Rocket City, Alabam' – by Mark Saltzman

Play with Music / Characters: 6m, 3f, with doubling

Rocket City, Alabam', a play with songs, captures a lost, true-life episode in the history of the American South, presenting a hushed-up story, colorful Southern characters, and several famous songs of the region- blues, spirituals and gospel. At the dawn of the Cold War, the early 1950's, a young, brash, Army major, Hamilton Pike, brings famed German rocket scientist and former Hitler employee Wernher Von Braun to Huntsville, Alabama, a cotton town selected to become America's "Rocket City." But Huntsville has a Jewish community over a century old. Sparks fly and tempers explode when Amy Lubin, the Jewish fiancee of local war hero Jed Kessler learns of Von Braun's Nazi past. Rocket City, Alabam' presents the moral dilemmas of idealism vs. practicality, of revenge vs. forgiveness with sensitivity and humor, as well as with some classic songs, including Down By the Riverside, Alabama Bound, This Little Light of Mine and many more. Rocket City, Alabam' was developed at Alabama Shakespeare Festival in its Southern Writers Project.

"Through Rocket City we are provoked into assessing our own beliefs and any ambiguities in our moral principles-the play also confronts its audiences with challenges to issues of race relations, gender politics, religious tolerance, military authority and the divide between North and South that remain with us today."- Michael P. Howley, Montgomery Advertiser

Released: 2010