Theatre in Review: The Twenty-Seventh Man (Public Theater)

	Daniel Oreskes, Ron Rifkin, Noah Robbins. Photo: Joan Marcus

The place is a prison in Soviet Russia. The year is 1952. The cell we see before us is occupied by a trio of writers, all of whom have run afoul of Joseph Stalin. They are Moishe Bretzky, a poet of a notably non-political bent and a massive appetite for women and booze; Yevgeny Zunser, a grand old man of letters, now retired; and, most surprisingly, Vasily Korinsky, another poet, who has spent his considerable talent on penning triumphalist odes to the achievements of the revolution. The two younger men wonder why they are there -- Bretzky is too hung over to remember the details of his arrest -- until Zunser informs them that they are part of a group of 26 writers who have been rounded up largely because their preferred language is Yiddish.

Now, Zunser adds, news has spread that there is a 27th man; as if on cue, the cell door opens and in comes Pinchas Pelovits, a youth who, living as a recluse, has penned a staggering number of works in various genres. (He admits to having written 15 novels, then, thinking it over, decides that 20 is the more accurate figure.) Even more confounding is that he has never published a word. Who is Pelovits, and how has he attracted the dictator's ire?

The answer, when it comes, isn't as revelatory as it might be; the playwright, Nathan Englander, has earned attention as a writer of short stories, and his command of the playwright's art is still a bit tentative. But, before his characters face the final irony embedded in Pelovits' arrest The Twenty-Seventh Man presents an unflinching picture of totalitarian brutality and its effects on culture. It also contains one of the most harrowing scenes I've experienced this season.

Englander has a gift for colorful, sardonic turns of phrase, mercilessly accurate summations that could only come from men who devoted themselves to chasing after the perfect words and making them shine like gold. Zunser isn't recognized by the others at first because he has been imprisoned under his real name, Melman. "The pen name sits out on the steps like a pair of muddy boots," he says. "Inside, Melman has always been enough for me." Hearing the guard outside the door, Korinsky, convinced that he is the victim of an error, prepares to be freed. Bretzky, knowing better, taunts him, saying, "A backup plan, Korinsky. What if it's only the dessert cart being rolled our way?" Dismissing the ingenuous Pelovits, Korinsky says, "Born after the revolution and still thinking with that toothless, pumpkin shtetl head." (One wonders if the play's title is an allusion to The Tenth Man, Paddy Chayefsky's contemporary retelling of The Golem; it features an equally disputatious cast of Jewish men. Interestingly, a story about a golem proves to be the downfall of one of the characters in Englander's play.)

By now it should be obvious that Korinsky is carrying a heavy load of illusions, all of them ripe for shattering. "Tell me," he says, "who has done more for the Jews than Joseph Stalin? Who has done more for our language in the world?" These words, which leave the others fairly gobsmacked, return to haunt him when he finally has a meeting with the man known only as the Agent in Charge. The latter is no stereotype of villainy; he is brisk, businesslike, and superficially friendly, as he instructs the poet: "What I need for you to do is pick up a hammer and strike one final blow to close the case against the giant, the massive, the limitless Jewish conspiracy in the arts." Baffled and terrified, Korinsky manages to implicate his wife, who fought back against the police who arrested him. The agent is not grateful for this small offering, instead sneering, "Some need to be coerced. But you, like tearing a hole in a bag of marbles. It just comes rattling out, doesn't it?" This scene, charting Korinsky's fall from Soviet apologist to abject outcast, begging for survival, shows that Englander, when he gets his hand on a real scene, has the instincts of a playwright through and through. The decision by the director, Barry Edelstein, to cast Byron Jennings as the Agent in Charge was inspired; known for his polished manner and silken line readings -- Jennings just finished playing Alfred Lunt in Jeffrey Hatcher's comedy Ten Chimneys -- he makes the character into an alternately banal and nightmarish figure, full of sweet reason one moment and pulverizing fury the next.

The worst of the Agent in Charge's threats against Korinsky contains the darkest of the dark truths to be found at the heart of The Twenty-Seventh Man: What frightens Englander' characters the most is the likelihood that they will be erased from history -- their images deleted from newspaper photos, their books destroyed, their awards scrubbed from the record. For Stalin, one of history's most accomplished mass murderers, the slaughter of 27 writers is but the merest detail; his real goal is the destruction of a culture, its language and literature.

Thanks to Edelstein's swift, punchy direction and the efforts of a fine cast, the action moves with assurance toward this terrible revelation. In addition to Jennings, Daniel Oreskes' Bretzky is properly sardonic, even in his direst moment, coolly commenting that "Hitler was busy trying to kill the Jewish body, but Stalin is smarter than that. It's too hard to wipe out every last Jew ... He was going to kill the Jewish soul. Leave a people like emptied oysters, all the pearls pulled from inside." Ron Rifkin's Zunser is a wry and melancholy figure, all too ready to be done with the things of this life. Asked why he stopped writing, he replies, chillingly, that his readers were "sent up the chimneys. My readers are smoke." Noah Robbins makes Pelovits into a compelling enigma, a young man who lives for words alone, even composing a story for the others' appreciation while facing imminent death. Most powerful of all is Chip Zien as Korinsky, his unshakeable faith in the revolution stripped away until he has nothing left.

Edelstein's design team has provided this strange tale with a distinctive look and sound. Michael McGarty's set, a cutaway view of a cramped, fetid cell, performs two distinct coups de théâtre: First, its low ceiling bends over at a 90-degree angle to become the office where the Agent in Charge torments Korinsky; later, the cell blows apart as the prisoners' collective moment of reckoning arrives. (There is also a striking show curtain, depicting mixed phrases written in Cyrillic and Hebrew, floating above a line of anonymous soldiers.) Russell H. Champa's expansive use of sidelight carves out the actors and adds much-needed dimensionality to McGarty's design. Katherine Roth's costumes look authentic and Darron L West's sound design includes a battery of disturbing, prison-related effects.

The Twenty-Seventh Man drew a somewhat mixed press; some reviewers found it too discursive and lacking in tension, and it's true that Englander's characters leave no thought unspoken. It's also true that the character of Pelovits, who is apparently meant to be the center of the action, is displaced by the spectacle of Korinsky's spectacular fall. Nevertheless, this is a remarkable debut by a writer who has made his name in other forms of literature. Few prose writers succeed on the stage; Nathan Englander can rest assured that he has surmounted this hurdle, with considerable skill.--David Barbour