Phoenix Theatre opens season with brilliant, myth-shattering world premiere

Decades ago, Tom Lehrer and Mort Sahl took Wernher von Braun down a peg or two during the German rocket scientist's American heyday.

The late singer-songwriter with a learned, contrary attitude  (and good taste in verging on bad taste) ended his song about von Braun like this: "In German or English I know how to count down, and I'm learning Chinrese, says Wernher von Braun."  The rescued scientist's amoral opportunism was the point, and the song told it wittily.

In an interview, Lehrer once quoted the stand-up comic Sahl's quip  imagining how Braun declared his idealism: "I aim for the stars. [Pause] Sometimes I hit London." The idea was to shoot down any loftiness of purpose as the German war machine rained his V2 rockets down on the British capital during the Blitz.

Yet the contribution of this household-name favorite of Walt Disney went beyond opportunism and no-holds-barred ambition. That's what Crystal Skillman's "The Rocket Men" probes and exposes to bitter scrutiny. The National New Play Network's "rolling world premiere" of the two-act play, continuing through Sept. 21, opens the Phoenix Theatre's 42nd season.

The opening-night performance on the Russell Stage featuring seven

Von Braun and his "rocket men" celebrate a peak of televised victory.

actors, most of them well-known on Indianapolis stages, tore any remaining protective veil off of von Braun's legacy. What he did contradicts one of the play's lines: "A dream is not political," von Braun says in a typical bravura moment. The dreamlike aspect of his work in his adopted homeland was capped with the singular triumph of the NASA moon landing in 1969. 

That project, forever associated with President Kennedy's Cold War mission to be on Earth's satellite first, is recounted with dramatic shrewdness in "The Rocket Men," even as the true involvement of the ambitious von Braun in the Holocaust barely seeped into public knowledge. Mars, the red planet, was the space program's original goal, and its symbolism is underlined by the story Skillman has to tell.

The untouchable aura of von Braun's reputation is nicely sustained across the show's arc, though the revelatory final scene and the tense discoveries that lead up to it bear a huge emotional weight. That burden is necessary, however, to fill out the historical tapestry and resolve some of the deep ironies in America's strategic cleansing of an ostensibly de-Nazified team of experts. Time shifts are vividly signaled by Katie Phelan Mayfield's projection designs against Robert M. Koharchik's space-age set. Laura E. Glover's lighting design helps direct and redirect the audience's attention toward different milieus of action.

The show's striking novelty is the way it undercuts its very title. All roles in "The Rocket Men" are filled by women (though one is actor is best defined as non-binary), directed with insight and attention to detail by Chris Saunders. The effect is at first comic to a degree, despite the brisk adoption of male privilege in the performances. Speaking as a beneficiary of such privilege, I enjoyed the distancing, while the production's constant hitting of the bull's-eye stung. The layering of exotic, ex-enemy status upon the Dixieland patriarchy is delightful to contemplate as von Braun's team goes about its work, riven by internal jealousy, petty egotism and other indications of anxiety about funding and freedom from deportation. 

Jolene Mentink Moffatt's Helmut Hoelzer and Jennifer Johansen's

Arthur Rudolph and Heinz-Hermann Koelle contemplate the heavens.

Arthur Rudolph fill a spectrum from cynical cavorting to testy competitiveness typical of men warding off threats to their status. Milicent Wright's William A. Mrazek amusingly plays catch-up to assert himself. Newcomer Heinz-Hermann Koelle (expansively portrayed by Jaddy Ciucci) receives glancing blows from their tussles, but his status is assured as a von Braun favorite. Yet Koelle is the vehicle for his boss' exposure, thanks to the way the mysterious Sol (Charlie Rankin) works his way into the young man's favor and pricks his conscience. 

A character identified only as "Friend" (a label of explosive significance at the end) is a kind of narrator, and the ringing of a deep-voiced bell marks scene changes. Skillman handles the historical obligations well, without any sort of stilted documentary quality sidelining her theatrical mission. The poised neutrality of Karla "Bibi" Heredia is a mask vigorously cast off in the play's brutal climax.

Most riveting of all was Constance Macy's portrayal of von Braun, a man practiced in self-guarding but not immune to self-deception. Her von Braun was broad-gestured and open-stance,  calculating and confident, resilient to such setbacks as having to refocus from Mars to the moon as a goal and proud to launch NASA into thin air to surmount struggles for control among America's three military branches. 

The transformation of all characters at the end is stunning, and suggests that the rescue of German rocket scientists by no means put them beyond the taint of the evil they escaped. They landed in the lap of a rich country, in a comfortable Alabama town, with its own deep, partly disguised sins. 

The success they provided to their new masters helped demonstrate there is no unalloyed goodness at the summits of power. The dream is always political, after all. I was reminded of the epigraph Kurt Vonnegut put at the head of "Mother Night," his novel of World War II conscience and practiced deception: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be."

[Credit: Shotwell Photography]