After watching the powerful and highly political three-act(!), three-hour(!) Prayer for the French Republic, I had a mental image of playwright Joshua Harmon composing it as if he were working a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle for which some of the pieces fit easily, others were more difficult to align, and some were wrongly included from an altogether different puzzle.
With his challenging Bad Jews a decade ago, Harmon established himself, deliberately or not, as a passionate commentator on Jewishness and Judaism today. When in 2015 he went to Paris for a first French production of the ground-breaking Bad Jews, he walked smack into a pressing reason to expand his view widely.
The profoundly engaged Harmon arrived when the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices had only recently occurred for its cartoons satirizing Muslims. At the same time, an exodus of Jews from Paris and the rest of the country was grabbing headlines. As a result, much discussion centered on whether it was becoming necessary for Jews to fear the worst and depart or minimize the irrefutable rise of French anti-Semitism (hardly a new development) and remain.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★★★ review here.]
To put the conflicting situation into one anxious, heartfelt drama, Harmon imagines the Salomon-Benhamou family, living in nervous contemporary middle-class comfort during 2016-17. Throughout his many scenes, he intercuts action involving Salomon forbears living in less comfort through 1944-46. That’s during World War II and just after, when the elder Salomons Irma (Nancy Robinette) and Adolphe (Kenneth Tigar) have been spared arrest and son Lucien (Ari Brand) and grandson Pierre (Pierre Epstein) survive the concentration camps and return to Paris, much the worse for wear and longing to suppress their recent past.
Harmon begins his explosive story when Patrick Salomon (Richard Topol), as narrator, introduces the audience to sister Marcelle Salomon-Benhamou (Betsy Aidem) as she’s welcoming distant cousin Molly (Molly Ranson) to town. The young woman has arrived from Manhattan’s Upper East Side to study in Nantes but becomes a regular guest at the Salomon-Benhamou household.
Marcelle is no more than 20 minutes into her conversation with Molly—and as rude daughter Elodie (Francis Benhamou, of all pertinent surnames) has briefly appeared—when son Daniel Benhamou (Yair Ben-Dor) comes home bloodied. He’s been attacked in the Paris suburb Sarcelles, where he teaches math and where for some time Jews have tensely lived alongside Muslims. That day, Daniel’s wearing of a kippah (skullcap) has announced him as obviously Jewish and an easy target for racial abuse.
With Marcelle instantly enraged and frightened and husband Charles (Jeff Seymour) now home and feeling increasingly uneasy about his hometown, Harmon begins exploring manifold aspects 21st-century Jewish unrest.
Having noted in a program note that he made two research trips to France in writing Prayer for the French Republic (the title refers to a prayer French Jews recite in temples and synagogues), Harmon finds innumerable opportunities to cover not only the plight of current French Jewry but to offer a theatrical thesis on Jewish wandering through history.
Foremost, in his three acts, he intensifies the pull these Jews feel between their French citizenships and a mounting impulse for emigration to Israel, where, if not safe there either, they assume they’d at least feel safer among fellow Jews. Charles and for a time Daniel dwell on this, whereas Marcelle insists she is French first.
Nonetheless, Harmon repeatedly includes Marcelle’s increasing worries about Paris assault statistics. As a counterbalance, he has Patrick argue forcibly for staying put. Adding to his contentions is the fact that since the 1850s, Salomons have operated a Paris piano store. Though it’s been failing lately, he reasons that the store has given the family a presence worth retaining.
As the Salomon-Benhamou conflicts multiply on Takeshi Kata’s complex turntable set and under Amith Chandrashaker’s intricate lighting, Harmon expands his focus to broader topics like the Ladino language Jews developed in response to the Spanish Inquisition. He has Charles give a short sermon on his Algerian origins. He confronts Lucien’s refusal to give any Holocaust details. A Passover seder is a chance to air disagreement over the progress Jews have and haven’t made through the ages. There’s a “why-do-they-hate-us?” family discussion Harmon surely intends as a portrait of oppressed peoples everywhere and at any time.
While Harmon goes about his marvelously nerve-wracking work, does he falter? Yes, For instance, he has not one but two agitated (not for no impetus) Jewish mothers. They’re not alone in fomenting quarrels waged again and again. And again. For another instance, the Salomon-Benhamous in their Paris apartment never quite seem convincingly French. Too often they come off more Manhattan than Harmon surely wants.
Some of this may be a consequence of David Cromer’s direction. All the same, he guarantees that the ensemble acting is emotionally outstanding. Aidem, Seymour, Topol, Ranson, Ben-Dor, Brand, Tigar, all of them distinguish themselves as frightening events rise to devastating outcomes.
A special nod goes to Benhamou for her brilliant delivery of a breathless and breathtaking second-act monologue in which Elodie exclaims “there has never been a country on earth that hasn’t eventually, at some point, turned on its Jews, and even in America, that fate awaits them, too.”
Harmon surely means the outburst to resonate not only with American Jews but with all minorities aware today of racial hatred here, there and everywhere.
Prayer for the French Republic opened February 1, 2022, at City Center Stage I and runs through March 27. Tickets and information: manhattantheatreclub.com
