{A snapshot from the workshop of Nancy Keystone’s Apollo.}

Frank Barter (our Teleservices Manager) ran across this intriguing interview in the LAist with Nancy Keystone, the writer/director who will be bringing her world premiere multi-media theater piece about the space race to Portland Center Stage in January.

Here’s an excerpt (Thanks Frank!):

The play chronicles the intersection of the Space Race and the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Where did the idea to explore the relationship between these two seemingly unconnected moments in U.S. history come from? Why did you want to explore it?

NK: The idea came from the facts, themselves, proving yet again that truth is stranger than fiction. The U.S. Army brought a group of German (Nazi) rocket engineers to the U.S. through a secret and illegal intelligence program at the end of WWII in order to teach us how to make ballistic missiles. They were originally brought to Fort Bliss, TX, and in 1950 they were moved to Huntsville, AL where they later headed the NASA program to design the Saturn V moon rocket for the Apollo missions. They were there throughout the decades of the 50s and 60s and some of them still live there. I was utterly fascinated by the crazy collision of these former Nazis and the Civil Rights movement in the deep South. And it struck me that these two movements—the Space Race and the Civil Rights Movement– were happening literally at the same time in the same place, but that somehow in the American psyche, they are two completely separate mythologies. So, that was the first impulse.

And then, I realized that Jules Verne had written his famous book, From the Earth to the Moon, which profoundly influenced every rocket engineer (and which prophesized the details of the rocket launch to an astonishing degree) in 1865, partly as a response to the U.S. Civil War. In his story he uses guncotton to fuel his rocket, and I got to thinking about what Huntsville was like in 1865, and the direct correlation between the expansion of the cotton industry with the expansion of slavery, and how the country was built on the backs of slaves. And I thought about all that cotton carrying this latent explosive power. Read the rest of the interview.

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