Prayer for the French Republic

David Cromer's direction will certainly make this a beautiful piece of theatre, though I can't speak for the play itself. Cromer's had a near-flawless track record as of late.

Has anyone seen any other discount offers yet? All I've seen other than full price is TodayTix, but I'd prefer to see my seats in advance.

I'll also be there on Sunday and am looking forward to it. It's a weird venue as it seems like an intimate show and City Center is huge. We'll see.

I think it's in the small theater of City Center (MTC stage I):

https://www.nycitycenter.org/globalassets/_about/seatingmap-mtc-1.pdf

FYI the runtime is three hours, 15 minutes. Including two intermissions. There is more than one person at this 7pm first preview who thought this was a 90 minute play, and that they were going to be going to dinner after.

Anakela said: "FYI the runtime is three hours, 15 minutes. Including two intermissions. There is more than one person at this 7pm first preview who thought this was a 90 minute play, and that they were going to be going to dinner after."

Christ. I'll wait til they get in the groove of the show.

Can you expand at all? That's pretty vague. What's the design like? Direction? Etc.

**SPOILERS AHEAD** Saw the play this afternoon and enjoyed it. The 3 hrs and 10 minutes went by quickly and there’s some really powerful stuff here, but for me, the end was lacking. The story revolves (literally and figuratively) around a family and their fears of antisemitism in present day (2016) Paris and their ancestors in the 1940s. I was thoroughly engaged for acts one and two, but the third act felt like it lost its way. A piano sits on stage for the entire play and while the events end at the piano, the final scene that accompanied the piano didn’t have the weight it needed. What message does Harmon want us to take away? That we’ll always have to live on edge? That we must remain with family because that’s all we have? Whatever the message is, it needs a bigger moment at the end. And speaking of remaining with family, there’s a cousin character who comes to stay with them and “dates” her cousin. Yes, they’re like 3rd cousins and it’s sort of played for laughs, but it’s weird. Can we make her a family friend?

Performance-wise, the actress playing the daughter, Elodie, stole the show. She had several long, ballsy, thought-provoking and/or funny monologues. The others were good, and I did find the mother, Marcelle, to be very good, but considering how long it was, not many of the others were developed quite as well as those two.


Was just thinking about it, and I’d liken this to a Jewish version of The Inheritance. What do we as Jews inherit from those who came before us? Why are our people always living in fear of who we are and how others see us? The selling point for me on this was Mr. Harmon’s writing. I think there’s a lot to work with and some powerful stuff, but he needs to figure out why we need to hear it.

Updated On: 1/16/22 at 09:51 PM

Who is in this? The cast seems to be a well-guarded secret.

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Wick3 said: "DramaTeach, I'm glad someone else on this board watched this play! I remember entering the theater and the first thing I noticed was the piano. I then wondered whether it was a real piano and was glad that it was when one of cast members played a note in middle of Act 1. I'm not French nor Jewish but I wish they explained the songs they played as I'm not sure whether the song was French or Jewish (or maybe both?) Or perhaps they did and I just missed the explanation. For me, knowing the premise of the song may have made the ending more powerful.

Anyways, the next morning, I read through the playbill and found there was a note from the playwright (Joshua Harmon). I'd put a link but couldn't find it on playbill.com or anywhere so I'm typing it below. It may have some of the answers you were looking for.

NOTE FROM THE PLAYWRIGHT (as found in Playbill of Prayer for the French Republic)

"In 2015, I went to London for a production of my play BAD JEWS. It had first been produced in New York in 2012. I'd seen it so many times, I knew how audiences responded to each moment. So I was caught off guard when their reaction to one line was different: toward the end of the play, the character Daphna Feygenbaum delivers a monologue in which she asks, "so now, when it's easier to be Jewish than it has ever been in the history of the world, now when it's safest, now we should all stop?" In 2012, audiences contemplated that question in silence. In 2015, they laughed.

How could they not? Previews in London began days after a gunman murdered four Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris. It was only the latest in a series of increasingly violent attacks: the 2006 kidnapping and murder of Ilan Halimi; the 2012 shooting at a Jewish day school in Toulouse where four Jews were killed --- three of whom were under the age of 8. Journalists everywhere began writing about the dangers facing French Jews. I read their articles with interest. But I also knew, just from having observed this one small changed response to my own play, something significant was unfolding.

In the months that followed, I began work on what you are now here to see. Much like Molly in the play, I descend from French Jews, minored in French and studied abroad there, too, and like so many before me, I fell in love with the country. Yet once I graduated college, I had no reason to speak French. Setting out to write this play meant my teenage interest in the language would actually prove useful all these years later. I packed my bags and went on the first of two research trips to France, in the fall of 2016.

I interviewed writers and rabbis, actors and shopkeepers, strangers and distant cousins. I met Holocaust survivors, and Jewish immigrants from North Africa now living in France, and French Jews now living in Israel, and American Jews now living in France. What became immediately clear is that despite sharing an identity, there was no consensus among these individuals about the state of things. Some felt perfectly safe. Some said things were fine - so long as you didn't appear Jewish in the streets. Some thought in the next 50 years, there would be no Jews left in France. One man laughed at my idea for this play. He found the entire premise false. I listened, crestfallen. When he told his friend about my absurd idea, his friend responded that he'd just put his apartment up for sale.

I returned home confused, unsure of how to tell a story with so many wildly divergent points of view. I considered abandoning the whole thing. Then, just two days after my return, Trump was elected president. You don't need me to tell you what happened next -- the cities' names speak for themselves: Charlottesville. Monsey. Pittsburgh. We even got our own kosher supermarket massacre in New Jersey. What started as a theoretical inquiry into French Jews suddenly became much more personal. My play about those people, over there, became a play about me, right here.

I am grateful to those who trusted me with their stories. Shards of them appear here, along with research and some family history. Ultimately though, this is a work of fiction. I set out to write about one family grappling with their future in their country, but soon found that if I hoped to portray them honestly, I also had to write about Algeria. And Cuba. And Poland, and Mexico, and Israel, and America. Perhaps that was inevitable. Living in in the diaspora means every Jewish family's passport has been stamped by many countries. Learning to live with the fear, of varying degrees, comes with the territory.

But now, more than ever, it seems more of us -- maybe all of us? -- are grappling with how to live in an ever more dangerous, ominous, confounding world. So whatever your background, I hope this fictionalized story resonates with some true aspect of your own experience. Even as I write this, Covid infections are once again spiking, and prognosticators are debating when, if, and how things might all shut down, again. We are all making impossible decisions as we navigate these days. But I am imagining that you are here -- masked, but still, here --- reading this in your program, ready for a play to begin. That is enough to give me hope.

Joshua Harmon

Dec 2021""

Maybe I just haven't read a lot but this is one of the best author's notes I've ever read. This clarifies a ton.

Hm.... I think I stand by my original post. David Cromer knocks this out of the park, delivering a beautiful piece of theatre with a terrific cast of very interesting actors. Betsy Aidem and Kenneth Tigar are highlights but this is a real ensemble. If you have a committed interest in things like directing, performance, and design, you should definitely see this and will most likely enjoy it for the remarkable craftsmanship on display.

Harmon's play I think is another matter. It's more ambitious than Significant Other and Bad Jews and definitely feels like Harmon's "adult" play, but the formalism he's going for reveals his weaknesses as a playwright.

Essentially, it's both a memory play and a political drama, set in three different time periods with a large cast telling many interlocking stories while simultaneously educating the audience about the history of anti-Semitism. It's a bit of a mess, and the story is not especially powerful — aside from the milieu.

For me personally, the message seemed almost hysterically apocalyptic about the future of the Jewish people. I'm okay with moderate right-wing plays, but this felt schematic in its desire to make a political point. Bad Jews made a similar point, but did so by telling a good story. There are many good scenes, but it doesn't really add up in my head.

Updated On: 1/19/22 at 11:25 PM

A huge Harmon fan, I saw this last night and agree with a lot of the points made here, especially about the piece's shortcomings. There was so, so, so much to like within the three hours – the expected hilarious, snippy dialogue; funny and poignant observations of family dynamics; exploration of complex issues from multiple angles without a single easy answer. During the running time I laughed, I cried, and I was moved – and yet by the end I found myself feeling mostly empty. Because in addition to all the good, there was a surprising amount of cliche, a lot of scenes that needed reengineering, and too much dialogue that felt overwrought. (If you saw "An Ordinary Muslim" at NYTW in 2018, this reminded me a lot of that – and unfortunately it's not a flattering comparison.)

The dialogue, undeniably Harmon's strong point, would vacillate from taut and thoughtful to slack and overwritten, often in the course of a single scene. Characters would have lengthy, meandering monologues that sounded less like real people and more like playwriting – often seconds after an inspired, photorealistic depiction of a family bickering over one another in real time. And tension often didn't arise when it was meant to. After their daughters were arrested by Nazis, a family begged for news of their fate so many times that any tension all but evaporated. The ending fell similarly flat, as covered in many reviews. And when politics did come up, characters were often painted in an overly simplistic light, or just inconsistently. Changes in the way Molly and Patrick discussed big issues I found particularly unconvincing, like I was watching two different people, with completely different IQs and EQs, from scene to scene.

The frustrating thing is that these are mostly surmountable issues. For a work this ambitious, and with this much good in it, to be dragged down by fixable things is a shame. In all, it felt like an early draft had been given a full production.

Speaking of the production, unlike most others here, I also found it to be quite lacking. The set was clunky, and not just figuratively – many quiet scenes were underpinned by loud bumps from backstage. And the direction lacked the subtlety I would have expected. A lot of the acting felt like acting, so to speak – for example, every "important" line came with the same delivery: shouted, with a long pause immediately after, which felt very 101, when it would have benefited from the understated, true-to-life approach I'd typically expect from Cromer. And finally, it did not feel remotely French. Sure, it's meant to be a universal story to some degree, but it doesn't need to take place in a theatrical netherworld to be that way (just ask Tevye). Why not play a french song or two between acts, or add some Parisian flair to the decor?

I hate to give a bad report – as a Harmon fan, a Jew, and a lover of long, epic pieces, I've been looking forward to this more than any play in probably years. But it just doesn't live up to its ambitions or creative team.