We’re all here just for a moment, of course, stuck in the middle of events mostly out of control. Whatever your identity, rarely in a Broadway theater will you have so powerfully felt your own vulnerability.
Prayer for the French Republic
Opening Night: January 9, 2024
Theater: Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
Website: www.manhattantheatreclub.com
In 1944, a Jewish couple in Paris desperately awaits news of their missing family. More than 70 years later, the couple’s great-grandchildren find themselves facing the same question as their ancestors: “Are we safe?” This celebrated work by the author of Bad Jews and Significant Other is about history, home and the effects of an ancient hatred.
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January 9, 2024
When it ran Off Broadway in 2022, “Prayer for the French Republic” already seemed painfully timely, with the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, the murder of a Holocaust survivor in Paris and other antisemitic atrocities barely in the rearview mirror. Two years later, with so much more awfulness to choose from, Harmon, revising his script for Broadway, has cut references to those events. What is too much for the world is way too much for the play.
READ THE REVIEWJanuary 10, 2024
“Prayer for the French Republic” is a formidable feat — it lives up to its gargantuan, time-leaping ambitions and is a sturdy theatrical vehicle for a large cast of actors to delve deep into character work.
READ THE REVIEWJanuary 9, 2024
The winner of just about every Off Broadway award there is to be had, Prayer, in this Manhattan Theatre Club production, makes a smooth, nearly flawless transition to the Broadway stage, with most of the original cast intact along with a big name TV star in ER‘s Anthony Edwards along for the move.
READ THE REVIEWJanuary 9, 2024
Playwright Joshua Harmon seems to be aiming for the reach of Tony Kushner, using maximalist technique to deliver ideas that sprawl forward.
He does not get there.
READ THE REVIEWJanuary 9, 2024
As a theatergoing experience, however, the three-hour Prayer for the French Republic is less effectively timed. The play premiered in early 2022 at Manhattan Theatre Club; Dravid Cromer’s production has now moved to MTC’s Broadway venue, the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. But in the gap between these two mountings, New York got a 10-month run of Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt, which approached the same core issues—the persistence of antisemitism, and the debates about fitting in that surround it—with more gravity, scope and finesse. By comparison, flaws that were already noticeable Off Broadway seem more pronounced.
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“Why do they hate us?” So asks Pierre Salomon, a Holocaust survivor in his 80’s, to his 26-year-old grandson Daniel after being told that Daniel’s family, including Pierre’s adult daughter Marcelle, is relocating from France to Israel (despite not knowing Hebrew or virtually anyone there) because they genuinely fear for their safety due to rising anti-Semitism in “Prayer for the French Republic,” Joshua Harmon’s long-winded (running three hours and 15 minutes) but powerful drama of family, religious identity, politics, and occasional humor.
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In three acts, Harmon brilliantly dramatizes these questions and more through the story of one very specific yet completely recognizable Jewish family (fans of last season’s Leopoldstadt will find much to admire here). Scenes of simmering resentment imperceptibly come to a boil as family politics brush up against seismic global forces.
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It would be a tall order to expect Prayer, a play written and programmed prior to these cascading events, to fully meet the complexity and horror of our current moment. But nor can it escape that context, arriving when it has.
READ THE REVIEWJanuary 9, 2024
Though it’s surrounded by heavy clouds, Harmon’s play is plenty sharp and by no means gloomy. Zingy, morbid humor and motormouthed diatribes are the playwright’s weapons of choice, not lyricism or sentimentality. Yet there’s a savviness to Prayer’s construction that makes it ring false.
READ THE REVIEWJanuary 9, 2024
Why does everyone hate us? Where can we go that’s safe? These stubbornly open-ended questions pop up repeatedly in Joshua Harmon’s piercing and pointedly amusing Prayer for the French Republic, now on Broadway following its 2022 Off-Broadway premiere.
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