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Recent events in Gaza could lead some to view Joshua Harmon’s blistering, funny and heartbreaking Prayer for the French Republic as uncannily prophetic, but let’s not give the playwright overmuch credit for foresight: The play, opening tonight at Broadway‘s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre after a sold-out run Off Broadway in 2022, would have been as timely a decade ago – two decades, three decades, more – and will likely be as timely at any point in a future most of us will live to see.
The play, which takes its title from a prayer recited in French synagogues since the late 1800s, is a sprawling family comedy-drama that moves easily between the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and the second decade of the 21st Century. Zionism, antisemitism and the attempted crushing of Jews throughout history is the subject, and it’s anyone’s guess how Harmon, director David Cromer and an exemplary cast wring laughs from the topics, but wring them they do.
The winner of just about every Off Broadway award there is to be had, Prayer, in this Manhattan Theatre Club production, makes a smooth, nearly flawless transition to the Broadway stage, with most of the original cast intact along with a big name TV star in ER‘s Anthony Edwards along for the move.
Edwards plays Patrick Saloman, our narrator and guide through the decades, a secular Jew – actually half-Jew, he is quick to point out, his late mother being Catholic – and the brother of Marcelle Saloman Benhamou (Leopoldstadt‘s astounding Betsy Aidem), a professor who, in 2016 Paris, is a sort of bridge between the postwar secularism of the Saloman family and the religiosity of her husband’s Benhamou family.
Betsy Aidem, Molly Ranson
Jeremy Daniel
If Patrick disdains his sister’s move away from secularism, he and the entire family are alternately baffled and fearful of the newfound religious fervency demonstrated by Marcelle’s twentysomething son Daniel (Aria Shahghasemi) who, to the horror of his mother, has been attacked on a Paris street for wearing a kippah. Rediscovering roots is one thing, she suggests, but couldn’t he wear a baseball cap when he goes out in public?
Marcelle and Daniel share a well-appointed Paris apartment – excellently rendered, without ostentation, by scenic designer Takeshi Kata – with husband and father Charles (Nael Nacer), whose family fled the antisemitism of Algeria in the 1960s (“It’s the suitcase or the coffin,” he says, summing up an ancient choice) and daughter and sister Elodie (Francis Benhamou, sharing a last name with her character, in a star-making performance).
Molly Ranson, Francis Benhamou
Jeremy Daniel
Elodie is the argumentative, rebellious and witheringly intellectual truth-teller of the bunch – think Louis from Angels in America, because both Harmon and Cromer certainly do. It’s Elodie who first forgoes forced politeness when a college-aged distant cousin from America comes calling. Molly (Molly Ranson) is studying abroad and, with all the privilege and presumptuousness of, yes, an American in Paris, is hoping to connect with this heretofore unknown branch of her family (and maybe crash on their couch). She’s just naive enough to think they might actually care about her views on Israel and Palestine.
Soon enough, Molly and Daniel have established an opposites-attract relationship, a flirtation that will have serious ramifications as events unfold. When everything seems to be telling the Benhamou’s to pack that suitcase for Israel, a move that Daniel first proposed, youthful love threatens to hold the young man back.
Nancy Robinette, Daniel Oreskes, Richard Masur, Ari Brand, Ethan Haberfield
Jeremy Daniel
And all of that is just in the 2016-2017 portions of the play. With effective stagecraft and first-rate writing, Prayer for the French Republic flashes back and forth to 1944-1946, when the grandparents of Marcelle and Daniel (Nancy Robinette and Daniel Oreskes) are desperate for any word from their adult son Lucien (Ari Brand), his wife and their children, who, as we quickly learn, have been sent to the camps. Only Lucien and his shell-shocked young son Pierre (Ethan Haberfield in the flashbacks) will find their way home.
As family connections and history lessons make themselves clear to the characters and the audience, Prayer for the French Republic offers up a thrilling concoction of drama, comedy (Harmon has, until now, been best known for 2013’s hilarious Bad Jews) and discourse. Each actor has more than ample opportunity to shine, with Benhamou, as the neurotic Elodie, getting the lion’s share of laughs (her one-on-one scene with cousin Molly at a bar matches, beat for beat and intentionally we have to assume, the masterful diner scene with Louis and Belize in Tony Kushner’s landmark epic), while Robinette, as the heartbroken grandmother Irma, makes absolute magic of a crushing made-for-Tony Awards heartbreaker.
Nancy Robinette
Jeremy Daniel
Ranson, as the American Molly, has what just might be the most difficult role of all: The presumptuous girl could, in lesser hands, be absolutely snotty. She isn’t. Ranson offers just enough hint of an emerging, for want of a better word, wisdom to make the character’s final, tender scenes with Shahghasemi’s Daniel convincing and poignant.
Of the newcomers to the cast – Shahghasemi, Nacer, Edwards, Oreskes, Haberfield and, in a terrifically moving performance as a character whose details won’t be spoiled here, the beloved veteran of stage and screen Richard Masur – only Edwards doesn’t quite equal the force of the original Off Broadway cast, though whether that’s an issue of stage presence or finding an immediate way into the character is difficult to tell. In either case, he delivers when it’s needed most, and he makes for a narrator who is, by turns and by necessity, affable and prickly.
With the inestimable assistance of Kata’s then-and-now set, Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting design, Daniel Kluger’s music and sound design and Sarah Laux’s spot-on costumes – to say nothing of Cromer’s direction, which easily matches his Tony-winning work on The Band’s Visit, Edwards and his castmates bring two distinct, if not always so dissimilar, eras to life, and they tell a sweeping story while conveying genuine intimacy. Prayer for the French Republic asks big questions – of history, of family, of identity – and, all but miraculously, answers their call.
Title: Prayer for the French Republic
Venue: Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
Written By: Joshua Harmon
Director: David Cromer
Cast: Betsy Aidem, Francis Benhamou, Ari Brand, Anthony Edwards, Ethan Haberfield, Richard Masur, Nael Nacer, Daniel Oreskes, Molly Ranson, Nancy Robinette, Aria Shahghasemi
Running time: 3 hrs (including two short intermissions)
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