Broadway review by Adam Feldman
To be Jewish in the diaspora is to always depend on the kindness of neighbors—a kindness that has proven unreliable, continually and violently, for millennia. The modern Parisian family in Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic is beginning to feel a cold shadow creeping up. In the play’s first scene, Daniel Benhamou (Aria Shahghasemi), a young teacher, arrives home with blood on his face; he has been targeted by local ruffians, and not for the first time. His mother, Marcelle (an excellent Betsy Aidem), implores him to stop putting his Jewishness on display by wearing a kippah. But his father, Charles (Nael Nacer), sees a larger pattern. It is time, he decides, to move somewhere safer: Israel.
The Hamas attack on Israel last fall has shaded Harmon’s 2022 play, which is mostly set in the mid-2010s, with fresh urgency and bitter irony: Antisemitic incidents have spiked in France, which supports the argument to leave; but the notion of Israel as a secure haven has rarely seemed shakier. (At least 41 French citizens, the most of any foreign nationality, were among those killed on October 7.) Densely packed with history and rhetoric, Harmon’s depiction of French Jews in two different decades—it periodically flashes back to the same apartment in the 1940s, as Marcelle’s elderly grandparents (Daniel Oreskes and Nancy Robinette, both very fine) wait out the Nazi occupation—provides valuable insights into their divided states of mind.
Prayer for the French Republic | Photograph: Courtesy Jeremy Daniel
As a theatergoing experience, however, the three-hour Prayer for the French Republic is less effectively timed. The play premiered in early 2022 at Manhattan Theatre Club; Dravid Cromer’s production has now moved to MTC’s Broadway venue, the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. But in the gap between these two mountings, New York got a 10-month run of Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt, which approached the same core issues—the persistence of antisemitism, and the debates about fitting in that surround it—with more gravity, scope and finesse. By comparison, flaws that were already noticeable Off Broadway seem more pronounced.
In his 2013 breakthrough, Bad Jews, Harmon surveyed questions of identity with a sharp insider eye for the internecine squabbles of American Jews. Here, perhaps because of the weightiness of his subject, his writing seems heavier: schematic and sometimes self-consciously polemical. Counterargument is put in the mouths of two family members from outside the Benhamou nuclear core: Marcelle’s assimilationist brother (Anthony Edwards), who toggles between testiness and rue, and also serves as our narrator; and Molly (Molly Ranson), a progressive American third cousin who hits it off with Daniel and—in an echo of Louis and Belize’s coffee-shop scene in Angels in America—gets lectured about Israeli politics by his frowzy sister, Elodie (Francis Benhamou). There is perceptiveness and humor in Prayer for the French Republic, and Cromer’s direction does its best to keep things honest. But as Harmon weighs out the issues, you can sense his thumb on the scale; by the denouement, it feels more like his whole hand, pressing for amens.
Prayer for the French Republic. Samuel J. Friedman Theatre (Broadway). By Joshua Harmon. Directed by David Cromer. With Betsy Aidem, Anthony Edwards, Francis Benhamou, Molly Ranson, Aria Shahghasemi, Nael Nacer, Daniel Oreskes, Nancy Robinette, Richard Masur, Ari Brand, Ethan Haberfield. Running time: 3hrs 5mins. Two intermissions.
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Prayer for the French Republic | Photograph: Courtesy Jeremy Daniel