The Public Theater

EXTENDED THROUGH DECEMBER 16!

“A FIRST-CLASS PRODUCTION AND A FIRST-RATE CAST! Nathan Englander asks potent questions about the nature of the writer’s art.”
– Charles Isherwood, The New York Times

“A SUPERB CAST. A quietly powerful meditation on identity and culture. ”
– Elisabeth Vincentelli, New York Post

“TRULY POWERFUL. The acting is top-notch.”
– Keith Staskiewicz, Entertainment Weekly

“FOUR STARS! Intensely moving and staged with extreme subtlety by Barry Edelstein. Few other young writers today possess Nathan Englander’s phenomenal gift.”
– Jeremy Gerard, Bloomberg News

World Premiere
THE TWENTY-SEVENTH MAN
By Nathan Englander
Directed by Barry Edelstein
Featuring Happy Anderson, Byron Jennings, Daniel Oreskes, Ron Rifkin, Noah Robbins, Chip Zien

NOW - December 16

Best-selling author Nathan Englander (What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank) adapts this new play from his acclaimed short story of the same name.

A Soviet prison,1952. Stalin's secret police have rounded up twenty-six writers, the giants of Yiddish literature in Russia. As judgment looms, a twenty-seventh suddenly appears: Pinchas Pelovits, unpublished and unknown. Baffled by his arrest, he and his cellmates wrestle with the mysteries of party loyalty and politics, culture and identity, and with what it means to write in troubled times. When they discover why the twenty-seventh man is among them, the writers come to realize that even in the face of tyranny stories still have the power to transcend.