Marc Miller takes a look at Prayer for the French Republic at City Center:
Joshua Harmon has a lot on his mind. That's clear from his program note for Prayer for the French Republic, his new, unwieldy but compelling comedy-drama–and it's heavy on both, but heavier on the drama. He relates how he'd been attending various productions of his previous hit, the hilarious and mean-spirited Bad Jews, and noticed how audience response was shifting. Lines that weren't getting laughs before now were, and he attributed that to people being more desperate to laugh in light of the increasing violent attacks on Jews, from the 2012 shooting at a day school in Toulouse to the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. "It seems," he writes, "more of us–maybe all of us?–are grappling with how to live in an ever more dangerous, ominous, confounding world. So, whatever your background, I hope this fictionalized story resonates with some true aspect of your own experience." |
