About the Play:

Watch on the Rhine is a full-length drama by Lillian Hellman. An idealistic German emigrates to the United States with his American wife and two children. But his conscience insists that he return to resist Hitler and the Nazi movement, even at the cost of his own life.

Watch on the Rhine concerns an idealistic German who, with his American wife and two children, flees Hitler's Germany and finds sanctuary with his wife's family in the United States. He hopes for a respite from the dangerous work in which he has been involved, but his desire for personal safety soon comes into conflict with the deeply held beliefs that have made him an active anti-Nazi. In the end his conscience cannot be compromised, and he returns to Germany and the resistance movement – and to what will be, most certainly, his ultimate destruction. Told in compelling, human terms, Lillian Hellman's suspenseful masterpiece is an eloquent and stirring tribute to the brave men and women who, despite all odds, struggled early on to stem the tide of fascism which was soon to spread throughout Europe and the world.

Watch on the Rhine premiered on Broadway in 1941 at the Martin Beck Theatre, a full eight months before the United States entered World War II. It won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. The play was revived on Broadway in 1979 and again in 2016.

Cast: 5 female, 6 male, 2 boys

What people say:

"...dramatically gripping and genuinely moving." — Chicago Tribune

"Lillian Hellman has brought the awful truth close to home." — The New York Times

"We live in unsubtle times, which proves to be a fitting atmosphere for the bare-knuckled, good-vs.-evil symmetry of ... Lillian Hellman's anti-fascist melodrama, Watch on the Rhine." — The Washington Post

About the Playwright:

Lillian Hellman (1905-1984) is considered one of the most acclaimed American dramatists of the first half of the twentieth century. In an era that largely favoured lighthearted romantic plays and drawing-room comedies, her works explored the human capacity for malice, the allure of power and money, and the dichotomy between individual interests and social conscience. She was also the first woman to be admitted into the previously all-male club of American "dramatic literature", primarily on the basis of two enormously successful plays from the 1930s: The Children's Hour and The Little Foxes.