Rarely does a theatrical work command the collective conscience of audiences with the piercing clarity, moral urgency, and theatrical ingenuity of Here There Are Blueberries. Written by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, conceived and directed by Kaufman, and devised alongside the internationally acclaimed Tectonic Theater Project, this gripping work of documentary theater has arrived on Broadway following a triumphant multi-year journey across the United States and the United Kingdom.

A finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and winner of the 2025 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, Here There Are Blueberries investigates the shocking true story behind a mysterious World War II-era photo album donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007. Featuring a powerhouse Broadway ensemble led by two-time Tony Award winner Michael Cerveris and Tony nominee Kathleen Chalfant, this strictly limited engagement at the historic Ethel Barrymore Theatre challenges audiences to look beyond the photographic frame and confront the unsettling ordinariness of complicity and evil.

1. Broadway Engagement: Venue, Dates & Performance Schedule

Here There Are Blueberries is playing a strictly limited 10-week engagement on Broadway at the historic Ethel Barrymore Theatre (located at 243 West 47th Street, New York City, operated by The Shubert Organization).

Performance Breakdown Table

Advertised as a special, strictly limited engagement of 80 performances only, the Broadway schedule allows audiences from November 2026 through early January 2027 to experience this acclaimed production before its scheduled closing.

2. The Real History: Inside the Karl Höcker Photo Album

To understand the profound impact of Here There Are Blueberries, one must understand the remarkable historical artifact at its center. In January 2007, Rebecca Erbelding, a young archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C., received a FedEx package from a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel named Matthew. Inside was a private, leather-bound World War II photo album containing 116 rare black-and-white photographs.

The retired officer had discovered the album in 1946 inside an abandoned apartment in Frankfurt, Germany, while serving with Allied counterintelligence forces after the war. For more than sixty years, it remained hidden in his personal belongings before he decided to donate it to the museum.

Erbelding and her colleagues—including photographic archives director Judy Cohen—embarked on a meticulous historical detective investigation. Through careful visual analysis, the archivists identified high-ranking perpetrators previously thought never to have been photographed at Auschwitz, including notorious SS physician Dr. Josef Mengele, Auschwitz founder Rudolf Höss, and Birkenau camp commander Josef Kramer. When the USHMM publicly released the digitized album in September 2007, it made international front-page news—and sparked an unexpected chain reaction among the descendants of the perpetrators pictured within its pages.

3. Play Synopsis & Dramatic Structure

Constructed using Tectonic Theater Project’s signature investigative methodology—known as Moment Work—Here There Are Blueberries unfolds over 90 uninterrupted minutes as both a gripping historical detective thriller and a piercing moral meditation. Drawing directly from real archival transcripts, museum records, historical documents, and original interviews conducted by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, every word spoken on stage is grounded in documented truth.

Part I: The FedEx Box and the Archival Investigation

The play opens in 2007 at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where archivist Rebecca Erbelding unwraps the newly arrived photo album. As massive, high-resolution projections of the authentic photographs illuminate the stage screen, Erbelding and her veteran supervisor, Judy Cohen, examine the perplexing images. Initially, the pictures appear almost benign: SS officers singing along to an accordion, lighting a Christmas tree, hunting in the woods, and relaxing at Solahütte, an SS mountain retreat located less than 20 miles from Auschwitz.

As the archivists cross-reference dates, uniforms, and facial features with historical records, the horrifying truth comes into focus. These carefree retreats and blueberry picnics occurred in the summer of 1944—the exact months when over 400,000 Hungarian Jews were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and murdered in the gas chambers.

Part II: The Ethical Dilemma of Preservation

Once the historical significance of the album is confirmed, Erbelding and Cohen face an agonizing curatorial and ethical dilemma: Should the museum publish photographs showing mass murderers smiling, laughing, and appearing wholly human? Museum leadership fears that releasing images of Nazis enjoying idyllic camaraderie could inadvertently humanize perpetrators, minimize the suffering of victims, or provide propaganda material for Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis.

Ultimately, the museum decides that transparency is vital to understanding how ordinary human beings participate in state-sponsored atrocity. In September 2007, the USHMM publishes the Höcker album online and on the front page of The New York Times.

Part III: Reckoning Across Generations

The final movement of the play traces the reverberations of the album’s publication across Germany and around the world. In Hamburg, a German businessman named Tilman Taube clicks on a news link about the album and is horrified to recognize his own beloved grandfather—an SS officer he knew only as a gentle, cultured family man—smiling in several of the Auschwitz photographs.

The play also introduces Rainer Höss (the grandson of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss) and examines post-war interviews with Karl Höcker himself, who claimed until his death in 2000 that he had no knowledge of the mass killings occurring just outside his office window. By juxtaposing the perpetrators’ idyllic self-image with the unimaginable horror omitted from their camera frames, Here There Are Blueberries leaves audiences grappling with an urgent contemporary question: What atrocities are happening outside our own frames today while we go about our ordinary lives?

4. Production History: From Miami Workshops to Broadway

The development of Here There Are Blueberries spans nearly a decade of intensive research, interviewing, and theatrical experimentation by Tectonic Theater Project—the renowned New York company behind landmark documentary plays such as The Laramie Project and Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde.

• 2018 – Work-in-Progress Premiere (Miami, FL): Under the early working title The Album: Here There Be Blueberries, the piece was first presented as a developmental work-in-progress during Miami New Drama’s 2017–2018 season at the Colony Theatre.
• July 2022 – World Premiere (La Jolla Playhouse, CA): Following years of interviews in Germany and the U.S., the finalized play had its official world premiere at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, winning rave reviews and selling out its run.
• May 2023 – Washington, D.C. Engagement: The production transferred to the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., right in the city where the Höcker album resides at the USHMM, earning two Helen Hayes Awards.
• May 2024 – Off-Broadway Triumph (New York Theatre Workshop): Making its New York debut in a co-production between New York Theatre Workshop and Tectonic Theater Project, the play became an instant critical phenomenon, earning a nomination as a 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Drama and winning the 2025 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play.
• 2025–2026 – National Tour & London UK Premiere: Launching from McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, NJ, a major U.S. national tour traveled to major regional houses including Berkeley Repertory Theatre, The Wallis Annenberg Center in Los Angeles, and Seattle Rep, while a separate UK production premiered at London’s Theatre Royal Stratford East in early 2026.
• November 2026 – Broadway Debut (Ethel Barrymore Theatre): In August 2026, producers announced the play’s official Broadway transfer to the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, with previews starting November 2 and Opening Night on November 9, 2026.

5. The 2026 Broadway Cast & Characters

For its Broadway run at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Here There Are Blueberries assembled an extraordinary eight-person ensemble combining original devising cast members with celebrated Broadway stars. Every actor portrays multiple real-life historical figures, archivists, historians, and descendants across time and continents.

Creative & Design Team

The visual and sonic architecture of Here There Are Blueberries is integral to its storytelling. Directed by Moisés Kaufman, the production features scenic design by Tony Award winner Derek McLane, Lucille Lortel Award-winning projection design by David Bengali, costume design by Dede Ayite, lighting design by David Lander, original music and sound design by Bobby McElver, and dramaturgy by Amy Marie Seidel.

6. Critical Acclaim & Reviews

From its regional debuts through its Off-Broadway triumph and Broadway arrival, Here There Are Blueberries has earned unanimous acclaim from major theater critics on both sides of the Atlantic, named one of the “10 Best Plays of 2024” by The Wall Street Journal:

“Haunting… For those who haven’t seen it… the experience is likely to be educational, sorrowful and even enlightening. The project contains great passion and seriousness, as well as a sense of the long, painfully maintained stewardship over this history.”

“A gripping exposé… Made compellingly theatrical by the virtuosic visual instincts of director Moisés Kaufman.”

“The play spools out like a detective story… Coming at a time when history is fiercely contested, when facts are elbowed out by conspiracies and deepfakes, and when demagogues and division are on the rise, it sends a stern warning from the past.”

7. Awards & Nominations

Prior to its Broadway opening in November 2026 (which makes it eligible for the 2027 Tony Awards season), Here There Are Blueberries garnered prestigious literary and theatrical honors across its developmental and Off-Broadway runs:

Conclusion: Essential Theater at the Ethel Barrymore

Playing for strictly 80 performances at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre through January 10, 2027, Here There Are Blueberries stands as one of the defining theatrical events of the 2026–2027 Broadway season. Through Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich’s razor-sharp script, David Bengali’s haunting visual projections, and an extraordinary eight-person cast, the play transforms an archival mystery into an unforgettable reckoning with history, memory, and human responsibility.