At first blush, the three-hour runtime of “Prayer for the French Republic,” enjoying on the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on Broadway, appears acceptable. Although it clearly doesn’t exist particularly in response to the occasions of Oct. 7, 2023 and the violent aftermath within the months since (for one factor, the play was first staged Off Broadway in 2022), it exists inside the context of all the historical past of Jews in Europe, and it seeks to attract that historical past out. Playwright Joshua Harmon appears to be aiming for the attain of Tony Kushner, utilizing maximalist method to ship concepts that sprawl ahead.
He doesn’t get there. “Prayer for the French Republic” is, in a single sense, well timed, delivering because it does pointed and direct arguments between characters who signify differing factors of view on the nation of Israel. (They do higher as representations of concepts, in truth, than as characters.) In 2016, the Benhamou household, led by matriarch Marcelle (Betsy Aidem, undeniably wonderful) suffers a disaster of religion of their native France after son Daniel (Aria Shahghasemi) is assaulted on the road for carrying a kippah. Led first by Charles (Nael Nacer), whose family left Algeria within the Sixties, the Benhamous transfer in direction of a choice to to migrate to Israel.
That selection is vehemently opposed by Marcelle’s brother Patrick (Anthony Edwards) and met with bland confusion by visiting American cousin Molly (Molly Ranson). It’s within the character of Molly that the present falls flattest, along with her foreignness an invite for the Benhamous, notably daughter Elodie (Francis Benhamou, sharing a surname along with her character) to ship disquisitions which have the form not of drama however of political treatises, or notably charged captions on Instagram carousels.
“Prayer for the French Republic” appears designed to evoke debate on the prepare trip residence. However the relative shapelessness of the Benhamous’ journey in direction of leaving France has a flattening impact on the viewers. I got here to understand the present’s second story, advised within the aftermath of World Conflict II as Marcelle and Patrick’s great-grandparents (Nancy Robinette and Daniel Oreskes) mourn the household life the Nazis stole from them, as a easy and chic story, well-told, even when the context it provides to the Benhamous’ story doesn’t fairly measure as much as the massive ask of bulking the present out to a few hours. (There’s a candy and painful contact of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” to the ancestors’ preliminary recreation of imagining their kids all alive, on the market someplace on the planet past ravaged France.)
Again within the near-present, although, the Benhamous’ departure appears so foreordained — and so relentlessly argued in direction of, with Molly and Patrick representing a kind of naïve and ungenerous unawareness and Daniel vacillating in a method that the story can’t make credible — that the strain seeps away.
Lacking, too, is the feel and granularity of cultural variations between France and America. The presence of an outsider — in addition to a brother and, ultimately, a son who declare a larger loyalty to the Benhamous’ native France — would appear to current the household with contrasts that may heighten our understanding of their very own scenario. And but director David Cromer has made the shocking option to step away from evoking France in something greater than probably the most fundamental croissants-and-cigarettes signifiers. The upper-middle-class Benhamous really feel like a household you may anticipate to fulfill in an upscale Brooklyn neighborhood. That deflates any declare the present may make to choosing aside the distinctive qualities of anti-Semitism — and the backlash thereto — in France, in addition to the sweep of French historical past specifically.
The selection of France as topic appears partially to sidestep taking over Trump. Because the 2016 part staggers into 2017, Molly, removed from residence, mourns the inauguration of her new president and, extra pertinently to the play’s story, the Benhamous concern the electoral success of right-wing chief Marine Le Pen, who reached the second spherical of voting in that yr’s French presidential election earlier than being worn out by Emmanuel Macron.
Le Pen is handled by the present’s French characters in a fashion exactly congruent with how American viewers members — and their avatar, Molly — handled Donald Trump; the French characters converse of them as if they’re one and the identical, separated merely by a language. Le Pen is an enchanting determine, and has been for years a sign of the rise of far-right authoritarianism around the globe and in Europe specifically. (And she or he got here marginally nearer to profitable, once more going through Macron, within the French elections of 2022.) However the methods she is attention-grabbing — notably her dedicated anti-Muslim sentiment, extending France’s so-called “laïcité” custom of secularism to a proposed ban on headscarfs in public, a possible counterpoint to Daniel’s being crushed for his personal spiritual garb — lay past the attain of Harmon’s pen. And so she’s evoked, however in a fashion that’s extra clumsy than enriching.
That’s to not say that “Prayer for the French Republic” ought to have been about one thing aside from the story it tells. But it surely doesn’t inform it in a compelling or nuanced method — regardless of Harmon having set himself as much as succeed with a flashback story that might, however doesn’t, present actual context and present-day interlocutors who might, however don’t, push the Benhamous past platitudes. The debates the Benhamous are having are ones which might be occurring in our personal republic — at dinner tables and in group chats, on Instagram and at protests. And in that method the play is correct on time. However for all of the capaciousness of the present’s story, what it’s in the end attempting to do is slender: To clarify a selection a gaggle of characters make by proving that these against it simply aren’t being severe. It’s a case, it seems, that takes three hours to conclusively show.
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