The Twenty-Seventh Man at The Old Globe

Nathan Englander; dir: Barry Edelstein.

Authors

• Nathan Englander

Best-selling author Nathan Englander (What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank) adapts this warm and deeply moving new play from his acclaimed short story of the same name. In a Soviet prison in 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 As judgment looms, a twenty-seventh suddenly appears: Pinchas Pelovits, unpublished and unknown.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 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.