“I just want people interacting with what’s onstage and then whatever they feel is theirs to feel”: Nathan Englander on What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

A long night of alcohol, weed, family, friends and provocative discussions touching on politics, identity and religion, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander is perhaps one of the most daring pieces to grace the current London theatre scene. Two couples, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish husband and wife, and an ultra-secular Jewish couple with their son who is passionate about climate change and equal rights; all five of these people are forced to confront their religious and political divides, as well as the generational gaps between them, throughout the changing light of day. There are tears, reminiscing and explosive arguments, and most importantly, honest talks about what the inability to reconcile these differences means for the longstanding friendship between the two women.

Englander is an exceptional writer whose credits include multiple short story collections. His debut novel For the Relief of Unbearable Urges spawned his first playwrighting credit, The 27^th Man. What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank is another short story of his adapted for stage. It debuted in San Diego, California with a cast that then included The Big Bang Theory’s Joshua Malina. Malina is back to reprise his role as Phil in this brand-new iteration of Englander’s piece. The rest of the cast spotlights How to Train Your Dragon’s Gabriel Howell, Doc Martin’s Caroline Catz, and theatre veterans Dorothea Myer-Bennett and Simon Yadoo. This version will be directed by Tony-winning director Patrick Marber. The Upcoming caught up with Englander to talk about the initial concept of the play, Raymond Carver’s short story that inspired What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, and what he hopes audiences will take away from watching his work.

Let’s start off with an introduction to your play What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank and the creation process of it all.

I grew up in a really private house and a really private community. I grew up religious and cloistered and I used to say “I’m shy”, and someone would scream out, “You’re not shy!” and I was like, “I’m private.” A lot of writers think organically close to themselves and then they move further afield. But for me, I always started so far from myself. I was a couple of books in, and I was thinking about how I’ve never looked closer to home and what I thought about how much of our normal life is abnormal. It’s almost pathological the things we take for granted. I’m many generations American and this idea of a wonderful Toni Morrison quote, “In this country, American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.” My first book came out and I was suddenly a Jewish-American author; I just tell stories. My sister and I did our education and it’s very American – no accents in our house, no relatives anywhere else – and we both have the brains of as if we’re the kids of Holocaust survivors. My sister and I literally – not a joke, it has always been our shorthand – talked of, “Oh yeah, she’s great. She’d hide us. But that husband of hers, he’d turn us in.” Like, we’d make order in the world that if we’d meet new people, [we’d ask] who would hide us in the event of a second Holocaust. I thought that was pathological. In America, you’ve got two separate realities happening right now and this idea of dual realities and how people are so committed to them. I just got so interested in how our brains are patterned. It is not at all a play about the Holocaust, but sort of about how identity works, how memory works and how our brains are shaped. It’s two women: two best friends who grew up together as mainstream religious, one has moved to Jerusalem and become ultra-Orthodox while the other moved to Florida and has become ultra-secular. They meet after 20-something years and we look at friendship, love and all those things. But all of it is through this eye of identity, culture, the Holocaust, and there was already some Israel and Palestine in there.

The short story that the play is based on was once inspired by Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Tell us about that particular inspiration.

I made the title an absolute homage to his story. I love Raymond Carver so much! As someone who has readers come out when I read, people bring you these crazy gifts and I just hadn’t known. Simply, this woman comes up to me, this woman who had been in that circle on which Carver’s story is taken from, or so she said. We were talking about it and she really knew her stuff and she’s like, “Carver’s story is based on an Anton Chekhov story.” Carver loved Chekhov; he has this wonderful story called Errand about being in Chekhov’s bedside when he’s dying. I’m very much a whole-cloth person. I used to get mad at West Side Story for being like Romeo and Juliet. I felt like everything must be whole-cloth. I truly love books and plays really deeply and I thought I had a very visual memory. I’m not one of those who does quotes; I remember the feel of things. So, I was writing my story, I had two couples at a kitchen table with a bottle of vodka but not a bottle of gin, and the changing light of day outside. I said to myself, “Wait a second, I had this memory. Why do I remember this? Oh! It’s the Carver story.” Like, that setting of the light and a bottle. I don’t remember what city it was set in, I didn’t even remember there was a doctor in there. I love that idea where good writing simply turns into a good memory to me. With a full homage to the Carver story, really with that concept that what we talk about and I’m replacing the word “love” with the idea of the Holocaust and the weight of that cultural burden. Yes, it’s a full homage to that story and I’d read it since, and it’s that changing light and that time that it happens at a table that’s really important to me.

With the short story itself, you’re talking about this very visual memory that you have of this particular setting, which really lends itself to stage adaptation. For yourself specifically, when did you get the idea of adapting this short story for theatre?

That is a fun story that leads back to weird writer’s life stuff. My first book came out and it seems to have patterned my brain somehow. I dreamed of being a writer and I was pretty sad about it because I thought that was a fancy-person job. It’s not for someone from my world, my school or my financial position. My first book came out and my agent called and said, “Nora Ephron, the wonderful writer and director – When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail and all those wonderful movies, books and essays that she has done – wants to meet you for lunch.” I was like, “Okay?” She took me for bagels because she said she wanted her New York street cred, and I love a bagel. She was like, “I read this book of yours, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, and this short story The 27^th Man has a play in here, and you’re a playwright and you’re going to write this into a play.” I said, “I am not. I just write fiction.” We made an agreement that I could finish my next book which took a full decade and that as soon as I was done, I would write a play and she would teach me how. That’s literally what happened. I would write a draft, I would go to her house, and she’d beat me up and I’d go home. The 27^th Man opened at the Public Theatre in New York in 2012 and it was just life-changing. I loved the process so much of actors and directors, and I just love the collaborative nature of it. It’s just unbelievable to me. I’m one of those people that when I’m doing something, I’m the most committed to it. Simply, when I’m driven, it’s like all or nothing. I just love all the people who have the same kind of passion. So, during that time they said, “Do you want to write another play?” And I said, “Sure.” I thought in my second collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank is all set in a kitchen and back to that Carver reference, it’s pretty much two couples in one room, and what they’re arguing about was very open to me. It was already all the fights about culture, identity, diaspora, Americanism and how we use history. People don’t believe the same things; they can’t even talk, they go for Thanksgiving and they will not broach the subject. Or, if they do, it becomes so loud, violent and out of control that the conversation doesn’t happen. My idea for this play was these two sets of very different Jewish-Americans and they organically have to find their way. They’re having it out; they’re having the conversations that need to be had, I believe. All that stuff I already had, and I finished a draft and Patrick and I worked on it. I did a massive rewrite from the San Deigo performances and I finished it around like end of September. Then, October 7^th happened. First, Patrick and I both processed this new reality and this terrible time which was quickly growing exponentially more terrible. An absolute nightmare with the amount of pain, suffering and innocence lost. The play to both of us instantly looked like some mantle-piece comedy. Patrick said, “You’re going to rewrite the whole thing,” and that took me a full year. It’s just a few pages. The play is not about that. It’s literally maybe 10% of the play but it has so much weight on it. A full year of my life I had no book to show you, I just put everything into this play and I spent a whole other year writing this extraordinarily painful scene for me. Like horribly painful. Although, it is a comedy, which is a strange thing to say. It’s got all the things!

In terms of actors and collaborating with them on their characters, how much of a hand did you have in choosing the people to play these characters that you have so meticulously written?

First of all, I’m so happy that we got the Marylebone Theatre. I know it’s having its new iteration even though the building’s like 100 years old. I love the size of the space and where it is in London; it’s really magical to me there. But also, I like the size of the place for what we wanted to do for this iteration, which is to really take our time, do it our way, and cast the people who fit the parts. It’s very much my dream team. Josh Malina is why we’re all here today. Josh hadn’t been on stage for 30 years but he wanted to do my play. He’s a real reader, which is nice. As much as I wanted him, he wanted to do my play after decades off the stage, and then he got bit by the theatre bug, as have I. He went from my play to Tom Stoppard’s play, Patrick’s play, and that’s how the script got to Patrick. Josh says he gave it to Patrick, Patrick says he asked Josh for it. Josh who I love in the part of Phil, he always says, “When I first read it, I felt like it was written for me,” and I was like, “Well, at this point, it is. It has been rewritten so much – it really is. I don’t see where Josh and Phil end in terms of mannerism.” Josh came with the play, I love him so much and he has become a really dear friend. It’s really my dream cast. Like, Gabriel Howell we got, he has a big part in How to Train Your Dragon so I don’t think he’s going to be able to walk down the street, let alone be available for another one. I hope we keep him, I hope he so enjoys this part, and he’s dreamy. Then we have Caroline Catz which all my family is excited for because of Doc Martin. Dorothea Myer-Bennett is just a theatre genius. Watching her work with Patrick is so beautiful – I think this is her third play in a row with Patrick, they don’t even need to talk! And Simon Yadoo is classic and Shakespearean. Each one of the cast is just my dream person for the role and it’s so sincere. Plays make me very vulnerable; I like to make jokes when people say serious stuff and hide all my feelings except for writing when I sneak them out. All my terms are basically from a life of writing where a writer has to have a unique voice. If you ask five writers to write a story, we better all have our own version, even if they give us all the perimeters. Like, it’d all still be shockingly different. Everything can be beautiful, and you can have one story that we all tell for all time and all of them will be new. On that note, I really feel like each of these actors, they’re all so good and so different. It’s so fun to bring them all together – how they act, how they come to it. They each bring themselves to the part in a different way and that’s beautiful to me. As someone who comes to this from the outside and loves it so much, I’m strict about the script and the form and it being right. But the best line always wins. I love them so much, I have no words, and they’re so great together.

Finally, when people walk out of that theatre after seeing this play for the very first time, what do you hope they can take away with them?

I won’t pretend not to be nervous. Generally, if I ever have the good fortune to talk to you about one of my books or something, it’s not like I would come sit on a chair and watch you read it. It’s just crazy to experience your own work with other people. The whole idea of people coming, I really want those people to come. But back to being vulnerable and feeling shy, let’s not pretend this isn’t a moment. We wanted to get this up right now, and it’s a play I spent a year rewriting for it to be of the now. What I want is for people to see and interact with the play itself. It’s ten years ago since my book Dinner at the Centre of the Earth and this is a subject that I am obsessed with. It sounds so naïve, but it didn’t need to be this way. It takes countless people to build amazing things, and all this effort to build beautiful things, and it takes so few people to destroy everything. When I wrote my Israel-Palestine novel, it became clear to me that didactic doesn’t work, lecturing doesn’t work. Nobody wants me on my soap box or to hear about my broken heart as someone who really wanted a peaceful solution a lifetime ago. I want people to think about how they think and that’s enough. My dream for them is simply to come into a play that touches on a lot of loaded subjects and interact with what’s on stage. They’re staring into a kitchen, and that’s what I want for an audience to come in and interact with. Whatever you takeaway, your experience is true. But I just want people interacting with what’s onstage and then whatever they feel is theirs to feel.

Mae Trumata
Photo: Mark Senior

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank is at Marylebone Theatre from 4^th October until 23^rd November 2024. For further information or to book visit the theatre’s website here.