“History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past,” James Baldwin wrote in a 1965 essay for Ebony magazine (titled, The White Man’s Guilt). He added, “On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.”
These undercurrents invigorate the drama that the Benhamou family faces in Joshua Harmon’s award-winning Broadway play Prayer for the French Republic. Featuring a sterling cast that skillfully shapes the complex layers of dialogue and debate in Harmon’s script, Pioneer Theatre Company’s Utah premiere production of the play zeroes in on the elucidating relevance of history’s omnipresent impact in our personal lives. The story also translates well for others who face similar questions that the Benhamou family members encounter but also which may involve different sets of circumstances that carry just as compelling existential concerns. Directed by Karen Azenberg, the production continues its run through Nov. 9 at the Simmons Pioneer Memorial Theatre.
Contra Baldwin, the character of Patrick Salomon (Robert Mammana) says at the beginning of the play, “What is history but a bunch of stuff people want you to get over already?” What unfolds over the three-hour stage drama, however, unequivocally affirms Baldwin’s assertions about history’s value.
Much of the play takes place in a Parisian apartment, where the Benhamous, a Sephardi-Ashkenazi Jewish family, live. Set in 2016, the triggering event for the drama occurs when the son Daniel (Japhet Balaban), who teaches math at a Jewish school, is the victim of an attack spurred by antisemitism. Marcelle, his mother (Judith Lightfoot Clarke), had repeatedly asked her son to wear a baseball cap to cover his kippah. His father, Charles (Alok Tewari) becomes so alarmed that he is resolved to relocate the family to Israel. The time context is important in the story because it coincides with the aftermath of several high-profile antisemitic attacks in France, including the 2015 shootings by Algerian-Muslim gunmen targeting employees of the Charlie Hebdo satire magazine, the murders of Jewish hostages at a Parisian kosher grocery store in the same year by a man who proclaimed his allegiance to ISIS (Islamic State), and suicide bombing attacks in Paris and the Saint-Denis suburb that left 130 dead.
The characters in Harmon’s play are fictional but their entire background story is not ahistorical in even the slightest bit. The characters emerged from the playwright’s extensive primary source research, including stories from his family history and interviews with French Jews that encompassed remembrances of the Holocaust days as well as contemporary sociopolitical experiences. France has Europe’s largest Jewish population, including many who escaped persecution in North Africa, so the fact the surge in antisemitic violence was so strong resulted in thousands of French Jews deciding to move to Israel.
directed by Karen Azenberg, Pioneer Theatre Company.
Photo Credit: BW Productions.
In the play, Charles is a refugee from Algeria who came to France during his childhood. His mother is descended from Holocaust survivors, who had family roots in France for many centuries. Intertwined with the events of 2016 is the story of the Salomon family, which is told in flashbacks — specifically from 1944 to 1946 just as France was finally about to be liberated by the Allies and stretching to the earliest days of the postwar era. We learn about the great-grandparents (Adolphe, played by Joel Leffert and Irma, played by Jayne Luke), grandfather (Lucien, played by Matthew McGloin) and Pierre (portrayed in his younger years by True Leavitt), the father of Marcelle and Patrick. Pierre, who represents the last generation of Salomons to run the family piano business, appears in an epiphany-making scene late in the play (played by Leffert).
What makes the play work – and which the actors extract with excellent results — is the robust near-constant serving of diatribes, featuring impassioned debate points delivered with fire and enough humor to keep it spicy and tantalizing enough for the audience’s attention. Prayer is just as good as last season’s Pioneer Theatre production of another grand family epic — The Lehman Trilogy.
Marcelle is frustrated that her son refuses to be intimidated by bigotry in deciding how he should display the symbols of his pride in his faith. No one minces their words in the rhetorical volleys that keep things moving in the play. When Marcelle tells Daniel that he was asking for it by walking in an area known for antisemitic bigotry, his sister, Elodie (Kim Taff) calls out her mother for blaming the victim. Elodie, who is two years older than Daniel, is depressed and appears to be in a rut with her life, but, no question, she has an opinion on every subject and her diatribes are among the longest sets of lines any character has in the play.
One of her favorite targets is Molly (Maggie Goble), a distant cousin from the U.S. who left the States after the election of Trump. At first, Molly makes for easy fodder when Elodie castigates her for knowing so little about Jewish history even as Molly is trying to put her own two cents in the discussion. Molly’s presence, however, in the play makes a good jumping-off point for the other characters to introduce the historical background that helps the audience comprehend and connect the family stories. Ironically, despite every request to dial back the volume on her diatribes, Elodie has sharp moments. She speaks one of the best lines that underpins the broader epiphany in the story, when she laments, “Everyone has become completely ahistorical.”
Political discussions add fuel to the fire. Charles, remembering why he and others had to escape Algeria in the Sixties, worries about the parallel in 2016, as the ultra nationalist Marine Le Pen and the National Rally (formerly the National Front) try to build their political muscle. Charles fears that the family might never be safe from the probability of an attack such as the one Daniel endured on the streets.
The play’s challenge to ahistorical sentiments sets up some of the finest moments in the performance. Patrick and Marcelle did not have the Jewish religion in their upbringing, thanks in part to the “gift” of a mother who was Catholic. Patrick’s added role as a narrator highlights questions that any family should never hesitate to explore. As he relates the details of the events on Valentine’s Day in 1349 when at least 2,000 Jews were burned to death in Strasbourg, he is playing a Johnny Mercer song on the piano and then asks rhetorically, “Do I descend from survivors of this massacre?”
That ambivalence about religious identity and questions about how our surroundings and experiences affect how we define our identity for the sake of making consequential decisions direct us to Harmon’s takeaway. At what costs should we forsake the place we and our ancestors have called home for centuries and centuries because of sociopolitical crises that we suddenly see as too dangerous to ignore.
One of the play’s many clarifying moments occurs during the Seder, when the door is opened for Elijah the prophet and Marcelle immediately closes it. Marcelle, a psychiatrist, suddenly remembers a real-life news story in 2017: the murder of Sarah Halimi, a retired Jewish doctor and teacher, who was killed by an intruder that threw her body from a third-story window in her home. Marcelle, who originally resisted Charles’s intention to leave France, has now come around to the idea.
The family debates resonate in parallels for those who have experienced and feared similar situations because of their race, sexual identity, ethnic background or their cultural and religious practices. The parallels are illuminated when Marcelle is frustrated that her son refuses to limit expressing his religious identity freely, which she believes should only be at home or when Patrick says that Judaism is too outmoded or irrelevant to matter. There are many families who inevitably have confronted the magnitude of the decision Charles Benhamou has placed before his loved ones, precisely because of fears that they will be targeted for harassment and violence simply because they are different.
The PTC production succeeds with honors in dealing with Harmon’s complex script and the penultimate value of remembrance. Baldwin closed his 1965 essay by writing, “We are urged to live and trust life,” and added a quote from Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors: “[I]t will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.” Indeed, those words befit Prayer.
For tickets and more information, see the Pioneer Theatre Company website.