Andy Sandberg to Direct Nora Theatre Company's OPERATION EPSILON

The Nora Theatre Company (Cambridge, MA) will present the World Premiere production of the new play Operation Epsilon by Alan Brody (The Housewives of Mannheim) at Central Square Theater in Cambridge, MA. The play will be directed by Tony Award-winning director/producer Andy Sandberg (Hair, The Last Smoker in America). No casting has been announced.

Tony-nominated producer ElLen Berman (Enchanted April) has presented two readings of the play in New York. The Asolo Rep Theatre (Sarasota, FL), in association with ElLen Berman and Flora Major, produced a developmental workshop of Operation Epsilon in the summer of 2011.

The cast for the most recent New York reading featured Tony Award-winner Michael Cerveris (Sweeney Todd, Assassins, Evita), Drama Desk Award-nominee Alexander Gemignani (Les Miserables, Sweeney Todd, Assassins), Michael Izquierdo (New Jerusalem), Drama Desk Award-winner Byron Jennings (The Merchant of Venice, Sight Unseen), Ian Kahn (Enron, Still Life), Greg Keller (Smudge), Jay Klaitz (Lend Me a Tenor, Rock of Ages), Drama Desk Award-winner Lorenzo Pisoni (Equus, Humor Abuse), stage and screen star James Rebhorn (Twelve Angry Men, “Independence Day”), Brian Russell (The Farnsworth Invention), and Kenneth Tigar (Translations).

The play is a true story based on the transcripts from Operation Epsilon at Farm Hall, 1945. It’s the close of World War II – the dawn of the atomic age. The Allies have captured Germany’s top ten nuclear scientists and sequestered them at Farm Hall– a lavish estate in England – keeping them under surveillance to learn what they know about the American nuclear program and to gauge how close the Nazis are to making an atomic bomb. Nine of these men, including Nobel Prize winners Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg, are known as Hitler’s “Uranium Club.” Based on actual transcripts of secretly recorded conversations, playwright Alan Brody illuminates the ethical complexity of pursuing scientific discovery at the risk of wreaking catastrophic consequences.

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