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Review of Prayer for the French Republic
A play by Joshua Harmon
At Huntington Theater through October 8, 2023

By Andy Hoffman

The Huntington Theater presents a new play by Joshua Harmon, Prayer for the French Republic, an extraordinary evening of theater. This ambitious drama concerns a family of French Jews and the uncertainty Jews everywhere feel about wherever they live. We may be comfortable now, the play posits, but for how long? We can look back to violent acts of antisemitism and ask ourselves, “Are we safe? Might we be safer somewhere else?”

Left to right: Jesse Kodama, Jared Troilo, Phyllis Kay, Peter Van Wagner, Tony Estrella.

Brother and sister Patrick Salomon and Marcelle Salomon Benhamou represent two sides of the problem. Patrick has assimilated to the extent that neither he nor his children observe Jewish holidays. Marcelle, on the other hand, married an Algerian Jew and described herself to a visiting young American cousin, Molly, as ‘traditional.’ Both Marcelle and her husband Charles are successful physicians, he with a large practice and she as psychiatry department head. Their two adult children, Elodie and Daniel, still live with them. Charles says of his family that they lived in Algeria for 500 years, and in Spain for a thousand years before that, marking the family’s movement around the Mediterranean with the Spanish Inquisition and the rise of Islamic Nationalism. The Benhamou family finds its peace disturbed in the beginning of the play when Daniel comes home having been attacked on the street, largely because as a math teacher at a Jewish school he wears a kippah, a skull cap. The elections involving the National Front leader Marie Le Pen and Donald Trump in the US have put the Benhamous on high alert. Charles no longer feels safe and wants the family to emigrate to Israel.

They live in the apartment that Marcelle and Patrick grew up in, and these characters share the stage with their ancestors, those who survived the Holocaust. Irma and Adolphe Salomon, the great-grandparents lived out the war trapped in the relative quiet of their Paris apartment, but their children have either escaped or fallen victim to the Nazis, and the old people pass their time imagining their offspring safe and sound. They are not, of course, not all of them. Those that do take up the century-old family business, selling pianos.

For these French Jews, the Holocaust remains as much a part of their personal history as their piano stores. Pierre marries a Catholic woman, and Patrick too marries outside the faith, but even he has not forgotten. As the play’s narrator, Patrick – admirably presented by Tony Estrella, the Artistic Director of Rhode Island’s Gamm Theater, which recently produced Harmon’s Bad Jews – regales the audience with stories of slaughter of Jews in France as far back as the Crusades. The felt vulnerability of the Benhamou family drives Prayer for the French Republic to its moving conclusion.

Harmon’s script, while long, flies along. These families, like all families, fight and argue and love, and we see plainly how people who are on the same side can vehemently, sometimes destructively, disagree. Prayer for the French Republic produces laughs and tears as the family struggles with and for its past and future. As they celebrate shabbat, Hannukah, and Passover, teaching their American cousin her own lost traditions, we feel the vital importance of both where they come from and where they are going. It’s a brilliant play, and Huntington Artistic director Loretta Greco has conducted the production and its talented cast to near perfection. The only hiccup in the evening is a peculiar break twenty minutes from the end, when the curtain comes down and the audience felt uncertain whether there was more to the show. Even with this misstep, Prayer for the French Republic should go on your must-see list. It tells a complicated and necessary story, not just about Jews, but about a world in migration. However, we come down on the mass movement of people from the America’s north to the US, or African to Europe and the Middle East, or South Asians on the run from climate change, this play opens our eyes and hearts to the painful uncertainty of life.