I first saw “Prayer for the French Republic,” Joshua Harmon’s epic exploration of the legacy, or legacies, of antisemitism, just a few weeks after the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. At the time, I marveled at how the play, penned some two years earlier, seemed so prescient in its exploration of an upper-middle class Jewish family, feeling and being unsafe as right-wing politics begin to take hold in France in the middle of the second decade of the 21st century.
Now this rich, sprawling and heartfelt drama arrives at Northlight Theatre, in a co-production with Chicago’s Theatre Wit, with opening night taking place just three days after antisemitic graffiti was found on (and quickly removed from) the campus of Northwestern University, basically down the road. Northlight is even preparing to move back to Evanston, the hometown of many of its subscribers. So there I was again, marveling at Harmon’s timeliness, even though his play is about a family of French jews madly in love with Paris, even when the City of Lights does not love them back.
I wrote in a review of “Good Night, and Good Luck” the other day that prescience is easier to achieve in the theater than most people think, being as human behavior doesn’t change all that much, however much we think society is transforming itself. “Prayer for the French Republic” is yet another example of that phenomenon. Antisemitism does not go out of style.
The title is clever. This is a play that contains many Jewish prayers and rituals, even though many of its Parisian characters are mostly secular in how they choose to live their lives. Harmon’s main point, I think, is that the characters lead split identities; fiercely French, and thus invested in that nation’s future and loath ever to leave and yet keenly aware of the lessons of history, especially the one where it behooves Jewish families to have a sense of when danger is increasing to the point where is advisable to get out.
Harmon’s play is set mostly in 2016-17. We see an American exchange student (played by Maya Lou Hlava) who has rolled up like Emily in Paris, beret and all, at the home of her relatives, the Salomon/Benhamou family, whose past is built on a piano-selling business — it’s now represented by two married doctors (played by Janet Ulrich Brooks and Rom Barkhordar) and their two adult children, one secular and feisty (Rae Gray) and the other spiritual and soulful (Max Stewart).
But Harmon also shows us the Salomon family’s Parisian life during and in the immediate aftermath of World War II in other scenes; the actors Henson Keys, Torrey Hanson, Kathy Scambiatterra, Nathan Becker and Alex Weisman show us a family ripped apart by the agonizing question of whether to leave or stay and, in so doing, the play makes us see in a strikingly immediate way that what happened in the middle of the 20th century is still within living memory. Even if France seems to have forgotten.
All of this story is narrated by a somewhat cynical and avowedly secularist figure, another Salomon who is the brother of the female doctor (sardonically played by Lawrence Grimm) and who looks at both history and family with a jaded eye. One of the big questions of the night is whether or not his realpolitik is justified, although I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the play ends up by focusing on the promise of a new generation, which has to make its own set of decisions.
“Prayer,” which has three acts, is a long play and Jeremy Wechsler’s empassioned but sometimes choppy production struggles with momentum some in Act 3, when the stakes don’t entirely rise to the levels they should and the pace sags. The show could use more evenness of tone. And while the dark comedic elements are very much in place, I found myself craving more of the crucial conversational reality, offering the feeling of everyday life as it was, and is, lived, specifically in France.
Still, this is a very skilled ensemble of actors and there are moments of real dramatic force. Weisman unpacks layers of trauma and I found the show’s younger cast members all rich in their understanding of how much and how wisely Harmon has placed most everything in their hands.
