Diatribe: Prayer for the French Republic

Yair Ben-Dor, Molly Ranson and Francis Benhamou in Prayer for the French Republic. (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

Prayer for the French Republic, now playing in a Manhattan Theatre Club production at City Center, is Joshua Harmon’s response to the wave of anti-Jewish incidents in Paris in 2016 and 2017. And it’s a hefty response – three acts, three hours’ running time, during which the characters never stop lecturing the audience and, indeed, each other. Harmon has provided a narrator, a cosmopolitan atheistic Jew named Patrick Salomon (Richard Topol) who recites for us the history of atrocities against Jews. But it’s not clear why the playwright feels the need of a commentator at all, since he’s built rants into the dialogue of both Patrick’s sister Marcelle Benhamou (Betsy Aidem) and her neurotic twentysomething daughter Elodie (Francis Benhamou). Even the ghost of their grandmother Irma (Nancy Robinette) strides downstage to explain to us the symbolic significance of her tombstone – the grave of a Jewish woman who, along with her husband Adolphe (Kenneth Tigar), survived the Holocaust without leaving France, out of sheer luck. Prayer for the French Republic is barely a play at all. There are characters – nearly a dozen of them, some in modern-day Paris and some in an intercut flashback set between 1944 and 1946 – but they’re mostly mouthpieces for Harmon’s disquisition on anti-Semitism.

New Works for the Theatre: The Michaels, The Height of the Storm and Admissions

Brenda Wehle and Charlotte Bydwell in The Michaels: Conversations During Difficult Times. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

The Michaels: Conversations During Difficult Times is Richard Nelson’s first play since he directed his own translation, with the wizardly translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, of Uncle Ványa in the Hunter Theatre Project a year ago. Now he’s back at the Public, where he presented (also as both playwright and director) his tetralogy The Apple Family Plays and his trilogy The Gabriels, and like those plays – and like Uncle Ványa – the style is what you might call conversational realism. The venue is LuEsther Hall, the smallest space at the Public, and those of us who didn’t obtain a listening device in the lobby leaned in to listen as soon as the actors had created the set out of piled-up tables, chairs and benches, rolled-up rugs and props laid out in trays. Then the lights come up and Jay O. Sanders, as David Michael, a producer and arts manager, tells the assembled kitchen in his ex-wife Rose’s Rhinebeck house about having to appear in place of an ailing actor in his latest show. He describes what it was like to experience the sacred performance space actors and dancers claim that isn’t normally open to mere producers. (Rhinebeck, in upstate New York, is also the setting of The Apple Family Plays and The Gabriels.)