Elizabeth Stahlman, Nemuna Ceesay, and Scott Barrow in the 2024 New York Theatre Workshop production. —Matthew Murphy 
Scott Barrow in the 2024 New York Theatre Workshop production. —Matthew Murphy 
Ensemble and Kathleen Chalfant in the 2024 New York Theatre Workshop production. —Matthew Murphy 
Charlie Thurston and Nemuna Ceesay in the 2024 New York Theatre Workshop production. —Matthew Murphy
This weekend, longtime Vineyard theater artist Scott Barrow directs the documentary play “Here There Are Blueberries” at the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse. This project is meaningful to him not only for its compelling story, but because it is a kind of homecoming.
Barrow’s relationship to the Playhouse goes back 30 years. Just out of Brandeis, he performed at the Amphitheater in “Twelfth Night,” alongside Vineyard native Brian Ditchfield. Barrow and Ditchfield have been close friends ever since, each continuing in sundry ways at the Playhouse. (The Playhouse has recently merged with Circuit Arts, of which Ditchfield is the executive director.)
In 2003, the Playhouse’s then-artistic director, MJ Munafo, cast Barrow in “The Laramie Project,” a flagship play of Moisés Kaufman’s Tectonic Theater Project. Tectonic uses documentary-style theater to dramatize real events; for the “The Laramie Project,” Tectonic had interviewed hundreds of Laramie, Wyo., residents about the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay university student who was tied to a fence and beaten to death. The staged interweaving of those interviews became a worldwide phenomenon.
The ethos of that kind of playmaking immediately appealed to Barrow: “After doing a show at the New York Theatre Workshop, I met Moisés, who became my mentor and collaborator. In 2010, I was able to bring ‘The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later’ (an epilogue) to the Playhouse. So Tectonic and the Playhouse have always been connected for me.”
Before that happened, though, a new Tectonic project came into being.
In 2007, Kaufman read a New York Times article by Neil A. Lewis: “In the Shadow of Horror, SS Guardians Frolic.” The story featured photos from WWII of wholesome-looking, cheerful German families who happened to be employed in systemic genocide. This chilling juxtaposition became the inspiration for “Here There Are Blueberries,” which Kaufman wrote with Amanda Gronich, whose family, like Kaufman’s, were Holocaust survivors. Like all Tectonic projects, it was developed experimentally, with an ensemble of theatre artists that included Barrow.
The play’s deceptively innocent title is the translation of a caption from the album. “These SS officers are frolicking and having fun on their days off and eating blueberries, and just outside the frame is the killing of 1.1 million people,” says Gronich.
Kaufman calls it “my most American play. It speaks about how we coexist when tremendous injustices are being committed. The purpose of this play is to show in a very specific way that the people who did this were not raised to do this. They were people like you and me, and through a series of very specific things, they learned how to do it. I refuse to believe the Nazis are monsters. The moment you label them as monsters, you can separate yourself from them. They were regular human beings, which makes it all the more frightening. There’s a line in the play,” says Kaufman: “’Six million people didn’t kill themselves.’ It’s important that we are also studying the psychology of the people who did this.”
Barrow says of the devising process, “We all immersed ourselves in the material. We really focused on criminality, culpability, and bystanderism. One of the great successes of the play is that it really does hold a mirror up to the audience. We study history not to learn what happened, we study history to learn what happens.”
For a production like this, actors are cast not in specific parts, but in tracks composed of multiple roles. Barrow had helped create the play, and as well as all developmental workshops, he has taken on every male track in the script, performing in Miami, La Jolla, Washington, D.C., New York, Princeton, Los Angeles, Berkeley, and London. The eight-person ensemble this weekend features familiar Playhouse faces, including Brooke Hardman, Tsilala Brock, and Chris Roberts, as well as screen actor and seasonal resident Don Wildman, and the star of last year’s summer film festival’s “Familiar Touch,” Kathy Chalfant.
While the show is billed as a “very, very staged reading,” Tectonics’ work is so theatrically imaginative that it retains its wonder in reading form. The company’s work toggles between naturalistic and so highly theatrical that “it borders on abstraction,” says Barrow. “And because everything we say is audience-addressed already, it will feel fairly close to what the presentation in its full form would be.”
“It feels so right, as an artist fostered and developed and nurtured by the Playhouse, to be bringing ‘Here There Are Blueberries’ back to the Playhouse,” he concludes. “It also feels really important because of how much these issues really resonate with the Island community, both year-round and seasonal. I’d feel incomplete if the Playhouse wasn’t part of this journey, my journey.”
“Here There Are Blueberries” at the M.V. Playhouse, 24 Church St., Vineyard Haven, at 7 pm, August 20–22. For more information, go to circuitarts.thundertix.com/events.
