SAN DIEGO — The Old Globe’s West Coast Premiere of The Twenty-seventh Man by award-winning novelist Nathan Englander, directed by Globe Artistic Director Barry Edelstein, will now play an extra week of performances—through March 22—due to ticket demand for the originally announced run. Tony and Emmy Award winner Hal Linden (“Barney Miller,” The Rothschilds) leads a cast of Broadway and Globe veterans including Ron Orbach, Robert Dorfman, Eli Gelb, James Shanklin, and Lowell Byers. The Twenty-seventh Man will run February 14 through March 22 in the Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre, part of the Conrad Prebys Theatre Center. Preview performances run February 14-18. Opening night is Thursday, February 19 at 8:00 p.m. Single tickets for the extension week are on sale now. Tickets can be purchased online at www.TheOldGlobe.org, by phone at (619) 23-GLOBE or by visiting the Box Office at 1363 Old Globe Way in Balboa Park.
In a Soviet prison in 1952, Stalin’s secret police have rounded up 26 writers, the giants of Yiddish literature in Russia. As judgment looms, a 27th suddenly appears: a teenager, unpublished and unknown. Baffled by his arrest, he and his cellmates wonder at what has brought them together and wrestle with what it means to write in troubled times. Time Out New York called The Twenty-seventh Man “exquisite – as chilling and haunted as a ghost story.” With The Twenty-seventh Man, Edelstein returns to the Englander play he premiered in New York and reimagines it for the Globe’s intimate in-the-round space, bringing us larger-than-life personalities and an unforgettable reminder of the transcendent power of storytelling.
Hal Linden will play Yiddish writer Yevgeny Zunser. A versatile Emmy and Tony Award-winning actor/singer/musician, Linden appeared on Broadway in Cabaret, The Gathering, The Sisters Rosensweig, and I’m Not Rappaport, Off Broadway in Visiting Mr. Green, and as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol at Madison Square Garden. The world recognizes him from the enormously popular television series “Barney Miller,” and he is a familiar face on television and in films including Out to Sea and A New Life.
The acting company also includes Lowell Byers (the Globe’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Othello, and Pericles, Prince of Tyre) as the Guard, Robert Dorfman (The Lion King and Social Security on Broadway, A Dybbuk and The Normal Heart at The Public) as Vasily Korinsky, Eli Gelb (Off Broadway’s The Thickness of Skin and Brighton Beach Memoirs) as Pinchas Pelovits, Ron Orbach (film Clueless, Chicago and Laughter on the 23rd Floor on Broadway) as Moishe Bretzky, and James Shanklin (“Hell on Wheels,” original Broadway company of Wit, Bethany at the Globe) as Agent in Charge.
“I’m honored to bring Nathan Englander’s beautiful and powerful play to the Globe in its first production since its New York premiere,” said Artistic Director Barry Edelstein. “The play highlights a little-known episode in 20th-century history that deserves to be remembered, but its canvas is much larger than that. It talks about the potency of art and the necessity of stories, and it reminds us that while tyranny is a sad constant in human life, so are wit, wisdom, and the creative spark. Englander’s very specific voice speaks to universal themes, and I know San Diego audiences will be moved by his work.”
