Theatre in Review: Prayer for the French Republic (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center Stage I)

	Nancy Robinette, Kenneth Tigar, Ari Brand, Pierre Epstein, Peyton Lusk, and Richard Topol. Photo: Matthew Murphy

Some playwrights pose questions; Joshua Harmon detonates them. His disputatious characters lead with irony, historical data, and steel-trap logic; if these fail, there are always full-frontal verbal assaults. Their ideas are wielded like weapons, and nobody emerges unscathed. Whatever the author's point of view, the other side usually has the best arguments; the time for definitive conclusions is never. Yet even as Harmon digs into humanity's darkest aspects, the result is exhilarating and often surprisingly hilarious. And, in the case before us, heartbreaking.

In Prayer for the French Republic, Harmon puts his restless, skeptical mind to work on the issue of French antisemitism, a long-running social evil seen here as a symptom of a world growing alarmingly illiberal and intolerant. It's a tale of two families. Middle-aged siblings Marcelle and Patrick are descendants of the Salomons, who have lived in France for a millennium. Their centuries-old piano business is winding down; their elderly father, Pierre, stoically minds the store, mostly napping until closing time. At best mildly observant -- "We keep the traditions," Marcelle says, blandly -- they are, apparently, fully assimilated.

Marcelle, a psychiatrist, and her husband Charles Benhamou, a physician, are secure in their successful careers. But the Benhamous are more recent arrivals, having left Algeria after independence in 1962 and the violence that followed. ("Many, many centuries, they lived there, and then...," Marcelle says, her voice trailing off before changing the subject.) Marcelle and Charles' son, Benjamin, a math teacher in a Jewish school, is openly religious, although he wears his piety as lightly as the kippah that Marcelle wishes he would cover up with a baseball cap. As it happens, she has a point: Benjamin is assaulted on the street, and not for the first time.

This incident exposes the brittle foundation underlying the Benhamous' seemingly solid existence. Charles, having already fled one homeland, suddenly decides it's time to move again, this time to Israel. Marcelle, horrified, resists until the real-life murder of the Jewish Dr. Sarah Halimi -- by a killer shouting "allahu akbar" -- annihilates her sense of security. Patrick, appalled, argues against emigration so vigorously that he and Marcelle stop speaking. As we see in flashbacks, the history of the Salomons offers cold comfort: Irma and Adolphe, Marcelle and Patrick's grandparents, are spared by the Holocaust by a fluke, sitting out World War II in their Paris apartment. Their daughter escapes to Cuba and, later, Mexico; their son, Lucien, returns from the death camps with his adolescent son Pierre, the only other survivor of their shattered family.

The Benhamous have other reasons for feeling unnerved. It is 2016: Donald Trump has just been elected and in France the presidential race is coming down to Emmanuel Macron versus the far-right demagogue Marine Le Pen, who infamously described the Holocaust as a "detail" of the war; sadly, the country's far left isn't much better. As Marcelle bitterly notes, Jews, who make up one percent of the population, figure in forty percent of the nation's hate crimes. Is history repeating itself? Is France no longer safe? Was it ever? And is Israel, forever perched on the edge of conflict, really a better choice?

Harmon explores these questions across both time frames, utilizing a structure in which past and present intertwine and events often mirror each other. Molly, a visiting American relative, unwittingly adds fuel to the Benhamous' fiery debates with mildly expressed criticisms of Israeli "apartheid" policies; at the same time, Trump's victory leaves her, too, feeling like a stranger in her own home country. (She and Benjamin fall for each other, a pairing of cousins like Irma and Adolphe, several generations earlier.) A 1946 dinner in which an anguished Lucien describes the murder of his daughter, Colette, is juxtaposed with a first-night-of-Hanukkah ceremony in 2016, a shadow of history cast over a troubled present. The elderly Pierre, by way of recalling France's collective amnesia, says he placed in the piano store a photo of Colette "presenting flowers to the President of France, Albert Lebrun. And you know something? No one has ever looked at the photo and asked, 'Where's your sister?'"

Director David Cromer has assembled a cast that brings the play's ideas to full-throated life. Betsy Aidem, giving one of her strongest performances to date, illuminates Marcelle's many contradictions, opposing the idea of Israel before implacably embracing it. Her fury is daunting, as is her skill at throwing arguments back in her opponents' faces. For example, Patrick, trying to calm what he sees as her alarmism, quotes Anne Frank's famous comment, "I still believe people are good." "Yes, she did say that," Marcelle snaps. "And a few months later she was dead."

Francis Benhamou, initially staggering around in pajamas, her hair seemingly shaped by a tornado, is equally memorable as Elodie, Charles and Marcelle's violently argumentative daughter. A manic-depressive still living at home in her late twenties, she is gifted with one of Harmon's signature arias, a scorched-earth attack on all criticisms of Israel. (A tidal wave of free associations and takedowns, expressed in a multitude of unfinished sentences, it is a formidable thing of beauty, delivered with matchless skill.) Elodie's volubility is a trial to even those who love her: "No, this is my last, last final point," she says, setting off waves of dismay among the others, who know that it is no such thing.

Richard Topol makes Patrick a suave and unsettling master of ceremonies, no more so than when seated at the piano, performing James van Heusen and Johnny Mercer's "I Thought About You" and breaking up the verses with detailed episodes of vicious Jew hatred going back centuries. Molly Ranson's Molly, thrown into the fray without warning, underplays with considerable elan, nearly toppling Elodie in mid-tirade with a single well-placed line. ("Are you familiar with this thing called whataboutism?")

Also fine are Jeff Seymour as Charles, wearily facing the loss of his homeland for a second time ("We felt Arab -- we were," he says, plaintively, about Algeria); Yair Ben-Dor, casually charming as Benjamin; Nancy Robinette and Kenneth Tigar as Irma and Adolphe; and Ari Brand and Peyton Lusk as the traumatized Lucien and young Pierre. Pierre Epstein brings a fund of worldly wisdom to the elderly Pierre's eleventh-hour appearance, in which he is forced to grapple with his family's imminent dispersal.

Slightly less assured is the production design. Takeshi Kata's set uses a turntable to often seamlessly shift between past and present, revealing the apartments of the Benhamous and elder Salomons from various angles; even so, there is at least one moment when a longish blackout is needed for a scene change. (There are oddities, too, in Cromer's staging; what French family ever sat down to a breakfast of croissants without coffee?) The Benhamous' apartment often seems under-furnished, although the piano at center stage is a powerful symbol of the Salomons' long history. Amith Chandrashaker's lighting helpfully works to delineate past and present. Sarah Laux's costumes accurately represent both eras; one especially telling touch is Lucien's outfits, which no longer fit his starved frame. The sound design by Lee Kinney and Daniel Kluger, is solid; Kluger also provided incidental music.

Even as the Benhamous make their life-changing decisions, there are no certainties. (For example, the audience knows that Le Pen didn't win in 2016; then again, she's running this year, as is the even more virulently xenophobic Éric Zemmour.) But, as Charles suggests, upheaval may be built into their destinies: "We just keep criss-crossing the Mediterranean, just back and forth and back and forth until forever. Spain, Algeria, France...Always on the go, always moving, never...Always wandering... But what can you do? It's the suitcase, or the coffin." --David Barbour