In 2014, an internet gossip-site published a story asserting that the boy-wonder novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, who had scarcely emerged from the womb before the literary world started showering him with prizes, had split with his wife, Nicole Krauss, another successful novelist, because of Foer’s unrequited love for the actress Natalie Portman, a fan and pen pal to him. Two years later, The New York Times promoted a movie Portman had directed by publishing a lengthy series of emails between actress and novelist that many thought amounted to a kind of smoking gun in Foer’s hand: to some, he came across as flirtatious and desperate to impress the Oscar-winning starlet.

This incident apparently inspired the playwright Anna Ziegler to write the 2018 play The Wanderers, which after running in San Diego, Washington, and Tel Aviv has just made its New York debut off-Broadway in a Roundabout Theatre Company production at the Laura Pels Theatre through April 2. The title of the play is a somewhat ungainly reference to both Jews and to people who stray from their marriages, but Ziegler is unable compellingly to intertwine the two concepts, which feel awkwardly bolted together.

Foer, Krauss, and Portman are all Jews, which seems to have led Ziegler to add to their soapy drama a series of ruminations on the nature of Jewishness. Since, however, Jewishness has nothing to do with epistolary unfaithfulness, or fanboy crushes on movie stars, the machinations of playwriting are visible throughout.