‘Prayer for the French Republic’

From Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic at the Samuel J. Friedman.
Photo: Jeremy Daniel

When Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic opened Off Broadway in 2022, there was already a steady drip of dramatic irony in the play. That’s how it is with Holocaust dramas (unless they’re really ingeniously structured) and, to a less visceral extent, with any show that’s grounded in a specific political reality of the not-so-ancient past: The audience knows what the characters don’t — we have seen the future. But as one of Prayer’s characters observes, “I don’t know what will happen 15 days from now, do you?” Making its Broadway premiere three months after Hamas’s attack on Israel, the play lands in a particularly bitter new context. Its story of five generations of a French Jewish family facing rising tides of antisemitism in their home country is now suffused with both its intended ironies and brutal new ones, unforeseen and unforeseeable. As Harmon’s Benhamou family, seeking somewhere “to feel safe,” consider moving from Paris to Israel, their future — our present — looms grimly. Since October 7, antisemitic attacks have surged by the thousands around the world, and since October 7, the Israeli military has killed more than 20,000 Palestinians, nearly 7,000 of them children. When will supposed safety for some cease to mean annihilation for others?

Though it’s surrounded by heavy clouds, Harmon’s play is plenty sharp and by no means gloomy. Zingy, morbid humor and motormouthed diatribes are the playwright’s weapons of choice, not lyricism or sentimentality. Yet there’s a savviness to Prayer’s construction that makes it ring false. Its ambition feels self-conscious: As a three-hour-and-two-intermission multigenerational family epic that’s Serious But Also Funny — and full of prolonged opportunities for actors to shout — it’s essentially purpose-built to win awards, and it has. Off Broadway, it nabbed Outstanding Play and Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play from the Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle, respectively. It has the shape of something profound and easily laudable, but inside that outline, though it doesn’t shy away from gnarly questions, it often feels showy in its engagement with them. Like that guy who corners you at the grad-school mixer, Prayer for the French Republic is smart and it has a heart in there, but its primary interest is in its own demonstrations of rhetoric.

Despite director David Cromer’s mercifully light hand, there’s a lot of yelling in this Prayer. Ranter-in-chief, in the play’s contemporary generation, is Elodie (Francis Benhamou), daughter of Charles (Nael Nacer) and Marcelle Benhamou, née Salomon (Betsy Aidem). At 28, Elodie still lives in her parents’ well-appointed Paris flat, coping with manic depression by sleeping till noon and slouching around the house like a fell beast in pajamas. She’s a heavyweight champ of one of Harmon’s favorite dramatic forms: the amped-up tirade. It’s the kind of argument that’s released in a sadistic, dam-breaking deluge, flattening all who stand before it with its acid contempt, its seemingly impenetrable logic, its preemptive obliteration of every potential objection. “And this is my point” is one of Elodie’s favorite phrases, deployed not in conclusion but in transition, over and over again. Elodie has many points.

How much you respond to Prayer may ultimately rest on your taste for such harangues. I admit to finding them hard to follow — not intellectually but emotionally. They leave me cold and a little suspicious. It’s a question of authorial real estate: One can’t assume it’s the playwright delivering speeches like these; he must on some level know how truly assailable such polemics are. Yet they’re where the ink flows most enthusiastically from Harmon’s pen, and they take up a lot of space. When characters stray for a moment into quieter, more tender territory, it feels obligatory rather than organic. You can sense the play itching to get back into the boxing ring.

If Elodie snaps and snarls at her immediate family, she all but devours their bright-eyed young visitor, a distant cousin from the U.S. named Molly (Molly Ranson). (The fact that Ranson and Benhamou share their characters’ names is coincidental.) Sweet and sincere — but not as much of a naïf as her Parisian relatives take her for — Molly has arrived for a school year abroad, a little embarrassed to be carrying A Moveable Feast in her suitcase but unable to disguise her American enthusiasm. (“Sorry, I just, I have never had anything this, uhm, good before? In my entire life?” she rhapsodizes over a croissant.) She’s also increasingly enthusiastic about the Benhamous’ son, Daniel (an appealing, unaffected Aria Shahghasemi), who first appears with his face covered in blood.

It’s 2016, and Daniel — who teaches math at a Jewish school and refuses, to his mother’s infinite frustration, to wear a baseball cap over his kippah in the streets — has been the victim of an antisemitic attack. The Charlie Hebdo shooting and the following murders of Jewish hostages at a kosher supermarket in Paris are still open wounds, along with the suicide bombings that killed 130 people in November 2015. Meanwhile, a certain election is about to take place in the U.S., and an analogous wave of violent far-right bigotry is sweeping France in the form of Marine Le Pen and the National Rally (known in 2016 as the National Front, a political party whose claims to infamy include describing Nazi gas chambers as “a point of detail”). As Paul Verlaine and Hayao Miyazaki put it, the wind is rising. And the Benhamous — especially Charles, a Sephardic Jew whose family fled Algeria for France in the ’60s — can feel it.

That’s already a bushel of circumstance, and Harmon adds more by weaving back and forth between the Benhamous’ story and that of Marcelle’s great-grandparents, Irma (Nancy Robinette) and Adolphe Salomon (Daniel Oreskes); their son, Lucien (Ari Brand); and his son, Marcelle’s father, Pierre, whom we meet both as an old man (Richard Masur) and as a boy (Ethan Haberfield) in 1945. Perhaps, having introduced the idea of ancestors who survived the war (and those who didn’t), Harmon felt unable not to expand his play to include them — and, of course, the horrors faced by the Salomons and the blood on Daniel’s face are their own terrible lineage. Thematically, it all checks out. Even so, when the turntable of Takeshi Kata’s set spins us back in time, the play feels as if it’s moving away from its natural milieu. Harmon is less at home in the past; the characters’ diction is more general and less confident, the scenarios more rote. Despite commitment from the actors — particularly Oreskes, who brings a subtle but vivid physical life and a fine sensitivity to the nearly blind Adolphe — Prayer’s 1940s scenes have a soft-focus, by-the-numbers quality that doesn’t let us register their heartbreak at full force. They feel like a play we’ve seen before.

Theatrically, the Salomons are most compelling when they break out of their frame. They are, after all, at least in part being conjured by the play’s narrator — Anthony Edwards, hunching his shoulders and looking askance as Marcelle’s brother, Patrick — and sometimes they look through the veil of their own time and speak to him. Patrick is a kind of middle-aged Tom Wingfield: a dry, heart-sore skeptic who’s more muddled than he lets on, inviting us to an elegy for a beloved sister who seems to have access to a part of the spirit that’s been denied him, or that he’s cut himself off from. Does the missing piece make him a rationalist or a coward? Is assimilation a dishonorable way to stay alive, or is living what matters and honor a mere scutcheon? What is asked of us all — no matter what dangers or oppressions we may or may not face when we venture out into the world — beyond survival? They may not always spark Harmon’s flashiest verbal fireworks, but these questions are still implicit in Prayer for the French Republic, and when we’re able to hear them, the play is at its strongest.

Prayer for the French Republic is at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.