Camp Siegfried Tickets

By: Bess Wohl
Producer: Second Stage Theater
Director: David Cromer
Lighting: Tyler Micoleau
Sound: Christopher Darbassie
Design: Brett Banakis
Costume: Brenda Abbandandolo
Cast list: Johnny Berchtold, Lily McInerny

Second Stage kicks off its fall season with a dark trip to summer camp at Camp Siegfried. Get Camp Siegfried tickets on TodayTix.

Camp Siegfried is a play about two teenagers who fall in love at a Long Island summer camp. It's 1938, on the brink of World War II, and the Nazi regime is gaining power in Germany — and in America. Here, an American Nazi group called the German American Bund opened camps meant for indoctrinating German American youth into Nazism. This is one of those camps.

The teenagers don't fully realize it, but camp leaders are carefully orchestrating their romance — they're meant to fall in love and, eventually, give birth to a new generation of children who will follow the Nazi ideology. What appears an innocent romance becomes a pawn for a horrific regime. Camp Siegfried is a show about how easy it is to fall into moral corruption and darkness — that is, a cautionary tale from the past that remains relevant today.

Wohl developed the play during the pandemic, and Camp Siegfried premiered in London in 2021. Camp Siegfried in New York is only the show's second production. Wohl, though, is no stranger to the New York theatre scene, with half a dozen Off-Broadway and Broadway credits.

Her last New York play was Grand Horizons on Broadway, which received a 2020 Best Play Tony nomination. Her last Off-Broadway production was Seven Deadly Sins, a walk-through, socially distanced theatre experience in Manhattan's Meatpacking District in 2021. She and six other playwrights each wrote a short play based on a sin.

Johnny Berchtold and Lily McInerny, the sole cast members of Camp Siegfried off Broadway, are both making their Off-Broadway debuts.

Get Camp Siegfried tickets on TodayTix now.

What to Watch For

• Camp Siegfried was a real camp in the town of Yaphank on Long Island. It opened in the 1930s, along with multiple other Nazi-run camps in the U.S., and closed in 1940. Once it shut down, part of it became a park, and the other part a housing development that is still operated by the German American Settlement League.
• The teenagers in the Camp Siegfried play are nameless. They're just called "Him" and "Her," showing how they can represent any young people from those camps.
• The camp is named for a mythical Germanic warrior who, according to legend, slayed a dragon.
• Bess Wohl is a Second Stage regular. The company has produced her plays American Hero, Make Believe, and the Tony-nominated Grand Horizons in addition to Camp Siegfried.