‘Prayer for the French Republic’
Through February 18
The Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 W. 47th St., Manhattan

More than three hours, the playwright Joshua Harmon’s “Prayer for the French Republic” aims to answer the question of what French Jews ought to do about a country that they love but that no longer seems to love them back. Of such unrequited passions are tragedies — and swaths of Jewish history — written. They also present political questions, and it is on that score that “Prayer” feels less scored to French crisis than American confusion.

Produced by the Manhattan Theater Club and directed by David Cromer, “Prayer” comes to Broadway sporting garlands, having won the 2022 Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Award during its Off-Broadway run. It follows four generations of the Salomon-Benhamou family, whose roots, we are told, have been planted in French soil for a millennium. The family business — or baggage — is a piano store at Montmartre. 

The play toggles between the travails of the Salomons in 1940 — this interlude feels potted, and was covered with more verve in Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt” — and their descendants in the present. The family is meant, we imagine, to feel representative, but its contours test coherence. Charles Benhamou, played by Nael Nacer, transforms into an ardent Zionist and goes from a cowed husband seemingly overnight. 

His wife, Marcelle, played with energy by Betsy Aidem, appears to be screaming — at her children, her husband, her brother, at anyone — for the entirety of this long play. While her strain is meant to reflect that of the French Jews, a more compelling explanation could be a more bespoke neurosis. Marcelle’s brother, Patrick, played by Anthony Edwards, a paragon of assimilationist belligerence, is the narrator.

The youngest generation of Benhamou-Salomons presents further conundrums. Daniel, played by Aria Shahghasemi, is newly religious, with a knit kippa that, early in the play, invites a pummeling that leaves him bloody. Rather than express outrage, though, he’d prefer to turn the other cheek. He also ends the play as the most lukewarm Zionist of all, a strange position for someone seemingly committed to praying thrice daily to Jerusalem.

Daniel’s sister is Elodie, acted by the coincidentally named Frances Benhamou. Recovering from a manic depressive episode, she stalks around in pajamas, fights with her mother, and lambasts her family members for being “ahistorical.” Her meditations on Jewish history and antisemitism appear aimed to make out of “Prayer” what the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw called a “drama of ideas.” She at least has something of Kafka’s mordant humor. 

Any trace of that trait is lacking in a distant relative who stays with the family during her time studying abroad, Molly, played by — again, coincidentally — Molly Ranson. One standard deviation away from the bewildered protagonist of “Emily in Paris,” Molly is sure to pack her paperback “Moveable Feast” and expresses suitable awe toward Paris’s croissants. She calls herself  “of Jewish extraction” and decries Israel as she goes goo-goo for Daniel. 

The play’s central question is whether this confused bunch should move to Israel. It is no idle parlor game, as the Jewish agency reports a 430 percent increase in the number of aliyah files opened in France since October 7. Antisemitic incidents “have exploded,” according to the country’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin. “Prayer” rightfully references the heinous murders of Ilan and Sarah Halimi, of no relation other than their shared Jewishness. How, though, could a work fresh to Broadway and hoping to be current on antisemitism, not be updated to account for the last three months?

The ability of “Prayer” to answer that conundrum, though, is hobbled by the blind spots that mar its vision. It only sees threats from the Jews as emanating from the right. Set just before France’s last presidential election, in 2022, its villains are President Trump and the leader of the National Rally party, Marine Le Pen, who was beaten by President Macron in that contest but has since grown in political strength, possibly heralding a populist moment. 

For “Prayer,” Ms. Le Pen is France’s worst-case scenario. Patrick promises that “France will never elect Le Pen, it will never happen, ever.” This prediction is repeated multiple times. Charles agonizes over “Le Pen and her base, all stirred up.” Elodie calls her supporters Nazis, while Daniel amends that to call them “sympathizers.” Mr. Trump is alluded to in similar terms, a trans-Atlantic warning for the French. 

While there is no gainsaying the legacy of Vichy or the long arm of Pétainism, it is exceedingly strange that a play about antisemitism in France ignores the motherlode of antisemitism — a tidal wave of immigrants implacably hostile to Israel and Jews and a leftist class that has made common cause with them. From the banlieues to the heart of Paris, rage at Israel finds Jewish victims close at hand. By and large, the terror is not coming from the right.

Our Michel Gurfinkiel writes that Ms. Le Pen has “repudiated antisemitism” and that her base — the same people maligned by Charles — is “increasingly convinced that Israel and France have a single common enemy — radical Islam.” The tribune of the country’s left, Jean-Luc Melenchon, meanwhile, is emerging as one of Hamas’s apologists. He once accused a Jewish minister of thinking not “in French” but in “international finance.”

“Prayer” deserves credit for taking Israel seriously as a Jewish option, and the family does finally decide to decamp. The script worries over “left-wing editorials,” but it can’t resist a reference to “apartheid” and “Israel’s occupation of Palestine,” which Elodie calls “problematic.” There is little sense that Israel is anything but a Plan B for the diaspora and a fallback for France rather than the most daring Jewish dream since Sinai.

Barely a syllable of French is heard in this prayer for France until the last scene when the prayer for the republic — a synagogue fixture for centuries — is sung. The accents deliver a sense of place more redolent of Bergen County than the Bastille, with nary a café nor boulevard in sight. The play shows little interest in conveying the romance of Paris, but its bigger disappointment is the absence of words that would convey the tug of Zion.