At Warehouse Theatre, ‘Here There Are Blueberries’ explores the human face of evil

A bowl of blueberries might seem an unlikely symbol for one of history’s darkest chapters.

But in “Here There Are Blueberries,” the new production at the Warehouse Theatre, a photograph of women enjoying blueberries becomes the starting point for an unsettling exploration of the Holocaust — and the people who helped carry it out.

Directed by Jay Briggs, the approximately 90-minute production is a work of documentary theater based on a real collection of photographs sent anonymously to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007.

The photographs depict personnel who worked at Auschwitz, including Nazi officers and their colleagues at work and at leisure.

The title comes from one of the most striking images: a group of women who worked at Auschwitz eating fresh blueberries at a nearby retreat used by camp personnel.

“It’s an album of photographs that was sent anonymously to the Holocaust Memorial Museum,” Briggs said. “But it features none of the inmates. It is only photographs of people who worked at the camp.”

That unusual perspective is central to the play, which was created by Tectonic Theater Project, the company led by Moisés Kaufman. Tectonic is perhaps best known for “The Laramie Project,” its documentary-theater work about the murder of Matthew Shepard.

Like that production, “Here There Are Blueberries” combines interviews and original source material and presents them theatrically. The Warehouse production features eight actors playing a variety of roles.

The actors portray historians, archivists and others connected to the photographs. One central character is Rebecca, a real-life historian and archivist who worked at the Holocaust museum and received and investigated the album.

Detective story

The investigation gives the play a kind of detective-story quality, Briggs said. The archivists try to determine who the people in the photographs were, where and when the pictures were taken, and what the images reveal about Auschwitz.

The photographs themselves are an important part of the production. Projected images appear throughout the play, functioning, Briggs said, almost as “an extra character.”

But the play ultimately goes beyond solving a historical mystery.

“It challenges us to not place the evil that we want to associate with this terrible event in history outside of ourselves,” Briggs said.

The danger, he said, is in treating the people who committed such atrocities as something entirely alien — as monsters rather than human beings. That is what makes the blueberries photograph so powerful.

The people pictured in it are enjoying an ordinary moment of pleasure. Knowing where they worked and what was happening at Auschwitz transforms that ordinary scene into something profoundly disturbing.

And “Here There Are Blueberries” asks its audience to grapple with that contradiction.