A Prayer for the French Republic
This review for A Prayer for the French Republic considers key takeaways from the play and why the play is particularly timely.
My friend and I went to see A Prayer for the French Republic this weekend at the Manhattan Theater Club. It was the first of two theater trips we made in a forty-eight hour window, since apparently it was just one of those weekends. The play has since closed at the Manhattan Theater Club, but I hope that it will be back at some point, and if it isn't, it should be.
About the Play (Minor Spoilers!)
Without giving too much away, the focus of the play is a French-Jewish family living in Paris circa 2016. Marcelle and Charles are moderately observant - they hold a Shabbat dinner every Friday, attended by their adult children, Elodie and Daniel, who still live at home. Elodie isn't observant otherwise, but Daniel wears a yamaka, much to his mother's chagrin, and it makes him a target on the street.
As the story unfold, we learn that Marcelle's father and grandfather are Holocaust survivors; Charles's family hails from Spain via Algeria, moving to France in the mid-twentieth century, because of rising anti-semitism. And so we have our theme.
A Prayer for the French Republic questions what it is to belong to a nation and what it means to be a Jew in different countries around the world. Molly, an American cousin visiting for a year, shares her perspective of being a secular American Jew (she's never been to a Shabbat dinner before). The play jumps between time periods - flashing back World War II and immediately post-war, when Marcelle's father and grandfather return to Paris (presumably) from concentration camps in the East.
Making use of a first-person narrator, Marcelle's brother, Patrick, the play reflect on what it means for the family of Holocaust survivors and others affected by anti-semitism to find themselves afraid to remain in their adopted country. It questions the impact of rising semitism, and the causes of it, boldly engaging with questions about Israel and Palestine in a way that cannot but make the play very timely.
Take Aways from the Play
After watching and enjoying the play, I had a look at some of the reviews. The playwright won the 2022 Drama Desk Award, and rightly so, but it is interesting to note how many critics suggest that the play is uneven or otherwise gimmicky. One of my friend's contacts shared that she was unmoved by it, which I find hard to believe.
The political arguments are, undoubtedly, uncomfortable. Elodie provides much humor and cynicism and she challenges her American cousin about her attitudes towards Israel and her fixation on the Israel-Palestine conflict at the expense of really knowing anything about what is going on anywhere else in the world. Molly counters and suggests it is "whataboutism," but the argument about numbers of people affected in Israel and Palestine versus, say, India and Pakistan, is pretty convincing.
Teaching a Holocaust class (see my earlier post on Musings from A Holocaust Class) and a literature and social justice class this semester, I wish I had time to include A Prayer for the French Republic to open up the discussion in both contexts. Discomfort experienced through literature is, I think, essential to health debate - not the kind of debate that we tend to see online these days, but the ones that we can reasonably have in our living rooms or with friends.