In 1791, France became the first European country to fully emancipate its Jewish population, and for more than two hundred years French rabbis have spoken a special Sabbath benediction. “May France enjoy a lasting peace and preserve her glorious rank among the nations,” they recite; the congregation replies, “Amen.” For centuries, Jewish identity in France—despite the Dreyfus case, despite Vichy collaboration, despite waves of hate crime—has been tightly linked to the state. But in Joshua Harmon’s “Prayer for the French Republic,” now on Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, that contract shows signs of strain.
It’s 2016 in Paris, and the Benhamou family is wondering if they should leave an increasingly hostile France. Since the twenty-six-year-old son, Daniel (Aria Shahghasemi), has begun wearing a yarmulke, he has been attacked twice, and the Benhamous ask if they—like eight thousand French Jews the previous year—should immigrate to Israel. Daniel’s father, Charles (Nael Nacer), whose family fled antisemitism in Algeria in the sixties, says leave; his mother, Marcelle (Betsy Aidem), whose great-grandparents the Salomons miraculously survived the Nazi occupation of Paris, says remain. Daniel’s brittle twenty-eight-year-old sister, Elodie (Francis Benhamou), takes no position—or, rather, she takes many positions, all of which counter the blundering political forays of their visiting American cousin, Molly (Molly Ranson). “I had no idea Israel’s occupation of Palestine was so problematic. Thank you so much for that,” Elodie says, her voice dripping acid.
Harmon’s other major plays have been sour-sweet domestic comedies: “Significant Other” joked about loneliness within friend groups; “Bad Jews” got its many laughs from intrafamilial hostility. “Prayer,” which was first produced Off Broadway, in 2022, incorporates that wry perspective on kinship into a political drama, in the sense that Harmon considers the polis, or the city-state. Is that city Paris, as it seems to be? Sensorily, perhaps. Harmon’s stand-in, Molly, is bewitched, as American visitors always are, by the croissants; she soon starts dating her (distant) cousin Daniel, as a self-conscious adventure. (“I had a French boyfriend, in France, in Paris. Do you know how sexy that is where I come from?”) And the production, directed by David Cromer, pauses several times to marvel at the eau-de-vie light streaming in through the set’s tall windows.
But Harmon is also meditating on cities closer to hand. He has spoken about writing the play in the shadow of Trump’s election, after the chants in Charlottesville, after the shooting at a kosher grocery store in Jersey City. His and Cromer’s production fits into a modern Broadway where we are frequently asked to think about Jewish identity and antisemitism (in “Leopoldstadt,” in “Harmony,” in “Parade”), and about a United States that is boiling over with fascist rhetoric. The danger with political theatre, of course, is that our polis shifts so quickly. Scenes that are topical one season can take on unexpected valences the next.
Harmon uses two dramatic devices to shape our understanding of the Benhamous’ debate: a present-day narrator—Marcelle’s brother, Patrick (Anthony Edwards, replacing the Off Broadway version’s excellent Richard Topol)—who addresses us directly; and flashbacks, in this case to the Salomons’ Paris apartment, between 1944 and 1946. Takeshi Kata’s ungainly set design allows one side of the airy Benhamou flat to rotate out of sight, showing us a sepia-dark dining room, where Irma Salomon (Nancy Robinette) and her husband, Adolphe (Daniel Oreskes), wait. There, after the liberation of the camps, they greet their returning son, Lucien (Ari Brand), and their fifteen-year-old grandson, Pierre, who will grow up to be Marcelle and Patrick’s father. (Ethan Haberfield plays Pierre at fifteen; Richard Masur plays Pierre in his eighties.) Even after the horrors they’ve suffered, the Salomons, like the Benhamous after them, engage in spirited verbal duels. At first, the chilly, assimilationist Patrick seems to be the play’s raisonneur, there to explicate history and to make sense of so much noisy disagreement; eventually, though, we see the contempt that Harmon has for Patrick’s detachment.
“Prayer” is about argumentation—familial arguments, certainly, but also a tradition of disputation. And the show, when it hits its stride, captures both the galvanizing and the infuriating aspects of incessant intellectual combat. You can tell when a playwright has a favorite character in his own play, and here it’s the fractious, sarcastic Elodie, who never stops debating. She’s constantly telling people, “This is my last, last, final point,” though Elodie never runs out of points. At a bar with Molly, discussing Israel with her cousin the way a steamroller might discuss bumps with asphalt, Elodie insists, “History demands we go back and forth all night, you can’t understand one thing without understanding everything.”
In order to short-circuit this perpetual back-and-forth—the play is already three hours long—Harmon must maneuver his characters toward some resolution. He does this by cranking up the emotion. At the end of Act I, for instance, the Benhamous are fighting about the possible move: Marcelle makes a solid case (they can’t abandon their careers and her father); the younger generation offers escalating commentary. Round and round they go, until Charles, a sob in his throat, says, “I’m scared.” Suddenly, the bickering stops. This pattern—frantic verbal gamesmanship and then a heartbroken cry—repeats throughout the play. Throbbing emotionality becomes the answer to both the drama’s “How will this scene find a turning point?” and the characters’ “How shall we decide?”
I found this rhythm unflattering for the actors. Betsy Aidem, a theatrical powerhouse, has to deliver too many of her lines with her voice breaking, for example. But at least it plays into one of Harmon’s own points: How much weight should a person give to a feeling? The Salomon scenes put their thumb on the scale in favor of intuition: the only branches of Marcelle and Patrick’s family to survive intact were those which left before the war. Trust yourself, or trust the state? Harmon has done an efficient job of personifying such difficult questions—he is determined to make a theatre of ideas.
Unfortunately, he isn’t as interested in character consistency. Elodie says that she is two years into a “manic depressive episode,” yet her mother, a psychiatrist, doesn’t discuss her daughter’s mental health when deciding whether to uproot her. Daniel is interested in Orthodox Judaism, but he never refers to, say, studying the Talmud. And Charles tells Molly that, before they came to France, the Benhamous were in Algeria for five hundred years. Moments later, he talks about his family being constantly on the move:
Is it “crisscrossing” if you’ve made one journey in five hundred years? As propulsive as the play’s language can be—the night I saw it, Elodie’s bar rant about Americans’ obsession with Israel received mid-scene applause—Harmon too often fails to make his characters into anything other than animated position papers. Only in scenes with the incredible Robinette, who gives the self-deluding, hopeful Irma a dozen delicate gradations, does Harmon’s work create a beautifully rendered illusion of reality.
Like any play transferring to Broadway from an Off Broadway success, this “Prayer” is a counterproposal to its earlier, smaller, and more intimate iteration. In some practical ways—for instance, the recasting of Patrick with Edwards, whose discomfort with his narrator duties hobbles the play from the start—the competition is weighted toward the Off Broadway version. That production, though, now feels like a relic from another time, before the recent Hamas attacks and the war in Gaza. The play’s ideas about the utility of fear sound particularly strange in this changed air. The production itself seems more tentative than it was before: Harmon has removed from the script a final recounting of several hate crimes that will occur after 2016, perhaps so that the audience will not think about other, more recent events. The room in 2022 where I first saw “Prayer” is lost now. The play was built for it, and sometimes you can’t go home. ♦