Widening the Lens, Anderson Cooper Brings Blueberries Talks to West 47th

The photographs look like vacation snapshots. Nazi officers take their ease at a resort. The resort sits next to a concentration camp.

The album they come from is the subject of Here There Are Blueberries, the play by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich that comes to Broadway next month. On Thursday the production announced a series of post-show conversations, and the first big name on the list is Anderson Cooper.

The series is called Widening the Lens. It will follow select performances at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on West 47th Street and bring in guests from journalism, history, human rights and faith, according to BroadwayWorld.

Cooper and the Survivor

Cooper's evening comes first, after the 1 p.m. matinee on Thursday, November 12. He will sit with Irene Weiss, the Auschwitz survivor he first interviewed for a 2024 60 Minutes story about the play.

Her connection to the pictures is direct. Weiss and her family reached Auschwitz on the same day many photographs in the Lili Jacob Album were taken, and she can be identified among the people in them, BroadwayWorld reports. The organizers bill the talk as a look at memory, inherited trauma and what such images say about cruelty and survival.

Weiss and her family reached Auschwitz on the same day many photographs in the Lili Jacob Album were taken.

The Rest of the Calendar

The lineup runs into January, per BroadwayWorld's listing.

On Sunday, November 15, after the 3 p.m. matinee, CBS Sunday Morning contributor Faith Salie talks with historian Rebecca Erbelding of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, whose work identifying the people in the Höcker album underpins the play, along with Kaufman and Gronich.

On Thursday, November 19, after the evening show, former U.N. ambassador Samantha Power joins David Goldman, founder of FASPE, the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics, to talk about conscience inside powerful institutions.

On Wednesday, December 2, the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II and author Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove take up silence and complicity with Goldman. On Sunday, December 13, Gary Kramer, grandson of Lili Jacob, sits with Tilman Taube, whose grandfather, an SS doctor, appears in the Höcker album.

Actor Jonah Platt talks with museum director Sara Bloomfield on Sunday, December 20. The series closes on Thursday, January 7, with Ken Burns, author Daniel Mendelsohn and Erbelding.

The Play

The story begins in 2007, when an album of Nazi-era photographs lands on the desk of an archivist at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, per the production's Playbill page. What follows is the work of finding out who is in it.

Kaufman's Tectonic Theater Project, the company behind The Laramie Project, made the piece. It premiered at La Jolla Playhouse in 2022 and played Off Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop, Playbill notes. It was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and won the 2025 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play.

The Broadway company includes Tectonic members Scott Barrow, Kathleen Chalfant and Delia Cunningham, who return from earlier stagings. New for Broadway are Michelle Beck, two-time Tony winner Michael Cerveris, Brandon Flynn, Montego Glover and Conrad Ricamora, per Playbill.

What to Know Before You Go

Previews begin Monday, November 2 at the Barrymore, 243 West 47th Street. Opening night is Monday, November 9, and the strictly limited 10-week run ends Sunday, January 10, 2027. Playbill lists 80 performances and a running time of 90 minutes with no intermission.

BroadwayWorld's listing shows tickets from $49. Check the show's site for which performances carry a talk.

Another serious play arrives on Broadway this fall with a famous name attached. See A Few Good Men at Lincoln Center.

The pictures were taken to be forgotten. On West 47th Street, people will stay after the bows to talk about them.