What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

A viciously funny and intelligently provocative play about family, friendship and faith, adapted by the author from his Pulitzer-finalist short story.

Who in your life would you trust to keep you alive? And who do you know who would risk their own life for yours?



Debbie and Lauren were best friends until Lauren became ultra-Orthodox, changed her name and moved to Jerusalem. More than twenty years later, husbands in tow, their Florida reunion descends with painful but hilarious inevitability into an argument about parenthood, marriage, friendship and faith.

If you really want to ensure a Jewish future, you should be like me. Good, old-fashioned afraid.



Nathan Englander's serious comedy, adapted for the stage from his Pulitzer-finalist short story, received its European premiere at the Marylebone Theatre, London, in October 2024.



Nathan Englander is the author of the story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, an international bestseller, and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, and the novels The Ministry of Special Cases, Dinner at the Center of the Earth, and kaddish.com. His books have been translated into twenty-two languages, and, among other prizes, he was chosen as one of Twenty Writers for the 21st Century by The New Yorker, is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, a Berlin Prize, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2013. His play The Twenty-Seventh Man premiered at the Public Theater in 2012. He is Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University and lives with his family in Toronto.