and Vallea E. Woodbury feature in Synchronicity Theatre’s production of The Rocket Men. Source: Source: Synchronicity Theatre, Atlanta.
Synchronicity Theatre in Atlanta presents The Rocket Men (October 10–November 2, 2025), a National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere directed by Rachel May and written by Crystal Skillman. In The Rocket Men, six women tell the seldom-heard true story of Nazi scientists who surrendered to the United States Army. These men rebuilt their lives—and reclaimed their power—in North Alabama to help create the NASA program that sent American astronauts to the Moon.
Told with innovation and urgency in equal measure, The Rocket Men asks a simple question with big stakes: who gets remembered by history, and at what cost? Moving between past and present, the play exposes buried truths behind a celebrated chapter of US history.
The Rocket Men Is “Sharp, Surprising, and Full of Theatrical Invention”
The Rocket Men navigates the uncomfortable interplay between victory and accountability after World War II. In the late 1940s, the United States secretly brought Wernher von Braun’s team of Nazi rocket scientists from Germany to the US through Operation Paperclip. With their help, the US aimed to outpace Soviet advances and jump-start a new era of technology. The play connects that postwar scramble to the wartime origins of V-2 rocketry.
Skillman purposely begins this historical reckoning in a present-day setting. “This is a surreal time in America,” she explained. “The play lives in these complications. Theatre is a forum of truth. The play is about what it means to be an American then and now.”
Director Rachel May said, “As a granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, this story shook something loose in me. [Skillman’s] script is sharp, surprising, and full of theatrical invention. It reclaims the lost voices of women erased by war and science alike, and asks us to reimagine what patriotism really looks like.”
Why Women Tell The Rocket Men‘s Male-Dominated Story
The meaning of the play is made clear the moment six women take the stage to tell a story about men. “From the start, I wanted audiences to be confronted with the fact that those actors don’t look anything like these figures in history,” Skillman said. This discrepancy heightens the impact of a crucial historical fact. After World War II, Skillman explained, “women were brought in from a concentration camp called Buchenwald to Mittelbau-Dora to make rockets… This is why they tell the story [of The Rocket Men].”
The Rocket Men runs from October 10 to November 2, 2025, at Synchronicity Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia. Performances begin at 8 p.m. from Wednesday to Saturday and at 5 p.m. on Sunday.
