That's the sadness of our world, when you play about anti-Semitism, however historic it may be, you can't help but be prescient. Take “Prayer for the French Republic,” Joshua Harmon’s sprawling family drama about the Solomons, Jews who “have lived in France for more than a thousand years,” as one of them puts it, and which still sounds tentative. With violent incidents on the rise and a pro-Nazi fascist party making gains in the polls, should they finally seek shelter elsewhere?
By the time it opened Off Broadway in 2022, “Prayer for the French Republic” already seemed painfully relevant, with the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the murder of a Holocaust survivor in Paris and other anti-Semitic atrocities barely in the spotlight Rearview mirrors were. Two years later, when Harmon was revising his script for Broadway and now had so many more horrors to choose from, he deleted references to these events. What is too much for the world is far too much for the piece.
And the piece, despite all its urgency, is already far too much. “Prayer for the French Republic,” which opened Tuesday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, clocks in at just over three hours and is still not long enough to do justice to the diverse stories it seeks to tell. In the manner of prestige television series, but compressed to the point of confusion for the stage, it attempts to dramatize the biggest and most intractable world issues in the microcosm of a single family, putting an impossible strain on both.
That this Manhattan Theater Club production, directed by David Cromer, remains largely riveting is the result of Harmon's wealth of novelistic details – and the lead actors' extraordinary ability to deliver them. Chief among them is Betsy Aidem as Marcelle Salomon Benhamou, a psychiatrist living in Paris in 2016 who apparently needs a psychiatrist herself. Overprotective yet hypercritical of her two children, she loses control when one of them, Daniel (Aria Shahghasemi), is beaten up by anti-Semitic thugs near the school where he teaches.
Marcelle's hectic reaction creates a rift in the family, which the play then breaks wide open. Her husband, Charles Benhamou (Nael Nacer), a doctor who emigrated from Algeria to France when living conditions for Jews became intolerable in the early 1960s, ultimately comes to the conclusion that his adopted country is now, like his homeland, deeply unsafe . Since he is familiar with sudden uprooting, he wants to move as quickly as possible – to Israel.
Marcelle points out that Israel is not a safe haven for anyone and initially categorically rejects this idea. But it is less her fear of the Middle East than her connection to France that forces her to stay. Her elderly father Pierre (Richard Masur) ran the last piano shop over five generations starting in 1855, which the Salomons expanded into a national brand with 22 stores. A beautiful amber-colored grand piano with “Salomon” written on it. in gold on the clapboard is the first and last thing we see in the show.
There is hardly a piece of furniture more difficult to pack than a grand piano, which here becomes a symbol of the gift that the Jews gave to French culture and the expectation that the gift would seem to have been permanently welcomed to them. That this is not the case is the sorrow of history.
But France is not the whole story, as Harmon shows us in alternating scenes set in the mid-1940s. Marcelle's great-grandparents Irma and Adolphe Salomon (Nancy Robinette and Daniel Oreskes) were somehow spared from the German occupation of Paris and await news of their family's fate at the end of the war. Soon after, her son Lucien (Ari Brand) returns with his son Pierre (Ethan Haberfield) – the old man from the later scenes, but only 15 years old at the time. Both father and son are clearly traumatized by their time in Auschwitz. And where is everyone else?
You can probably guess it. But if the scenes from the earlier period give the later the pathos with which they often permeate each other, little of the later flows back into the earlier. The 1940s material is sad but dutiful. Likewise, three characters who take up much of the play's energy in the 2010s don't contribute much to the central conflict. One is Marcelle's brother Patrick (Anthony Edwards): aggressively atheist, contemptuous of Sabbaths and Seders, evil for no apparent reason other than to conceal his otherwise contextless presence as narrator.
Slightly more integrated and much more entertaining is Marcelle and Charles' daughter, Elodie (Frances Benhamou), a frequently pajama-wearing, hilariously logorrheic, self-absorbed know-it-all who is coming off a two-year manic-depressive episode. (If you saw Harmon's 2012 play “Bad Jews,” she'll remind you of Daphna Feygenbaum, an early version of that kind.) Her punching bag is Molly (Molly Ranson), a distant cousin visiting Paris during her college year abroad. Both Marcelle and Elodie constantly lie to Molly, as if her naivety, which they attribute to her being a spoiled American, was a crime against Judaism.
Although Ranson represents Molly as well as the script allows – she played the object of Daphna's wrath in Bad Jews, so she knows her stuff – her conflict with the Benhamou women, as is her budding romance with them dreamy Daniel, is a loose end and a distraction: a second season development in a story that only lasts one season. At least she is more likeable than the Parisians. Marcelle's frenzy and Elodie's diatribes (one of which lasts a devastating 17 minutes) set the tone for psychiatric cabaret, leaving the anti-Semitic trauma to compete for dramatic space with the anti-social nature of the garden, only to be ultimately overwhelmed by it.
Is it Harmon's opinion that “bad” Jews like the Salomons of the 2010s, who may have been made neurotic by anti-Semitism in the first place, have as much right to protect their homeland as unimpeachably “good” Jews like their ancestors in the 2010s? 1940s? In any case, a claim on our attention is a different matter, especially as the characters' fiercely defended opinions become more recurring and persistent – and then change radically without any apparent motivation. In the third act the arguments are completely invalidated and the play ends in sentimental exhaustion.
This exhaustion is one of the few elements of naturalism (being a Jew means being morally exhausted) in a predominantly expressionist production. Like many Cromer productions, “Prayer for the French Republic” is richly and darkly lit (in this case by Amith Chandrashaker) and moves between eras and locations with exquisite fluidity on rails and turntables (sets by Takeshi Kata). Daniel Kluger's original music sounds like a Jewish memory, led by the joyful and ominous sound of a clarinet.
But like Tom Stoppard's “Leopoldstadt” “Prayer for the French Republic” (its title is the name of a blessing recited in French synagogues for 200 years) gets lost in its central question: How can Jews know whether it is time to leave home again? , in a story of hundreds where they think they are safe but may soon find out otherwise? The prayer that they don't have to go at all – the prayer for the end of anti-Semitism itself – has not yet been answered.
Prayer for the French Republic
Through February 18 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheaterclub.com. Running time: 3 hours 5 minutes.