| “Where is safe?” The sad answer is very likely “nowhere really.” In PRAYER FOR THE FRENCH REPUBLIC, Harmon poses the question and suggests the answer. His play, a social-historical family drama, is immediately absorbing and sustains for just over three hours largely because Harmon, like Kushner before him, can write compelling dialectic characters; they’re both intellectually engrossing and emotionally affecting. Two generations of a Jewish family contend with past and present iterations of ethnic and religious hatred. Argument helps them to cope with a legacy of harm and constant threat. Cromer is one of the best directors of actors we have and everyone here, most of them unknown to me, is exceptional. Even as it proposes that anti-Semitism is overdetermined and so ultimately inexplicable, PRAYER FOR THE FRENCH REPUBLIC finds strength in trying, communally, to comprehend. The only meaningful response to hatred is reasoned inquiry. And survival. |
