The Public Theater's THE TWENTY-SEVENTH MAN Ends Run Today

The Public Theater's new production The Twenty-Seventh Man closes today, December 16. Written by Nathan Englander and directed by Barry Edelstein, The Twenty-Seventh Man officially opened on Sunday, November 18 and was originally scheduled to close on Sunday, December 9.

The complete cast of The Twenty-Seventh Man features Happy Anderson (Guard), Byron Jennings (The Agent in Charge), Daniel Oreskes (Moishe Bretzky), Ron Rifkin (Yevgeny Zunser), Noah Robbins (Pinchas Pelovits), and Chip Zien (Vasily Korinsky).

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 As judgment looms, a twenty-seventh suddenly appears: Pinchas Pelovits, unpublished and unknown.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.

THE TWENTY-SEVENTH MAN features scenic design by Michael McGarty, costume design by Katherine Roth, lighting design by Russell H. Champa, and sound design by Darron L West.

Nathan Englander (Playwright) is the author of the short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, as well as the internationally best-selling story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, and the novel The Ministry of Special Cases (all published by Knopf/Vintage). His short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Washington Post, as well as The O. Henry Prize Stories, and numerous editions of The Best American Short Stories. Translated into more than a dozen languages, Englander was selected as one of "20 Writers for the 21st Century" by The New Yorker, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He has been a fellow at the Dorothy & Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and at The American Academy of Berlin. He teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Hunter College, along with Peter Carey and Colum McCann, and, in the summer, he teaches a course for NYU's Writers in Paris program. This year, his translation of New American Haggadah (edited by Jonathan Safran Foer) will be published by Little Brown. He also co-translated Etgar Keret's Suddenly A Knock at the Door forthcoming in March from FSG.

Barry Edelstein (Director). For The Public, Edelstein has directed Timon of Athens, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, and WASP and Other Plays. For The Public's Shakespeare Initiative, he has supervised As You Like It, Love's Labor's Lost, Titus Andronicus, All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, The Winter's Tale, The Merchant of Venice (also Broadway), Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and Othello. He also directs the Shakespeare Lab and The Public's Shakespeare-related education and outreach programs. In addition, he served as dramaturg for three seasons of Joseph Papp's "Shakespeare Marathon," and as Artistic Director of Classic Stage Company from 1998 to 2003. He is the author of Thinking Shakespeare (2007) and Bardisms: Shakespeare for All Occasions (2009). In October, he was appointed Artistic Director of The Old Globe in San Diego.

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