The stage at Seattle Rep turned into a forensic lab this week with the opening of Here There Are Blueberries, a chilling documentary play that foregoes traditional drama for something much more clinical and haunting. This production, a collaboration between Tectonic Theater Project and authors Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, is not your typical night at the theater. It is an investigation into the banality of evil that still feels relevant in our current social climate.

The production centers on a real-world mystery that began in 2007, when an anonymous package arrived at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Inside was a personal photo album belonging to Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the commandant of Auschwitz, a discovery that set off the investigation depicted on stage.

The opening night performance featured a post-show talk-back with Gronich, an Emmy nominee and Pulitzer finalist, who spent eight years developing the project, and Dr. Rebecca Erbelding (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum archivist). Gronich noted during the discussion that theatergoers often arrive with specific expectations for a Holocaust story, such as barbed wire and somber violin music. However, this play focuses on the “petty bureaucrats” and ordinary citizens.

“The faces of the perpetrators look like us,” Gronich told the opening night crowd. “We’re looking for sociopathic monsters, we’re looking for aberrant serial killers… but for the most part, these were rank and file people. These were ordinary citizens who became capable of doing extraordinary things.”

Here There Are Blueberries uses large projections to dissect the photographs, which Gronich described as the SS officers’ version of “selfies.” These images show people laughing, eating blueberries, and enjoying life, all while the machinery of death operated just out of the frame. Gronich explained that the album was a deliberate construction of a false reality.

One of the play’s most compelling arcs involves the modern-day historians like Erbelding (played by Delia Cunningham) tracking down the descendants of the Nazis pictured. Gronich spoke about the historian/playwright relationship and what it was like working with Erbelding. “I think Rebecca’s job is far more important,” she noted. “And, our job is sort of interpretive.”

On stage at the Rep, Gronich and Erbelding shared their perspectives coming from two different disciplines. “You said something really interesting just now,” Gronich responded to a comment made by Erbelding. “You said the Höcker album was a lie, or that the picture, the story that those pictures is telling, is a lie. And my playwright brain goes to well, not to him. Right, it’s true, but it’s a lie.”

“It is a photo album that was deliberately created to not show any crimes,” she remarked. “Karl Höcker’s album is both true and a complete lie.”

As the production wraps up its U.S. tour in Seattle, its thesis feels increasingly pointed. By focusing on the “continuum of complacency, complicity, and culpability,” the play refuses to let the audience off the hook, suggesting that the same machinery of indifference that operated in the 1940s is never truly out of frame.