album (named for the Nazi who compiled it) are the unlikely dramatic fodder for New York Theatre Workshop’s new play, Here There Are Blueberries. Characters narrate the action, starting with Rebecca’s discovery of the album. Museum staff debate whether or not to display the photos, weighing their historical value against USNHM policy to focus on the victims. The archivists do detective work, coming up with theses about who created the album and why.

Publicity draws the attention of German Tillman Taube who recognizes his grandfather in the photos. He goes to work for the museum, finding and talking with other descendants of the Nazis in the photos. The Germans and the Americans struggle to come to terms with the fact that these normal-looking individuals perpetrated one of history’s greatest crimes.

Playwrights Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich use interviews with USNHM staff and Nazi descendants to weave a compelling story. This isn’t documentary theatre where transcripts are edited and dramatized. Kaufman and Gronich take liberties, recreating conversations and liberally employing direct audience address. But they very clearly are trying to represent events as they happened, resulting in a play that feels authentic.

The Höcher album’s workaday photographs, projected throughout the play on virtually every surface, give rise to the play’s central question: were the perpetrators of the holocaust all monstrous deviants or were they ordinary people who just went along? And did these photographic subjects, like the photographers, know what was happening or did they maintain a willful ignorance? Archivist Rebecca attempts to answer these questions by focusing on the innocent-looking young women who worked the camp’s switchboard, the Helferinnen. Played frankly and subtlety by Elizabeth Stahlmann, Rebecca fruitlessly searches for hints in the photos. “That’s the thing about history,” she tells us, “not all of it is knowable.”

But the playwrights don’t give up so easily. Later, in one of the play’s most affecting scenes, Tillman, played ably by Jonathan Raviv, asks son of camp doctor Peter Wirths if he’s come to terms with the participation of his father, who eliminated typhoid and improved nutrition and is credited with saving some 93,000 inmates. Wirths seems astonished by the question. His father stood “at the ramp, and selected who was going to be sent into forced labor and who was going to the gas chamber.” Regardless of how much he improved conditions, his part can never be forgiven.

The entire cast does great work, continuously assuming and shedding characters. There are a few times more clarity would have been useful, like when recanting Nazi propagandist Melita Maschmann appears. Are these really her statements? When did she make them?

The unaffected acting style director Kaufman has chosen suits the text perfectly. The characters analyze, research and debate without histrionics, but the play manages to convey emotion effectively when it needs to. Somehow, the intellectual debate about culpability is quite moving.

The times Kaufman gives in to melodramatic impulses are when the show is weakest. Sound designer Bobby McElver, while delivering effective cues overall, undercuts the drama when his sound telegraphs too overtly. When photos at the top of the show start featuring swastikas and Nazi salutes, the ominous music is overkill. Ditto the sound of the train cattle car opening and closing near the end.

I appreciate designer Derek McLane’s versatile set, where everything can be a surface upon which the photographs are projected, and Dede Ayite’s costumes, which strike the balance between specificity and versatility. Some welcome theatricality is provided by David Lander’s lighting. All design elements conspire to place the photographs front and center, as they should. Despite the constant photographic presence, David Bengali’s projection design never feels like a PowerPoint presentation. That in itself is an accomplishment.

At the play’s conclusion, survivor Lili Jacob displays the album she found after liberation – the other, more familiar Auschwitz photographs. These images contextualize the seemingly benign characters of the Höcher album and return focus to the Holocaust’s victims. Höcher and company saw themselves as good guys. They were so proud of the work they were doing that they documented it. But their self-portraits were incomplete. They left out the most relevant information: what that work was. When that information is included, the true banality of evil, to borrow a phrase, becomes apparent.