This year’s Edina High School one-act play, “Dear Finder” will open on Jan. 27 at the Edina Performing Arts Center. The cast will then take the show to competition at Academy of Holy Angels and then the Guthrie Theater.

“Dear Finder” is a show written in monologues derived from letters discovered buried outside concentration camps after the Holocaust. All of the letters inside were addressed to “Dear Finder”(hence the play’s title). The authors of these letters, victims of the Holocaust, were writing to anyone that would listen, hoping that if they should die, someone would find their letters and tell their stories.

The show was written by Tom Isbell, a playwright from the University of Minnesota, Duluth who found the letters in storage while touring the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. After reading the compelling stories, he decided to write a play. “This show is like a documentary, but put on its feet as a play, there isn’t an exact plot but rather its purpose is to educate and warn viewers. It has a very important message that could be overlooked if told in a dramatic plotline,” said sophomore Lily Randle. “Once I read the script, immediately I thought ‘this is the kind of story I want to tell,’” said director of “Dear Finder” and head of the EHS theater department, Anthony Matthes.     

The cast includes several students whose ancestors  were victims of the Holocaust. “I have a lot of Jewish ancestry, this compelled me to audition for the show because I felt like I had a duty to tell this story,” said junior Audrey Anaya. “I have a lot of Jewish heritage in my family so I really wanted to try out. I think that this show is really relevant not only to me because of my ancestry, but it is also really important for everyone in this show whether they are cast or crew to tell this story,” said sophomore Ella Dolynchuk.

Regardless of background, all of the cast members in the show were drawn to the story and all of them find purpose in the production process. The actors have learned more about the Holocaust from participating in the show. “I had heard a lot about the Holocaust from school but the first time we read through the script, we finished and I realized I had been holding my breath,” said Anaya. “There are so many things that happened to these people that I never even guessed human beings were capable of doing…It is a very shocking show,” said Dolynchuk. “The things that really stuck with me were the things that would usually be overlooked, the small atrocities…the lack of humanity, the lack of care and attention. It’s appalling,” said Randle.

The cast and crew is in agreement that “Dear Finder” is both an account of the past and a warning for the future. “There is always purpose when doing a Holocaust show, but with this election I think it made us all remember that we have so much to do with this story…It will really educate people and give them a sense of realization about the similarities between the events that led to the Holocaust and the events taking place right now,” said Dolynchuk.

Many of the cast members agreed that there are undeniable similarities between the stories in the show and the accounts of people today facing persecution in other countries as well as our own. “I think that this story really addresses the topic of a silent majority and the topic of this really monstrous thing that came out of people not talking and allowing for things to happen…this story is extremely relevant especially today because of everything happening with the election, and even now we are having problems distinguishing right from wrong and how far people are willing to go,” said Randle. “We want people to be culturally and politically aware of what is happening in our country right now,” said Dolynchuk.  Matthes agrees that this show has an important message for contemporary audience members. “One of the big messages throughout the play is ‘we need to tell these stories so that these things don’t happen again,’” said Matthes.