What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and Other Modern Dilemmas

Raymond Carver was the most influential and highly regarded American short story writer of the late 20th Century.  What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and Other Modern Dilemmas is a suite of one act plays about the peculiarities of contemporary relationships, adapted from three of the stories in his posthumous collection, “Where I’m Calling From.” 

Each of the stories deals with two couples and the intersecting tensions between them.  In “What’s in Alaska?” the couples are in their late 20s; In “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” Carver’s most famous and frequently anthologized story, they are in their 30s, and “Put Yourself in My Shoes,” concerns a conflict between a couple in their late 30s and one in their 50s.  Although the stories were all written in the 1980s, the plays are set in the 80s, 90s, and the first years of the 21st century.