Dear Friends,

When I began my tenure as artistic director at La Jolla Playhouse in 2007, the very first show I programmed was 33 Variations, Moisés Kaufman’s gorgeous play about a musicologist searching for the meaning behind Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations.  

The Playhouse’s relationship with Moisés and his fantastic company, Tectonic Theater Project, predates me – he directed I Am My Own Wife (the Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning play that launched the Playhouse’s Page to Stage program in 2001) and Tectonic’s production of The Laramie Project before I arrived – and he has returned to the Playhouse many times since. I am proud that the Playhouse has remained an artistic home for him and Tectonic, a company with a rich history of devising urgent theatrical works.  

Like 33 Variations, Here There Are Blueberries, co-written by Moisés and fellow Tectonic company member Amanda Gronich, is about the search for meaning behind a cultural artifact – albeit a much darker one. The archivists at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum are charged with uncovering the significance of an album of World War II-era photographs donated to the museum in 2007.  

What makes these photos so indelible and chilling is precisely that they capture activities that are so banal, so quotidian. Blueberries sidesteps the typical question that arises when we consider unspeakable atrocities – how could such unadulterated evil exist? – in favor of an adjacent and much more compelling question: how can that kind of evil co-exist so seamlessly with the mundane, everyday life of the perpetrators?

We are in the process of losing our last direct connections to Holocaust survivors, while an alarmingly high percentage of Americans are unaware of what Auschwitz was. This is why I find Here There Are Blueberries especially important in this moment: it not only examines this story through a fresh and unique lens, it also invites us to consider our own ability to be complicit in – or indifferent to – atrocities that are unfolding around us now. 

CHRISTOPHER ASHLEY

The Rich Family Artistic Director of La Jolla Playhouse