Overview
- Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich’s play is running at the Barrymore Theatre and has been named a Pulitzer Prize for Drama finalist, bringing the production to a wider public stage.
- The drama is rooted in a real 2007 archival discovery at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: an album of Auschwitz perpetrators’ photographs that became the play’s central puzzle.
- Designers project the perpetrators’ photos for the entire performance so the audience must look directly at the faces researchers investigate, a device critics say makes the moral questions immediate.
- Reviewers single out Delia Cunningham’s portrayal of museum archivist Rebecca Erbelding and the bar-scene pairing of Conrad Ricamora and Brandon Flynn as emotionally forceful anchors of the story.
- By dramatizing a museum debate over display and showing descendants confronting family culpability, the play pushes public discussion about museum ethics, how institutions frame trauma, and what later generations owe to historical truth.