EPISODE · Nov 3, 2025 · 1H 31M

Crystal Skillman

from Something (rather than nothing)

Crystal Skillman is an internationally award-winning playwright, fictional podcast writer, and comic book author who has written for Stories Podcast (Wondery Kids), Girl Tales, Adventure Time comics, as well as Marvel comics. In addition to Open and The Rocket Men, Crystal is the dramatist of RAIN AND ZOE SAVE THE WORLD (premiered in the UK in 2022) and the NYTimes Critics’ Pick plays GEEK, CUT, and KING KIRBY which you can listen to on Broadway Podcast Network.We talk about the big issues of history, war, justice and art. We focus on her new play 'The Rocket Men.' The Rocket Men is a unique theatrical experience that carries us through time in a blink of an eye to present the story of the German "Rocket Men" who used their scientific skills to flee Nazi Germany and settle in the most unlikely of places...North Alabama. These men form the backbone of NASA’s rocketry program.In this modern play, women (employees at Space Camp), step into roles playing the men focusing on Heinz- Hermann Koelle, a lesser-known young German rocketeer, who joined this "Operation Paperclip" team years later; Rocket Men explores the dynamic relationship of Wernher von Braun and Koelle as these two have set their sights on getting us to the Moon and beyond.But as the play counts down to the launch of Apollo 11, Koelle is befriended by a Jewish engineer hell-bent on exposing the truth: the Germans' technology is based on the V-2 rockets built by slave labor.Played by six female-identifying women who force us to theatrically re-examine this explosive story - still widely not known in America - “The Rocket Men” asks who gets to be remembered in the history books, and why?