Tag Archives: David Lander

HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES

Here There Are Blueberries explores a remarkable album of photos taken at Auschwitz (photo © Matthew Murphy)

HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES
New York Theatre Workshop
79 East Fourth St. between Second & Third Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 30, $105-$125
www.nytw.org

When you enter New York Theatre Workshop to see Here There Are Blueberries, there’s a projection of the Leica logo on a translucent curtain behind an actual camera on a stand on the stage. “In the 1930s, the development of compact, portable cameras like this one changed everything,” an actor says in a prologue, explaining that as Germany emerged from a national depression, citizens started taking photos as an affordable hobby in the pursuit of happiness. “Each pose, each press of a button, each frozen moment tells the world: This is our shared history, and this is what it means to us. Viewed in this way, the apparent ordinariness of these images does not detract from their political relevance. On the contrary: Asserting ordinariness in the face of the extraordinary is, in itself, an immensely political act.”

According to the September 2020 U.S. Millennial Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Survey, the first national poll ever taken of millennials and Gen Z about the Holocaust, sixty-three percent of respondents did not know that six million Jews were killed by the Nazis, forty-eight percent could not name a single concentration camp or European ghetto, and twenty percent believed that the Jews caused the Holocaust. As more survivors and witnesses pass away and antisemitism grows around the world, those numbers are only likely to increase, which is why a play such as the exquisitely rendered Here There Are Blueberries is so timely and necessary.

Running at New York Theatre Workshop through June 30, the gripping hundred-minute drama from the Tectonic Theater Project pores over the contents of a book of photos delivered to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007 by an eighty-seven-year-old retired U.S. lieutenant colonel (Grant James Varjas); he had been holding on to them since he discovered them in an abandoned Frankfurt apartment in 1946. There was something unique and unexpected — and terrifying — about the pictures: They did not contain a single image of a victim or prisoner.

With limited information, the archival team, led by Dr. Rebecca Erbelding (Elizabeth Stahlmann) and Judy Cohen (Kathleen Chalfant), begin a detailed forensic investigation that yields a surprising result: The photos are of Nazi officers and Helferinnen, a communication corps of young women, enjoying themselves at Auschwitz, exploring the facilities, laughing and singing, and relaxing at the previously unknown chalet known as Solahütte, where weekends were awarded to hard workers, a bonus for a job well done — asserting ordinariness in the face of the extraordinary, examples of what Jewish historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt, who fled Germany with her family in 1933, referred to as “the banality of evil.”

As the museum archive team starts identifying the men in the photos — among those seen in large projections on the back wall are Dr. Josef Mengele, Commandant SS Major Richard Baer, chief SS doctor Eduard Wirths, Auschwitz builder Rudolph Höss, and his right-hand man, former bank clerk SS Obersturmführer Karl Höcker (Scott Barrow), who owned the album — it reaches out to descendants of the subjects, some of whom are shocked to find out what their fathers and grandfathers were up to. One, Tilman Taube (Jonathan Raviv), decides to help the museum track down more relatives in order to gather further information. “Those who say nothing . . . they transfer this trauma to the next generation,” he bravely argues.

Meanwhile, Dr. Erbelding, Cohen, and museum director Sara Bloomfield (Erika Rose) debate whether the photographs should be put on display. “Here we find our first obstacle. There’s a sense at our museum that we should focus on the victims, not on the perpetrators,” Cohen says. Bloomfield replies, “In the creation of the permanent exhibition of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, special effort has been made to avoid undue attention to the perpetrators and to humanize and honor the victims.” Shortly after a survivor declares that the museum should let the public see the pictures for themselves, Bloomfield says, “We don’t want to elevate Nazis, to give them any kind of platform.”

The photographs that give the play its name are a series of shots of Höcker with a group of Helferinnen in skirts sitting on a fence on the Solahütte deck, eating blueberries, all smiles as they pose for the camera; one of the young women pretends to cry because her bowl is empty. “People called us and said — these people look normal, the girls look like teenage girls. Because they were. And that was surprising, that they look like us!” Dr. Erbelding explains. The caller continued, “‘I know I never could’ve been a Mengele. I know I never could’ve been a Höcker. But could I have been a Helferin?’”

And therein lies the dilemma at the heart of the play: What would any of us have done in that situation — and what would we do today?

Dr. Rebecca Erbelding (Elizabeth Stahlmann) leads a team at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in gripping play (photo © Matthew Murphy)

Using their Moment Work method of collaboration, Tectonic Theater Project and founding artistic director Moisés Kaufman have created such fact-based narrative plays as The Laramie Project, 33 Variations, I Am My Own Wife, and Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. Conceived and directed by Tony and Emmy nominee Kaufman — inspired by the 2007 New York Times article “In the Shadow of Horror, SS Guardians Frolic” — and cowritten by Kaufman and Emmy nominee Amanda Gronich, Here There Are Blueberries takes the audience inside the tense research and analysis as the museum realizes how important the evidence is.

The album served as visual reference for the Oscar-nominated film The Zone of Interest, a fictionalized version of the everyday life of Höss and his family, who lived next door to Auschwitz. It also has much in common with Bianca Stigter’s astounding 2021 documentary, Three Minutes — A Lengthening, which follows the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as it tries to uncover the details about a mysterious 180-second home-movie clip from Poland in 1938, searching for the exact location, who is in the footage, and what happened to the citizens of this community.

Derek McLane’s set is a research room containing several standing desks where characters in Dede Ayite’s everyday costumes conduct their analyses; David Lander’s clear-cut lighting includes overhead industrial fluorescents and illuminates individual speakers, while Bobby McElver’s sound ranges from the accordion and a storm to chirping birds, a flowing river, and marching feet. David Bengali’s bold projections of the photos, news reports, related documents, and maps makes the audience feel like they are part of the research team, especially with close-ups and when a particular figure in a photo is lit up or silhouetted. A few instances of live video are distracting and unnecessary, but they are kept to a minimum.

Stahlmann (Slave Play, Pushkin “Eugene Onegin” in our own words) and Tony nominee Chalfant (Angels in America, Novenas for a Lost Hospital) lead a strong ensemble cast (which also includes Noah Keyishian, Anna Shafer, and Charlie Thurston) that smoothly handles multiple roles. The material is treated with a gentle sensitivity that makes the various revelations all the more powerful.

Early on, Dr. Erbelding concludes, “This album is something [Höcker] treasured. There are no ink blots, he doesn’t misspell anything, he made sure the lettering was right. Everything is glued perfectly. This was meant to last.” After the show, as the audience exits, facsimiles of many of the photos are on display in the lobby, a potent reminder that the story that has just been told is true and that the snapshots are real.

I know that for me, one thing that is going to last from this play: I will never be able to look at blueberries the same way again.

[The June 4 and 12 performances will be followed by discussions with the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics. Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

COAL COUNTRY

The characters of Coal Country listen to Steve Earle sing about a horrific mining disaster (photo by Joan Marcus)

COAL COUNTRY
Cherry Lane Mainstage Theatre
38 Commerce St.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 17, $39-$77
212-989-2020
www.cherrylanetheatre.org
coalcountrymusical.com

Coal Country is a damning portrait of much that’s wrong in America today, a tale of corporate greed, corruption, union busting, an unequal justice system, and a lack of compassion for one’s fellow human beings. And it’s all true.

On April 5, 2010, more than two dozen men died in the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in Raleigh County, West Virginia. Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s documentary play is set at the end of the trial of Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship, who ran the mine. The action begins as Judge Berger (Kym Gomes) has opened the floor for relatives and colleagues to share their stories of what happened before, during, and after the horrific event, the worst mining disaster in the United States in forty years. The audience serves as a kind of jury as the characters speak verbatim dialogue, word for word what the real men and women of Raleigh County said.

Patti Stover (Mary Bacon) talks about her chance at second love with Gregory Steven Brock, who went to the mine that day even though he wasn’t feeling well because he couldn’t afford to take time off. Tommy Davis (Michael Laurence) worked in the mines with his brother Timmy and nephews Cory and Josh; like many people who lived in the company town, mining went back generations.

Roosevelt Lynch Jr. (Ezra Knight) would pass by his father every morning, one having just finished a shift, the other about to start one. Dr. Judy Petersen’s (Deirdre Madigan) brother Dean did everything with his twin brother, Gene, but shortly after they both began in the mine, Gene quit while Dean stayed on.

Gary Quarles (Thomas Kopache) shares the story of his son in Coal Country (photo by Joan Marcus)

Gary Quarles’s (Thomas Kopache) son was tired of working off the dangerous longwall. “I’d say Massey ran outlaw from the day Blankenship brought ’em in,” Gary says about the hiring of nonunion employees. “We always said that Massey Energy was his third world country, and Don was the dictator.”

The de-facto leader of the group is Stanley Stewart, known as Goose (Carl Palmer), a third-generation miner whose grandfather was killed on the job. Goose told his wife, Mindi (Amelia Campbell), about how he could see trouble was brewing because of how the new ownership was dealing with basic health and safety issues. “My first twenty years was union. This was the strongest union place in the world before Massey came in,” Goose says. Gary adds, “And I’ll tell you what, you didn’t worry ’bout gettin’ fired by speakin’ up.”

Throughout the play, Grammy-winning folk-country-rock troubadour and activist Steve Earle plays related songs from his chair in the front right corner of the stage, switching between acoustic guitar and banjo. He sometimes gets up and joins the cast, who occasionally sing lines and choruses with him. Earle’s score ranges from the traditional folk song “John Henry,” about an African American “steel drivin’ man” battling a steam drill in the Big Bend Tunnel in West Virginia in the nineteenth century, to “Heaven Ain’t Goin Nowhere,” “The Devil Put the Coal in the Ground,” and “It’s About Blood.”

In “Union, God, and Country,” Earle asks the audience to sing along to these key lines: “Union, god, and country / West Virginia gold and blue / Union, god, and country / was all we ever knew.” Earle also performs his 2013 bluegrass song “The Mountain,” in which he explains, “I was born on this mountain / This mountain’s my home / And she holds me and keeps me from worry and woe / Well, they took everything that she gave / Now they’re gone / But I’ll die on this mountain / This mountain’s my home.” I’ve seen Earle numerous times over the years, from the Ritz and the Bottom Line to the Blue Note, the Lone Star Roadhouse, and Judson Church, and he is an inspired choice for Coal Country; he also served as composer and onstage narrator in Richard Maxwell’s existential Western Samara for Soho Rep. in 2017. On April 5, 2020, Earle played the songs of Coal Country in a free Facebook Live concert and has recorded them for the album Ghosts of West Virginia. (Wednesday night shows will be followed by a discussion with Earle on March 16 and 30 and Blank and members of the cast on March 23 and April 6.)

Dr. Judy Petersen (Deirdre Madigan) and Mindi Stewart (Amelia Campbell) wait for word of their relatives in Coal Country (photo by Joan Marcus)

An Audible production that had to cut short its premiere run at the Public in March 2020 because of the pandemic lockdown, the ninety-minute Coal Country has made a successful transition to the Cherry Lane. Richard Hoover’s wood-based set at times places the audience inside the mine, with David Lander’s lighting signaling trouble behind the slats of broken wood in the back. Movement director Adesola Osakalumi guides the actors on- and offstage as they rearrange various benches, providing much-needed breaks between emotional moments.

Married partners Blank and Jensen previously collaborated on such projects as The Exonerated, in which an ensemble reads the words of innocent men and women on death row, and The Line, a virtual Public Theater presentation from July 2020 in which an all-star cast told the verbatim stories of health-care workers and first responders in the early days of the Covid-19 crisis.

In Coal Country, Blank and Jensen do a magnificent job of integrating the individual stories, weaving them together to form a compelling narrative that will have you at the edge of your seat, even if you know exactly what happened. The scenes in which the characters are waiting on news of the fate of their loved ones are unforgettable, especially seen now, after two years of a global health crisis that has killed nearly a million Americans, many of whom died alone, their relatives forbidden to be with them. It’s a uniquely American tale, one that comes amid extreme partisanship, polarization, and divisiveness, but it doesn’t matter where you fall on the political spectrum to be deeply moved and infuriated by its overarching message.

As Earle sings, “It’s about fathers / It’s about sons / It’s about lovers / Wakin’ up in the middle of the night alone / It’s about muscle / It’s about bone / It’s about a river running thicker than water ’cause / It’s about blood.”

WAKEY, WAKEY

Two-time Emmy winner Michael Emerson returns to the New York stage in WAKEY, WAKEY (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 2, $30-$75
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Will Eno completes his three-play Residency Five program at the Signature Theatre with Wakey, Wakey, a very funny, deeply touching, and unique exploration of humanity and the life cycle. Partially inspired by his friendship with Signature founder James Houghton, who passed away in August 2016 at the age of fifty-seven from stomach cancer, Wakey, Wakey is about all the little pieces of basic daily existence that make us who we are, from birth to death. Michael Emerson returns to the stage as a character referred to in the script only as Guy, who as the play opens is lying on the floor, facedown. “Is it now?” he asks. “I thought I had more time.” For the next seventy minutes, Guy shares details from his life, plays word games, philosophizes about the world, shows home movies and YouTube videos, and is cared for by home health worker Lisa (a gentle and sweet January LaVoy). He also self-reflexively critiques what is happening in the theater. “Sorry, I don’t know exactly what to say to you,” he admits. “I wonder how you hear that, how that strikes you? What do you make of the fact that this event, painstakingly scripted, rehearsed, designed, and directed, features someone saying, ‘I don’t know exactly what to say to you.’ I hope you’ll receive that in the humble and hopeful spirit it was offered in.” Writer-director Eno, whose previous Signature works were Title and Deed and The Open House and who was represented on Broadway by The Realistic Joneses in 2014, has fun with the very clever staging; for example, noises that initially seem to be coming from the street or the audience are actually part of the sound design, and he uses physical objects in creative ways as well.

Lisa (January LaVoy) arrives to help Guy (Michael Emerson) in Will Eno world premiere at Signature (photo by Joan Marcus)

Following a video of screaming wildlife, Guy delves into the nature of pleasure and enjoyment, questioning where such feelings go once the moment is past. He also discusses how one’s life can be divided into two parts, one before watching the video, and one after it ends, in much the same way the play itself can serve as a dividing line, especially as it deals so intimately with life and death and how things don’t always go quite as planned. Christine Jones’s set consists of a free-standing door, a large wall with a calendar on it, and packing boxes, as if someone is moving in — or moving out. David Lander’s lighting, Nevin Steinberg’s sound, and Peter Nigrini’s projections all contribute to the play’s inventive originality. Two-time Emmy winner Emerson (Lost, Person of Interest), whose previous stage credits include playing Oscar Wilde in 1997–98’s Gross Indecency at the Minetta Lane as well as three Broadway roles, gives a rousing performance, tender and humane, mostly from a wheelchair, making the most of his expressive puppy-dog eyes and small body movements, the slightest pause or glance filled with charm and humble mischief, then pain as Guy takes a turn for the worse. The play certainly has a message, but it’s not quite as syrupy and sentimental as it could have been. “Yes, we’re here to say good-bye and maybe hopefully also get better at saying hello,” Guy explains. “To celebrate Life, if that doesn’t sound too passive-aggressive.” But even when you think it’s over, Eno has yet more surprises in store, both inside the theater and outside in the lobby, as you kick off the next phase of your life.

SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK: THE TEMPEST

Miranda (Francesca Carpanini) and her father, Prospero (Sam Waterston), make magic in Central Park (photo by Joan Marcus)

Central Park
Delacorte Theater
Through July 5, free, 8:00
publictheater.org/tempest

In the brief synopsis of The Tempest in the program for the Public Theater’s latest Shakespeare in the Park presentation, which opened at the Delacorte on June 16, it says in bold caps, “The play opens with a storm. . . . The storm isn’t natural.” But the night I saw it, real blasts of thunder accompanied the beginning, a striking depiction of the sudden squall that deposits a group of noblemen on a remote island. The elements are always part of the fun in these Public Theater productions, so the darkening clouds and threatening rain — which never came — added to the drama, which at times needed a little help. The island is occupied by the gray-bearded, professorly magician Prospero (Sam Waterston), his fifteen-year-old daughter, Miranda (Francesca Carpanini), and his two slaves, the playful sprite Ariel (Chris Perfetti) and the brooding, deformed Caliban (Louis Cancelmi). Formerly the duke of Milan, Prospero was exiled twelve years earlier when his brother, Antonio (Cotter Smith), usurped his title, and Prospero has been planning his revenge ever since; it is no coincidence that the shipwrecked boat was carrying Antonio, along with Alonso, the king of Milan (Charles Parnell), his brother, Sebastian (Frank Harts), and Ferdinand, the son of the king of Naples (Rodney Richardson), along with several others, including the honest councilor Gonzalo (Bernard White), Alonso’s jester, Trinculo (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), and the drunken butler Stephano (Danny Mastrogiorgio). Promising him freedom, Prospero sends out Ariel to do his dirty work, turning the men against one another so he can regain his title, while also playing matchmaker to Miranda and Ferdinand, who take an instant liking to each other.

Prospero (Sam Waterston) orchestrates strange doings on a remote island in THE TEMPEST (photo by Joan Marcus)

“Your tale, sir, would cure deafness,” Miranda says to her father when he is filling her in about their past, but unfortunately, Waterston (Law & Order, Grace and Frankie), wearing what appears to be a kind of tallit (Jewish prayer shawl), is marble-mouthed as Prospero, hesitant and uneasy in his line readings, particularly in the first act, making it hard to understand him as he strains to find a rhythm. This is his tenth Shakespeare in the Park appearance, an illustrious resume that dates back to his starring role in Hamlet back in 1975, so his performance is somewhat confounding, although he does settle down significantly in the second act. Perfetti’s (Sons of the Prophet) Ariel, clad in a mildly S&M body harness, is also questionable and ill-defined. But the rest of the cast is strong and engaging; current Juilliard student Carpanini and Richardson (Pulse) have infectious chemistry as the potential lovers, Ferguson (Modern Family, The Comedy of Errors) and Mastrogiorgio (Lucky Guy, Golden Boy) provide necessary comic relief, and Cancelmi (Father Comes Home from the Wars, The Hallway Trilogy) is excellent as the native “monster,” a character who evokes colonialism, bigotry, and fear of the other. Through it all, Arthur Solari’s percussion, played from his own booth at the corner of the stage, is filled with emotion itself as it goes from anger and ire to passion and love. Director Michael Greif (Next to Normal, Our Lady of Kibeho,), who helmed the well-received 2007 Shakespeare in the Park production of Romeo and Juliet with Lauren Ambrose and Oscar Isaac, never quite finds his own rhythm, the three story lines bumpy until all coming together in the end on Riccardo Hernandez’s scaffold-based set. And speaking of the end, when Waterston stood alone onstage to deliver the epilogue, asking for applause to help him return to Milan, a goose flew overhead as if on cue, honking like a warped metronome, the outdoor elements once again becoming part of the show. This brave goose might not have laid a golden egg, but it did recall Mercutio telling Romeo, “Nay, if thy wits run the wild-goose chase, I have done, for thou hast more of the wild-goose in one of thy wits than, I am sure, I have in my whole five: was I with you there for the goose?”

ONE ARM

Larisa Polonsky and Claybourne Edler offer a different take on the kindness of strangers in Tennessee Williams’s ONE ARM (photo by Monique Carboni)

The Acorn Theater at Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Through July 2, $61
www.thenewgroup.org
www.tectonictheaterproject.org
www.theatrerow.org/theacorn.htm

Early on in One Arm, Moisés Kaufman’s adaptation of a 1940s short story and unproduced 1960s screenplay by Tennessee Williams, the main character, Ollie Olsen (Claybourne Elder), says, “Somebody tole me that if you stand in one place long enough near the sea or the Gulf, a sea gull will fly over and shit a pot of gold on you. Is that a fact or a fiction?” It’s a fact that there’s no pot of gold waiting for Ollie, a one-armed street hustler facing the electric chair. A onetime lightweight boxing champion of the Pacific fleet, Ollie gave up on life immediately after losing his limb. “Oliver couldn’t have put into words the psychic change which came with his mutilation,” Williams writes in the short story. “He knew that he had lost his right arm, but didn’t consciously know that with it had gone the center of his being. But the self that doesn’t form words nor even thoughts had come to a realization that whirled darkly up from its hidden laboratory and changed him altogether in less time than it took new skin to cover the stump of the arm he had lost. He never said to himself, I’m lost. But the speechless self knew it and in submission to its unthinking control the youth had begun as soon as he left the hospital to look about for destruction.” Elder plays Ollie as a matter-of-fact loser awaiting his ultimate fate, resigned that life has nothing left to offer, a far cry from his contemporary, Midnight Cowboy’s Joe Buck. Ollie has chosen not to care about what goes on in his new life, letting things happen to him instead of taking action as he moves from Los Angeles to New York and New Orleans; when he finally does react, it lands him on death row. Kaufman (The Laramie Project, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo) keeps things appropriately low-tech, dank, and dark. Instead of trying to come up with a way to hide Ollie’s right arm, Kaufman has chosen to keep it always visible, tied to the former boxer’s taut body with a black belt. “Think of it as an arm that doesn’t exist,” the onstage narrator (Noah Bean) explains. Derek McLane’s set and David Lander’s lighting offer excitements galore, as Ollie’s bed serves multiple purposes, including getting turned around and used as a car, while Lander employs a dangling lamp as an inventive spotlight. The ensemble changes costumes and roles in a flash; particularly impressive are Larisa Polonsky as Lila, a girl in the French Quarter, and a nurse interested in Ollie, and Greg Pierotti as Cherry the pimp, a man in the park, and a middle-aged homosexual. Unlike so much of Williams’s work, there are no passionately melodramatic scenes, no Stanley Kowalski screams, no Big Daddy speeches. Kaufman maintains a calm, relatively subdued atmosphere, although the inclusion of the narrator is a major flaw. For the most part, the narrator is either telling the audiences things they can figure out for themselves or filling in gaps in the story that would have been better acted out; it sometimes feels as if the narrator is being used as an excuse not to have to stage a specific scene. Since the play runs only eighty minutes, this gives it a rushed, at times unfinished feel. A production of the New Group in collaboration with Kaufman’s Tectonic Theater Project, One Arm might be minor Tennessee Williams, but even minor Tennessee Williams still packs a punch.