In 2007, an archivist at a US Holocaust Memorial Museum received a mysterious album containing never-before-seen photographs from Auschwitz.
Curators scrambled to uncover the truth behind the photos, but news of the album spread quickly, making national headlines and sparking a widespread debate and posing questions about the role of ordinary people in the Nazi regime.
HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES, the latest work by Tectonic Theater Project written by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich. Based on real events, the play was a 2024 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama and has already taken the US by storm.
Now, it is gearing up for its UK debut at Stratford East. The theatre’s artistic director, Lisa Spirling, told East End Review: “I dived into the play. I read it, I watched a recording of it, and it just blew my socks off. I found it very, very powerful, very moving.
“It's almost like a detective story. It was looking into a period of history that I'd studied, that I felt like I knew a lot about, and it was doing it in a completely different way. I'm interested in shows that I haven't seen before, or stories that I haven't seen before, being told in a way I haven't seen before.”
New York City-based theatre company Tectonic Theater Project has toured the world with its groundbreaking plays, including The Laramie Project, Tony Award-winning I Am My Own Wife and docudrama The Tallest Tree in the Forest. Their work seeks to shine a light on significant social and political issues and foster dialogue with their audiences.
Some of the performances will be followed by talks with leading ethicists and scholars, programmed by Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE) and Tectonic Theater Project’s Content and Conversation Partner.
In our own time, the populist far right is gaining traction and countries like the US and UK feel more divided than ever. HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES — and the questions it asks of us — have as much relevance today as they did 80 years ago.
“What [Tectonic Theater Project] are doing is to invite interrogation and witnessing without any sort of prescribing,” Spirling added.
“They're asking us to feel discomfort, to see how ordinary people became complicit in something really unimaginable, then slightly turning that mirror back on us.
“I think particularly in England, particularly in London, we can very smugly say, ‘Well, we would never do that. That would never happen on our watch, our politics aren't like that, and we don't behave like that.’
“What this play is doing is looking at the perpetrators and going, ‘Oh, actually, really uncomfortably, they were just like us. And if they're just like us, what does that mean for us?’
“I was so excited about putting it on because it speaks so powerfully to now. Yes, you can look at [the show’s themes] on a global stage, but I think what it's doing, more than anything, is looking at the actions of specific individuals.”
You can see HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES at Stratford East from 31 January until 28 February, 2026. Get tickets here.
