Here There Are Blueberries Originated At Miami New Drama Planned For Broadway

By Bill Hirschman

For the third time, Miami New Drama is expected to send a work it sired to New York.

Here There Are Blueberries, created and then staged in a workshop in a production here in 2018, is planned to begin previews Nov. 2 and to open Nov. 9 for a 10-week run at Broadway’s Barrymore Theater.

The harrowing work based on a real-life incident examines photographs donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007 portraying life in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

But it is not the well-known depictions of the horror-riven victims. Instead, the photos collected by an SS officer are almost vacation-style images of the camp’s Nazi workers relaxing, playing, celebrating holidays, playing with pets.

Thus the question cited by the judges of the Pulitzer Prize is “the unsolvable mystery of how individuals can insist on normalcy while atrocity lurks outside the frame.”

The play was written by Miami New Drama co-founder Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, a duo whose Tectonic Theater Project created The Laramie Project.

Blueberries was developed locally in 2017 and received a workshop production on Miami New Theatre’s stage in 2018. Subsequently, the ever-evolving work has gotten full productions across the nation and the West End.

Company co-founder and current artistic director Michel Hausmann doesn’t take credit for the rest of the play’s years-long evolution, although the theater will get acknowledgement “over the title” and producer credit in New York, Hausmann said. “I’m just one of the parents.”

But his pride is clear. “What I’m most proud is that that the DNA has (been) kept throughout the entire development process,” Hausmann said. “Many things have changed, but the essence of what the play was investigating, of the structure, is pretty similar.”

Hausmann and Kaufman began brainstorming the idea around 2017. Miami New Drama then produced a workshop production with sets and costumes in May 2018 with the title, The Album.

Since then, it received a full production after COVID in 2022 at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego. The piece was performed at the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington and New York Theater Workshop.

Miami New Drama then mounted a full production of the script as it was at that point in 2025.

The work toured at McCarter Theater Center in New Jersey, the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts and Berkeley Repertory Theater in California, and Seattle Repertory Theater.

Over those runs, the work was a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist, 2025 Lucille Lortel Award winner for Outstanding Play, and two-time Helen Hayes Award winner, plus cited as one of the ten best plays of 2024 by the Wall Street Journal.

In much of the 20^th Century, Broadway and many off-Broadway productions were developed and premiered in Manhattan, often with a preview in Hartford, Philadelphia, New Haven or Washington, D.C. But in this century, regional theaters like Miami New Drama and Palm Beach Dramaworks pay for the creation and development of works that premiere on their stages, get picked up by other regional theaters and then go to New York.

For instance, Miami New Drama created A Wonderful World in 2021, the bio-musical about Louis Armstrong that went to Broadway in 2024.

Last year, Miami New Drama originated Birthright, about six American Jewish friends over an 18-year span starting with a reunion after a shared Birthright trip to Israel.  A fresh production moved off-Broadway this past summer for a successful and praised run.

The 10-year-old Miami company has built an enviable reputation for works reflecting distinct threads of the varied cultures in Miami: Hispanic, Jewish, African American and others. Many of these works are world premieres, many commissioned at the company’s expense.

“We’ve been investing in those playwrights for a long time and to sort of see them triumph is an extraordinary experience,” Hausmann said.