During the 2014-15 theater season, playwright Joshua Harmon’s dark comedy “Bad Jews” was among the most-produced plays in the United States. It concerned an argument among cousins about who deserved to inherit a grandfather’s Holocaust-era chai necklace – the holier-than-thou one, the barely-a-Jew Jew or the can’t-we-just-all-get-along one.
In 2022, Harmon did it again, by premiering what certainly should be called the most-important Jewish play in generations. His prescient “Prayer for the French Republic” faces down the existential Jewish question of our time: Where can we, as Jews, live freely and safely? Subsequently, the world has seen an unprecedented rise in Jew-hatred and anti-Israeli sentiment and attacks around the world and, of course, here at home in the United States.
Theater J’s fine production, which runs at the Goldman Theater of the Edlavitch Washington, D.C., JCC through Nov. 24, is not to be missed. With astute direction by artistic director Hayley Finn, this incarnation of “Prayer,” following a Broadway run this past season, is profound and gut-wrenching, particularly at this moment in the U.S. The FBI reported in late September that antisemitic hate crimes rose by an astonishing 63 percent in 2023. And prior to ’23, hate crimes against Jews had been increasing since at least 2019, by all accounts.
Harmon’s “Prayer for the French Republic” takes place in an impeccable Paris apartment (nod to scenic designer Misha Kachman) and follows distant American cousin Molly’s meeting with the very French family she never knew. That includes the financially comfortable Jewish couple Marcelle Salomon and Charles Benhamou and their two adult children. As the outsider, college student Molly, who describes herself as of “Jewish extraction,” quickly — perhaps too quickly for hypervigilant Jewish mother Marcelle — ensconces herself in the family’s petty and oversized conflicts while forging a relationship with son Daniel.
The excellent cast finesses Harmon’s fast-talking dialogues, rapier wit, and penchant for outsize arguments that cut to the crux of this work: the immutable Jewish ties our people maintain to the past and the salient yearning we hold for a future less bound by choices made generations ago.
The Salomon/Benhamou family is burdened with metaphorical ghosts – their forbears. The Salomon family’s illustrious, but faded history in the French Republic dates back for 1,000 years; the five most recent generations have been piano makers and sellers participating in highly valued French cultural life. Beloved D.C.-area actor Brigid Cleary embodies Holocaust-era grandmother Irma with dichotomous charms of frailty and strength, anxiety and determination, while Stephen Patrick Martin plays her counterpoint with both benevolent patience and end-of-his-rope frustration as they suffer through yet survive the Holocaust alone in their flat. Their sons were not as fortunate. The Benhamou ancestors fled Algeria for freedom and safety.
Harmon teases out these generational traumas wrought on 21st-century, decidedly secular Jews who live with the deep-seated aftereffects of antisemitism.
Molly (Jourdan Lewanda) serves as the antagonist, disrupting this tight-knit nuclear family with her postmodern — or “ahistorical” as she’s called out for — ideas about Israel, its place in the world, and its treatment of Palestinians. She leans into cloying didacticism — the brand that second- and third-year undergraduates take up with effortless overconfidence. Her lectures to her host family result in bemused and annoyed expressions of disbelief.
That is until manic-depressive sister Elodie Benhamou takes her American cousin to task. Elodie provides the unfettered Jewish perspective and Dani Stoller plays her with scintillating confidence and disdain. Her sharp-tongued retorts and meandering lectures provide the centerpiece of the play, laying out Harmon’s pro-Israel argument for the necessity of a Jewish state in an unstable and Jew-hating world. Stoller crafts the whip-smart monologue with her own piercing intellect and remains relentless in disabusing her on-stage cousin of earnest but unstudied opinions.
Brother Daniel sparked much of this heated discourse by his decision to wear a kippa at home and on the dangerous streets of Paris, where he suffers the bruising results of being a public Jew.
The present-day Salomon family is rounded out by patriarch Charles Benhamou, the Algerian Jewish émigré to France who built a lux life for his family. Ariel Eliaz imbues Charles with both the grandeur of a proud papa and also the repressed fear of a refugee still not completely at home in his new country. Codie Nickell serves as a participant-observer of sorts, in the presence of Patrick Salomon, Marcelle’s out-of-touch brother. And Danielle Skraastad, with her chic French bob and crisp wardrobe, leans fully into her role as Jewish mother and wife Marcelle – overbearing, overloving, overprotecting in the best — and occasionally worst — possible ways.
This tightly knit cast faces with various levels of fear and nonchalance the impending presence of rising Jew hatred in their lives. The ultimate question they grapple with is one the Jewish people have faced for millennia: should we stay or is it time to flee?
While this premise sounds as if it’s been ripped from yesterday’s headlines describing current college campus protests, soccer riots and demonstrations throughout the West, playwright Harmon set “Prayer” in 2016, shortly following Donald Trump’s first election as U.S. president and during France’s election when far-right candidate Marine Le Pen vied for France’s top spot. But it could have been written last week.
“Prayer for the French Republic” has a Theater J connection. Playwright Harmon received the first Theater J Trish Vradenburg Jewish Play Prize when this was a work in progress, so it’s good to have this full production make its Washington, D.C., debut there. It was later highly lauded in New York, moving to Broadway where “Prayer” received three 2023 Tony Awards. When I saw it a year-and-a-half ago on Broadway, I found it important and compelling.
Last week Theater J’s production hit me hard, and felt fully visceral, as if it was torn from yesterday’s newspaper. I felt the play must have changed to make it so much more gripping, thus, I reached out to verify what Harmon had done to the script. Director Hayley Finn, who has crafted one of the most compelling pieces on Theater J’s stage in recent years, noted he made very few minor script changes.
What changed, then? The world. And me. And us. As Harmon was writing “Prayer,” antisemitism was on the rise. In this post-October 7 world, where Israelis and Jews aren’t safe in their towns and homes, in a era when genocidal chants against Jews and Israelis are regularly heard on streets, college campuses and public spaces across North America, Europe and beyond, this play now feels like docudrama — or worse — real life. The evening I saw “Prayer” a week ago today (Thursday), by the time I arrived home, a pogrom was in progress in Amsterdam.
This tour de force, clocking in at three swift-moving hours, shines a light on the hideous darkness that haunts Jews wherever they choose to live: antisemitism — it may hibernate for a time, but it never disappears. In “Prayer for the French Republic,” Harmon with Finn universalizes the Jewish diasporic experience, whittling it down to the ultimate unanswerable plaint: “Why do they hate us?” And its necessary existential rejoinder, “Where can we find safety for us and for our children?” Prayers, this work suggests, are not sufficient in times of existential crisis. Jews must move, take action, to protect themselves.
“Prayer for the French Republic,” by Joshua Harmon, through Nov. 24, Theater J at the Edlavitch DCJCC, 1529 16th St., NW, Washington, D.C. Tickets: $50-$80. Visit edcjcc.org/theater-j/show/prayer-for-the-french-republic.
Lisa Traiger is Washington Jewish Week’s arts correspondent.
