Kristallnacht

The time is 1957. The place is Huntsville, Alabama—home of the Marshall Space Flight Center where scientists have been working on the Redstone rocket program, to be used for the first nuclear ballistic missile test. The male characters are research scientists but the science is not pure. The play is set in 1957 during America’s Cold War with the Soviet Union. David Marguilies, a German Jew born in Berlin, is interviewed for a position as a rocket scientist for the U.S. government. When he meets his new boss, Josef Schell, he feels strongly that Schell was the one who set fire to his family home in Berlin. David has a problem: can he continue with a job that means so much to him, which includes working on putting a man into space and eventually a rocket to the moon—or is his hate so unrelenting that he must leave? When the play begins, Schell is already running America’s rocket program; developing the ICBM; the intercontinental ballistic missile program. The seeds of suspicion are planted not only in David’s mind but also in the mind of Josef Schell.