Here There Are Blueberries

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On Sunday 4^th May Vicky & I saw Berkeley Rep's production of a thought-provoking new play by Moisés Kaufman, Amanda Gronich, and Tectonic Theater, the team behind The Laramie Project:

about the reaction to the 1998 murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. The murder was denounced as a hate crime and brought attention to the lack of hate crime laws in various states, including Wyoming.

An example of verbatim theatre, the play draws on hundreds of interviews conducted by the theatre company with inhabitants of the town, company members' own journal entries, and published news reports.

The new play, Here There Are Blueberries, is on tour after a 2022 premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse and a 2024 run at the New York Theatre Workshop. Vinson Cunningham reviewed the New York production in The Chilling Truth Pictured in “Here There Are Blueberries”:

There’s something awful about a lost picture. Maybe it’s because of a disparity between your original hope and the result: you made the photograph because you intended to keep it, and now that intention—artistic, memorial, historical—is fugitive, on the run toward ends other than your own. The picture, gone forever, possibly revived by strange eyes, will never again mean quite what you thought it would.

The play dramatizes the process archivists at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum went through to investigate an album of photographs taken at Auschwitz. Photographs from Auschwitz are extremely rare because the Nazis didn't want evidence of what happened there to survive.

Below the fold I discuss the play and some of the thoughts it provoked that are relevant to digital preservation.

The Box Conspiracy

Growing up in London left me with a life-long interest in the theatre (note the spelling).  Although I greatly appreciate polished productions of classics, such as the Royal National Theatre's 2014 King Lear, my particular interests are:

• Long-form theatre, such as Tony Kushner's 7+ hour Angels in America, Ken Campbell's Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool's 9-hour Illuminatus Trilogy, or Taylor Mac's 24-hour A 24-Decade History of Popular Music.
• New plays, for which I support San Francisco's Magic Theatre and the Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Ground Floor program.
• Plays that experiment with the form of theatre, such as the Royal National Theatre's London Road and Earthquakes in London.

I've been writing recently about Web advertising, reading Tim Wu's book The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, and especially watching Dude, You Broke The Future, Charlie Stross' keynote for the 34th Chaos Communications Congress. As I do so, I can't help remembering a show I saw nearly a quarter of a century ago that fit the last of those categories. Below the fold I pay tribute to the prophetic vision of an under-appreciated show and its author.