Most of the new play “The Twenty-Seventh Man” takes place in a 1952 Soviet prison cell. It contains four men, part of a larger group of 27 rounded up on Stalin’s orders. They’re more or less famous Jewish writers — “and Yiddishists, to boot,” adds one. “The last of the literary greats delivered up together, all enemies of the state and all of one tribe.”
At first glance, the show’s big mystery isn’t why they were arrested, but who the title character is, and why that incongruous, fresh-faced youth has been locked up.
Nathan Englander could have wrung a thriller out of the situation — which is fictional, but partly inspired by a real event, the “Night of the Murdered Poets.” Instead, he wrote an understated, quietly powerful meditation on identity and culture.
Englander, whose latest book is the acclaimed collection “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” adapted his own 1999 short story for the stage, on the advice of Nora Ephron.
This is his first outing as a playwright, and there are some rookie mistakes, notably a lack of dramatic momentum. The show mostly consists of men having philosophical discussions about the ways in which they experience their Jewishness and their being writers.
Director Barry Edelstein throws in ominous ka-chunk noises when the cell’s door occasionally opens and closes, but rarely do we get a full sense of the Kafka-esque horror that’s swallowed these men.
One of those instances is the meeting between the imprisoned Vasily Korinsky (Chip Zien) and the unnamed Agent in Charge (Byron Jennings). Korinsky is a delusional Stalinist who thinks there’s been a mistake.
But as one of his cellmates, the legendary writer Yevgeny Zunser (Ron Rifkin), points out, “An enemy is not always guilty.”
Zunser is much admired by the youthful odd man out, Pinchas Pelovits (Noah Robbins). Young Pinchas is flattered to be in such company, which also includes the bearish poet Moishe Bretzky (Daniel Oreskes). Pinchas may not be a published author, but he certainly is a writer. Denied pen or paper, he composes his last story in his head — perhaps an allusion to the wife of Osip Mandelstam, who memorized her husband’s poems to preserve them while he was in a Gulag.
Served by a superb cast, which is attuned to the show’s gravity but also its flickers of dark humor, “The Twenty-Seventh Man” is a meditative look at an attempt to eradicate a civilization by getting rid of its writers.