What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

Director Barry Edelstein delivers a well-acted play written by his good friend Nathan Englander. The ensemble quartet delivers this prolonged Jewish in-joke, where every line is a one-liner. The plot centers on two couples, one orthodox, the other not. The wives grew up as close schoolmates; the husbands are meeting for the first time. None is descended from a Holocaust victim or survivor.

Mark and Lauren (the excellent Greg Hildreth and Sophie von Haselberg) live in straitened circumstances in Israel with 10 daughters. Greg is garbed as a rabbi, while Lauren (“Shoshona”) is in orthodox mufti, but for her platinum blonde wig. Phil and Debbie (the hilarious Joshua Malina and Rebecca Creskoff) live in South Florida in lavish quarters, the subject of much critical comment from Phil. They have one son, Trevor (the utterly charming Nathan Salstone).

That’s it. Played in the round on Paul Tate dePoo III’s lovely set, beneath Russell Champa’s brilliant lighting, and garbed in Katherine Roth’s spot-on costumes, the quartet argues non stop, downs two bottles of Grey Goose vodka-in-the-rocks, hilariously smokes marijuana (an appalled Trevor: “You stole my weed?”) and ranges over the Holocaust, the joys of an orthodox life (or not), to America’s current social and political turmoil.

Trevor arrives between sports practices to define his generation’s view of America: It’s the end times. To Mark’s horror, he has enrolled in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and vehemently asserts that the Nativity should be replaced with spaghetti and meatballs as nothing means anything anymore. Mark laments American education and tries to demand answers to historical questions from the boy. “He’s just a kid,” defends Debbie, ever the anxious earth mother.

Anne Frank isn’t mentioned by name until the last 15 minutes, but the child-woman symbol of the Holocaust is present throughout. Mark and Sophie ransack the humungous refrigerator for kosher snacks and return clutching, among other items, “The Dairy of Anne Frank—Six Million Flavors.” The quartet dances a Horah, the Israeli national folk dance, downs more vodka, and becomes fast friends, even the husbands.

But emerging from Phil’s ceaseless store of jokes (the apparently predominantly Jewish audience was in fits of laughter throughout) is a darker theme. Who will hide you should another Holocaust strike? Of course, this is a reference to the Frank family, which was hidden in an Amsterdam apartment by a non-Jew, Hermine Santrouschitz, and sent to the gas chambers when the Gestapo found them in 1944.

Englander goes too far in mentioning the possibility of “an American Holocaust.” This, for a country that has welcomed countless wanderers home, including some eight million Jews, now about 2.4% to 7.19% of the U.S. population, depending on who’s counting. Jews have fled ghettos, pogroms and organized slaughter to reach America largely through legal immigration and government intervention. They have evolved as the nation has evolved. For example, where the La Jolla neighborhood in San Diego was once barred to Jews, it is now a cultured Jewish enclave.

In a wrenching conclusion, the two old friends, Lauren and Debbie, ask each other whether she would “hide me.” Lauren immediately says yes. Debbie, caught up America’s uncertainty and the issues that grievously divide the nation, cannot answer. This response ends a probing, interesting production, one of the Globe’s best.

The play runs through Oct. 23 in the Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre.