In a City of Monuments, History Lives Onstage and in the Streets – The New York Times

In this case, the interviews begin with archivists at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum not far from the theater as they process the astonishing trove of photographs sent to them by a possible donor who says little about how he got them. The images of Auschwitz leaders and workers enjoying outings and singalongs and rewards for their accomplishments, including bowls of fresh blueberries, seem to say almost too much.

By the time the play introduces another Auschwitz album one that fills the historical and emotional gaps of the first with images of inmates you understand why, as a former Nazi propagandist explains, One must harden oneself against the sight of human suffering.

Yet Im not sure plays should. Blueberries, which closed on Sunday in Washington but will be presented next spring at New York Theater Workshop, is so brisk and unsentimental it sometimes feels merely clinical, or perhaps surgical, its unbearable topic opened up for autopsy.

Thats effective, but the more powerful moments for me are those in which characters vitally and morally involved in the story descendants of Nazis, a survivor of the camp speak from painful experience about the ways history implicates them, and all of us, even as it starts to fade from collective memory. The procedural mysteries of the albums are, after all, less important than the living fact of their irrefutable testimony.

Theater is its own kind of testimony. Blueberries, like Exclusion and Good Bones, uses drama (and comedy) to extend our thinking about the legacies of prejudice and resistance, power and deprivation. But then so does any tour of this history-rich, antihistorical city. As our teacher son walked us back to our hotel after seeing Blueberries, I asked him about a particularly impressive Beaux-Arts building we passed. The Carnegie Library, he said. Its now an Apple store.

Good Bones Through June 18 at the Studio Theater, Washington D.C.; studiotheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

Exclusion Through June 25 at Arena Stage, Washington D.C.; arenastage.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

Link:

In a City of Monuments, History Lives Onstage and in the Streets - The New York Times