There’s a foreboding fear of history on the precipice of repeating itself in Prayer for the French Republic. This ambitious 2022 off-Broadway drama (which also received an acclaimed 2024 Broadway run) by gay playwright Joshua Harmon is now making a pitch-perfect regional premiere in a co-production by Northlight Theatre and Theater Wit at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie.
Prayer for the French Republic also continues an exclusive artistic connection between Theater Wit and Harmon. Theater Wit artistic director Jeremy Wechsler has repeatedly championed Harmon by staging the Chicago premieres of his plays, including Significant Other in 2017 and Admissions in 2019.
But more significantly, Wechsler also directed the 2015 Chicago premiere of Harmon’s breakthrough 2013 comedy Bad Jews. Theater Wit’s hit production of Bad Jews then played a 2016 summer revival run in the same Skokie venue as Prayer for the French Republic, so everything feels like both a reunion and a continuing collaboration.
In Bad Jews, Harmon explored pressing questions of contemporary Jewish identity within a four-character comedy that ran a brash 100 minutes without intermission.
Jewish identity also runs through Prayer for the French Republic, which operates on a much grander scale, as it also takes in the perniciousness of antisemitism. Within a running time of nearly three hours and two intermissions, Prayer for the French Republic is engrossing as it explores the history of five generations of a French Jewish family.
That Prayer for the French Republic feels like it breezes by is a major credit to Harmon’s skilled plot construction. But director Wechsler’s strong cast also all deserve kudos for enlivening the fine drama and copious amounts of comedy in Harmon’s layered script.
Prayer for the French Republic is set in Paris and switches back and forth between the 2016-17 school year and the mid-‘40s (in and around the same well-appointed/cluttered apartment by set designer Joe Schermoly). An affable narrator named Patrick Salomon (Lawrence Grimm) links the two eras and shares loads of background about his family’s piano business in France. Patrick is later pulled into the drama as a supporting character as tensions simmer and boil over into explosive family fights.
Harmon also smartly includes the contemporary character of young twenty-something U.S. exchange student Molly (Maya Lou Hlava). As a distant-relative to the Salomons, Molly allows Harmon’s characters to naturally spout plenty of exposition as they (and audiences) piece together the family-tree connections.
Molly is staying with a non-Jewish host family in the smaller French city of Nantes (a study-abroad condition imposed by her parents due their fear of big-city terrorist attacks). But Molly keeps returning to the observant Paris home of Charles Benamou (Rom Barkhordar) and his often exasperated wife, Marcelle (Janet Ulrich Brooks), the sister of narrator Patrick Salomon.
Harmon mines lots of humor from culture clashes, especially when Charles and Marcelle’s unemployed daughter, Elodie (Rae Gray), lays into Molly over her U.S.-centric views of Israeli domestic and global policies. Talk of recent terrorism also comes up frequently, whether in the U.S. or France.
But it’s antisemitic attacks in Paris that particularly hit home, since Charles and Marcelle’s grown teacher son, Daniel (Max Stewart), has been assualted twice for openly wearing a yarmulke in public. Harmon then ratchets up the family’s fears as each member feels increasingly unsafe.
Alternately, the ‘40s scenes involving the elderly Adolphe Salomon (Torrey Hanson) and his wife, Irma (Kathy Scambiatterra), allow Harmon to get into the minds of a Jewish family in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. Adolphe and Irma were fortunate enough to survive World War II, but they are wracked with uncertainty over the whereabouts of their grown children and their families.
The return of Adolphe and Irma’s only son, Lucien Salomon (Alex Weisman), and grandson, Pierre (a role split as a youth by Nathan Becker and in old age by Henson Keys), is not entirely a happy reunion as more conflicts arise. Harmon also delves into these characters’ traumatized psyches for some surprising revelations before Prayer for the French Republic reaches its conflicted conclusion.
Everything in Wechsler’s production is beautifully realized, especially with designer Mara Blumenfeld’s period costumes working in tandem with designer JR Lederle’s lighting (darker for the ‘40s; brighter for last decade) to delineate the two time periods.
Wechsler’s acting company is also wonderfully attuned to the comic and dramatic rhythms of Harmon’s script. They even pull off Harmon’s questionable tendency to jam-pack his characters’ dialogue with facts, figures and statistics to back up their many, many arguments.
Northlight Theatre and Theater Wit’s co-production of Prayer for the French Republic takes a long historical view as it simultaneously functions as both a period and contemporary theater piece. Prayer for the French Republic takes big dramatic swings as it asks if Jewish people can ever truly feel safe as a minority population.
Prayer for the French Republic also unfortunately feels very timely. Amid so much uncertainty and fears about past and recent history being repeated in the world we’re living in now, at least Harmon is brave enough to ask and dramatize these big questions.
Northlight Theatre and Theater Wit’s co-production of Prayer for the French Republic continues through May 18 * at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie. Performances are 1 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays, 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays with 2:30 p.m. matinees Saturdays and Sundays. Tickets are $49-$91. Call 847-673-6300 or visit northlight.org or theaterwit.org for more information.
* Northlight and Theater Wit’s run of “Prayer for the French Republic” has been extended again at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie. The final extension is now through Sunday, May 25.