Review: ‘Prayer for the French Republic’ on Broadway shows generations of a Jewish family — with scary prescience
The brutal Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel have cast broad shadows on Broadway.
They were there at the opening of the musical “Harmony” in November, and they are there again at the Broadway transfer of director David Cromer’s gripping production of Joshua Harmon’s new three-hour drama, “Prayer for the French Republic,” which opened Tuesday night at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.
This is true even though Harmon’s epic exploration of the perils of Jewish identity was a 2022 off-Broadway hit and penned long before we learned of parachutes, abductions and human carnage at a music festival. Unlike the movies, the theater is a time-bound art and the bodies of the actors in Cromer’s Broadway production pulse with the unease of the current moment, fraught as it surely is for Jews and their allies.
“To be a Jew in Europe, to be a Jew in France, is to grow up in a place that has historically, for hundreds and in some cases thousands of years, persecuted you,” observes Elodie (Francis Benhamou), one of the young Parisian characters in a split-screen play that looks at multiple generations of French Jews, some surviving World War II, if surviving’s the word, others consumed by their growing anxiety in contemporary Paris.
At the show’s core is the issue of conflicted loyalty. Given the lessons of history, the play asks, can a Jew ever feel fully safe in France or even truly consider themselves French? The play is set partly in 2016-17 as the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen makes unnerving political inroads and partly between 1944 and 1946, when Jewish families had either been obliterated or were missing loved ones at their tables.
Elodie is talking in a cafe to her progressive but mostly clueless cousin, Molly (Molly Ranson), a visiting exchange student who declares herself Jewish only “by extraction.” Elodie goes on to define exactly what she means by persecution: she is not talking about entry into the right country club but rape and death. So shows the historical record; so has shown the news.
“Prayer for the French Republic” feels prescient to a very striking degree, not least for the way Jews often struggle to find a home on either the political right or the left. Had she existed beyond the fictional world of the play, the American student Molly surely would have gained a better understanding of what her cousin was talking about in recent weeks. She would have seen the folly of her own youth.
In the play, all of her extended family feel palpable unease, a sense of quiet dread that plays beautifully into Cromer’s directorial sensibilities, emphasizing in his staging, as he has for years, how humans often beat back despair in the name of resilience.
Elodie’s mostly secular mother, Marcelle (Betsy Aidem) has to deal with a husband, Charles (Nael Nacer) who wants to move to Israel, a son Daniel (Aria Shahghasemi) whose new religiosity makes him unsafe on the streets and a brother Patrick (Anthony Edwards) who she cannot trust to take care of her aging father Pierre (Richard Masur), should she move to Tel Aviv.
Many in this family are uneasy over Israel, that geopolitical entity inextricably linked with Jewish identity, but also very much aware that they may need it, and sooner than they think. That’s Harmon’s main point here: Logic suggests Jews must discern the shadows of history, act accordingly and never stay too long, but who can live, and love, that way?
Aside from all that, we see Pierre’s grandparents (piano dealers by trade) in their Paris apartment in the 1940s, miraculously surviving the Occupation themselves but seeing the family of their son Lucien (Ari Brand) and grandson (Masur is the Young Pierre) blown to bits by the Holocaust.
These two eras rotate on Takeshi Kata’s set as Cromer’s superbly cast actors walk through a world of light and shadow, as gorgeously illuminated (and obscured) by the designer Amith Chandrashaker.
The play, narrated uneasily by the self-doubting Patrick, is saying that little has been solved, Jews remain wanderers by necessity, that the painful lessons of history have never been more important, and love and happiness must be grabbed where they can.
We’re all here just for a moment, of course, stuck in the middle of events mostly out of control. Whatever your identity, rarely in a Broadway theater will you have so powerfully felt your own vulnerability.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Manhattan Theatre Club at Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 W. 47th St., New York; www.manhattantheatreclub.com
