The well of naive young Americans schooled in life, love, politics and croissants by effortlessly worldly French is in no danger of drying up. The latest addition to this cohort is 20-year-old Molly, a New Yorker who just met her distant cousins in Paris.
Fortunately, they, not the sweet, passive Molly, are the subject of “Prayer for the French Republic,” Joshua Harmon’s ambitious and maddening, thought-provoking and schematic new play directed by David Cromer at the Manhattan Theater Club.
At the very beginning, the matriarch, Marcelle Salomon Benhamou (an excellent Betsy Aidem), painstakingly explains her family’s genealogical ties to Molly (Molly Ranson). They are so complicated that Marcelle has to repeat them for the benefit of the young woman and, of course, the audience. Even then, it takes much of the piece’s three-hour running time and some changes between 2016-17 and 1944-46 for the connections and their implications to sink in.
Harmon (“Significant Other”, “Admissions”) has set himself quite a challenge as Molly has arrived at a critical point for Marcelle; her husband, Charles (Jeff Seymour); and their 20-year-old children, Daniel (Yair Ben-Dor) and Elodie (Francis Benhamou). Daniel, who wears a kipa, has come home with a bloody face after an anti-Semitic assault. It’s just another example of what Charles feels like an increasingly scary climate for Jews in France, a final straw that pushes him to move to Israel.
“It’s the trunk, or the coffin,” he says, referring to his ancestors’ forced wandering as he is about to pursue it. (One of the most fascinating aspects of the piece, though an understated one, is how these characters represent two lines of French Judaism: Marcelle’s Ashkenazi ancestors are rooted in France for centuries, while Charles’s are Sephardic Jews who have lived in North America for generations. -Africa before moving from Algeria in the 1960s.)
The Benhamous have spirited arguments that have the urgency of life-or-death decisions: should they stay or should they go? What does it mean to be Jewish in France? (The title of the piece refers to a prayer that has been prayed in French synagogues since the early 1800s.)
Some of the show’s concerns, including the lure of reconciliation through assimilation — a position embodied by Marcelle’s brother, Patrick (Richard Topol) — align with Harmon’s, explored in a much more comical way in his blistering debut,” Bad Jews”, from 2012. That show was dominated by a hurricane-like character named Daphna, and she now has a slightly gentler relative in Elodie, who injects volatile energy every time she opens her mouth.
Incidentally, Ranson was also in “Bad Jews” and once again finds herself on the receiving end of impassioned, and often wickedly funny, diatribes and dejections that have the biting rhythm of New York Jewish humor rather than a French sensibility. (A faux pas: The Benhamous buy croissants in an American-style cardboard box instead of the paper bags used in French bakeries.)
All of this would be enough to wrap up any story, but Harmon also takes us to the end of World War II for several scenes featuring Marcelle and Patrick’s older relatives. — their grandparents, Irma and Adolphe Salomon (Nancy Robinette and Kenneth Tigar, both heartbreaking), somehow managed to survive in occupied Paris and kept their piano shop.
The two stories gradually begin to merge, with Marcelle and Patrick’s father, Pierre (Peyton Lusk in the 1940s, Pierre Epstein in the 2010s), embodying the literal and metaphorical link between past and present.
A technically astute and emotionally sensitive director, Cromer moves back and forth as you’d expect – for example, putting a stage turntable on suggestive, if perhaps a bit clichéd, use. Still, it’s not hard to feel the tension of the show slacken as we leave the Benhamous. The finale of the piece that targets the lofty and falls short, one may wonder what the future holds for them.
Prayer for the French Republic
Until Feb. 27 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 3 hours.