March 21, 2025

Iris Bahr is bringing her seventh solo show to Los Angeles this month — and she wants you to “schlep to the East Side” for an entertaining evening.

“Stories From the Brink,” which plays March 21 and 22 at The Lyric Hyperion Theatre, is a fast-paced, character-driven, 55-minute journey through Bahr’s life as a secular Israeli kid from the Bronx, a reluctant yeshiva student, an IDF soldier, a “Curb Your Enthusiasm” guest star, and now a caregiver navigating her mother’s dementia.

The show begins in Tel Aviv on Oct. 7, 2023, where Bahr was when Hamas terrorists attacked Israel. It became the moment everything changed for Bahr. As with so many Jews around the world over the last year and a half, the attacks strengthened her Jewish identity.

“I decided to kind of frame that and then put a whole show together surrounding [being in Israel on Oct. 7],” Bahr told the Journal. “Some are actual experiences, some are perceived, some are being close to death. But a big theme of the show is being Jewish as worry — as worry is love. It’s the Jewish notion of love is worry. I think that that’s a through-line that takes us through a lot of the show and my relationships.”

From there, the show unpacks chapters of Bahr’s life in a series of standalone vignettes. She shares a near-death rafting incident, childhood culture clashes, and a surreal journey through Israel’s pandemic travel bureaucracy when her mother had a stroke.

“My mom had a stroke while she was talking to me on a video chat,” Bahr said. “And the ensuing caregiving for her and all this stuff, I realized that I wanted to venture into the nonfiction kind of storytelling and long form storytelling.”

Bahr, best known through her work as Rachel Heineman on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (including the infamous sundown ski lift episode) and Perla on “Hacks” — has a long track record of original, self-written solo shows. Her earlier works like “Die Enough” and “Dai” (Hebrew for “enough”) featured fictional characters. But “Stories From the Brink” is more personal than ever.

“I always believe that first and foremost, an honest one-person show should be entertaining,” Bahr said. “This is not a therapy session for me. It could be a therapy session for other people — but it’s not.”

But audience reactions suggest the show really taps into some powerful emotions.

“I think of live theater as the basis of a communal experience which can be very healing and therapeutic — besides just the laughter.”

“There’s not a single show where people don’t run up to me crying and hugging me needing a hug from me. They say, ‘thank you so much for doing this’ and ‘this is exactly what I’m going through and it feels so isolating.’ I think of live theater as the basis of a communal experience which can be very healing and therapeutic —besides just the laughter.”

 

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The show covers a lot in under an hour. Bahr moves through stories about being mocked in Israeli middle school for her American accent, and her shifting sense of home and identity between New York, Los Angeles, and Tel Aviv.

“I always felt like an alien, an outsider,” Bahr said. “At the yeshiva, I felt like I was living a double life. Everyone else was Orthodox. And my dad was eating bacon and dragging me to the Guggenheim on Saturdays.”

The show also confronts the exhaustion of caregiving for her mother in Israel.

“My mom is convinced that she’s currently in New Jersey, and I don’t know why,” she said. “I’m killing myself to pay for a nursing home overlooking the Mediterranean, and my mom thinks she’s in Newark.”

But humor is present in every story, even the dark ones.

“I find the humor even in the darkest situations,” Bahr said. “There’s just got to be a lot of fun adventure.”

Bahr has spent decades toggling between acting, writing, directing, and stand-up. She created and starred in the improvised series “Svetlana,” executive produced by Mark Cuban, and has performed in dozens of TV shows including “Elementary” and “The Brink.” She’s also the author of “Dork Whore,” “Machu My Picchu,” and co-wrote “The Book of Leon” with “Curb Your Enthusiasm’s” JB Smoove.

Offstage, Bahr has been vocal about Jewish identity, especially in the wake of rising antisemitism. She recently organized the first-ever Jewish Heritage Day at her son’s public school and makes a point to wear her Magen David in public.

“I like wearing my Magen David and I wear it even when I’m on the train,” Bahr said.

Bahr hopes Los Angeles audiences join her for a fun evening of live theater — and is specifically calling for people on the west side to go on a slight road trip this weekend.

“I know that sometimes people don’t like to schlep or everything feels like a schlep to schlep out to the east side,” she said.

“Stories from the Brink” is a sharp and deeply-relatable 55-minute respite from the stressors of the week. Bahr puts on the kind of show that makes trek across town absolutely worth your time.

“Stories From the Brink” will be performed March 21 and 22 at The Lyric Hyperion Theatre in Los Angeles. For tickets visit https://www.eventbrite.com/e/stories-from-the-brink-jan-dates-rescheduled-to-march-tickets-1042498570287?aff=oddtdtcreator

For more information on Bahr, visit www.irisbahr.com or follow @iris.bahr on Instagram.

An anonymous American World War II veteran contacted the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in December 2006 about an album containing photographs of SS officers at Auschwitz. They weren’t snapshots of the Nazis committing atrocities, but eating blueberries, playing music, and enjoying their days off. There was a disturbing ordinariness to them — they weren’t monsters. The scenes between committing murder looked mundane. That is the basis of “Here There Are Blueberries,” a new play by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, on stage at the Wallis in Beverly Hills until March 30.

The album was found in an abandoned Frankfurt apartment in 1946 by a U.S. Army officer serving in the Counter Intelligence Corps. He kept it for decades before donating it anonymously to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in January 2007. The photo album became news in September 2007 when The New York Timesreported on it in an article titled, “In the Shadow of Horror, SS Guardians Frolic.” The album is believed to have been made by Karl Höcker, an SS officer at Auschwitz, It had 116 photographs showing Nazis seemingly taking a break. USHMM says the photos were taken between May 1944 and January 1945 — “the period during which the gas chambers were operating at maximum efficiency.”

The images are a jarring look at how those responsible for the Holocaust viewed themselves — not as killers, but as ordinary people enjoying their free time. Excerpts can be viewed on the USHMM website.

“The [Nazi] owner of the album had put this thing together as a scrapbook of his time there,” Gronich told the Journal. “So we’re literally looking through the eyes of the perpetrators. It’s their version of the story. It’s how they perceived what Auschwitz was. Through these pictures, we see not only a glimpse of how the perpetrators viewed their day-to-day lives there, but also how they envision what the world might look like if they were the victors.”

“The [Nazi] owner of the album had put this thing together as a scrapbook of his time there. … So we’re literally looking through the eyes of the perpetrators. It’s their version of the story. It’s how they perceived what Auschwitz was.” – Amanda Gronich

Kaufman’s Tectonic Theater Project began developing “Here There Are Blueberries” through workshops in 2016, with Gronich co-writing.

“I thought at first, this is impossible,” Gronich said. “We can’t make a play about an album of photographs. And even if we could make a play about an album of photographs, we can’t make a play about that album of photographs. But again, I had never worked on anything about World War II, and I had this personal connection. So I sort of took a deep breath and I said, well, if we can figure this out, it would really be such an extraordinary journey for an audience.”

The play premiered in 2022 in San Diego. Its 2024 run at New York Theatre Workshop was the highest-grossing production in the theatre’s history. It was also a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The story follows the museum archivists who first examined the album and the historical detective work that followed after it made international headlines.

“A businessman in Hessen, Germany recognized a family member,” Gronich said. “And so he embarks on this journey working with the museum to track down people who have relatives in the photographs. And what does that mean? … When we interviewed these descendants of people in the photographs, I (was) so intrigued. They don’t have the luxury of distance. They are descendants of Nazis. And how are they grappling with this continuum of complacency, complicity, and culpability? For them, looking at these pictures, when we interviewed them, it wasn’t, ‘Oh, what does this picture say to you?’ It was, ‘Oh, and that’s your father and that’s your grandfather.’ In some ways, these pictures in the Höcker album are family photos for them so that they’re grappling with history in a very immediate way… again, where is the luxury of distance? And if you don’t have that, you really are forced to reckon with your own family and your own role in history. And that’s really something that I think we all need to do. All of us need to be reckoning with history in a very personal and immediate way.”

The play blends live actors with projected images from the album.

“The actors interact with the images almost as though they were scene partners,” Gronich said. “It’s really a detective story.”

What makes “Here There Are Blueberries” so unsettling is that it refuses to treat Nazis as monsters. Monsters are easy to dismiss. But these men and women were human. They ate blueberries, played music, and laughed — then returned to their roles in mass murder. That contradiction is what makes the play so haunting.

“To prevent this from happening again, we need to understand how it happened,” Gronich said. “We are not exonerating, we are not apologizing for, we are not explaining it away. We are simply saying, human beings did this. And for us to examine how human beings do this, it helps us to understand the recipe. If we can understand the recipe for the making of a Nazi, we hopefully can make sure we never make that recipe again.”

The play draws from the field of “perpetrator studies,” which examines the mindset and behaviors of those who commit atrocities. “Perpetrator studies is sort of a new — I mean, not new, but it is being investigated more fully now, in the moment in history that we find ourselves,” Gronich said. “And we have to be willing to look at how ordinary people were capable of doing this.”

Gronich, whose past work includes “The Laramie Project,” describes audience reactions as unlike anything she has seen before.

“In all my years in theater, I have never seen audiences so wrapped,” Gronich said. “You can hear a pin drop.”

The Los Angeles debut of “Here There Are Blueberries” runs through March 30 at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills. Tickets are available at TheWallis.org