GableStage: “Prayer for the French Republic”

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At GableStage, Present, Past Seamlessly Collide In Riveting ‘Prayer’

By Michelle F. Solomon

ArtburstMiami

In 2014, artistic director Joseph Adler staged “Bad Jews” — Joshua Harmon’s 2012 Off- Broadway hit — at GableStage. The dark comedy was a four-character play rife with family tensions, judgment, and competing ideas of faith. The cast and its director delivered what was a hallmark of GableStage: an intimate, actor-focused, and sharply directed piece that had audiences thinking as much as feeling family dynamics and
what it meant to be a young Jew in the modern world.

More than a decade later, GableStage’s artistic director Bari Newport returns to Harmon with “Prayer for the French Republic,” which was written a decade after “Bad Jews.” While that play confined its drama to a single apartment and a handful of family members, “Prayer” casts a wider net, wrestling with identity, faith, and the weight of memory on a much larger scale.

Newport’s skillful direction drives the more than 3½-hour play (including two intermissions), making every minute count. Time breezes by — these are people you want to get to know. Newport’s shaping of characters, set in two different time periods, and pacing allows for the broader historical stakes to resonate, yet never sacrifices Harmon’s gift for storytelling. By the final bows, there’s an understanding that this is a
story that deserves to be seen at this moment.

“Prayer for the French Republic” follows a French Jewish family in two separate time periods: 2016–2017 and 1944–1946. Although in different eras, they both question their belonging and how far they must go to protect themselves and their families.

For the present-day Benhamou family, three days that shook France are still fresh on their minds. Ripped from real news headlines, on Jan. 7, 2015, two brothers stormed the offices of the French satirical weekly “Charlie Hebdo” and killed 12 people; a day later, four people were killed and taken as hostages at a kosher supermarket — all in all, 17 people died in three days of attacks.

The Benhamous are also dealing with anti-Semitic acts close to home. Daniel (Jeremy Sevelovitz), a teacher at a Jewish school, is attacked on the streets of Paris for wearing a yarmulke. His mother, Marcelle (Elizabeth Price), says he has a target on his back for his public display and begs him to wear a baseball cap in public if he wants to cover his head.

His father, Charles (Stephen Trovillion), wants to take things further. The family should move out of Paris to a place where Daniel would not have to worry about persecution. All of the violence is forcing a moment of reckoning: Is France still home, or has it become too dangerous to stay?

Interwoven with this contemporary struggle are flashbacks to the 1940s, where Daniel’s great-grandparents, Adolphe (Bruce Sabath) and Irma (Patti Gardner) Salomon, are facing life in Nazi-occupied France. When their son, Lucien (Jason Peck), and grandson, Pierre (Holden Peck), return after the liberation of Nazi camps, Irma wants to know where they were and what happened. She and Adolphe stayed in their Paris apartment during the occupation while they awaited word of their missing children and grandchildren.

As Irma, who painfully waits for news of the fate of her family, Gardner embodies the agony — her performance is a quiet, simmering slow burn that shows both despair an hope. When Lucien shows up, she wants to know it all, every detail, but he doesn’t want to talk about it. Gardner’s Irma explodes: “. . . for two years at this table, losing my mind, never knowing where the children were, how they were, what was happening.”

Guiding the action, Harmon has created a narrator. Michael McKenzie plays Patrick Salamon, narrator and brother of Marcelle, and McKenzie is a standout, capturing both cynicism and wit. He also steps into the present-day scenes to interact with the family, a tricky device that he and the director make feel completely natural.

Using the fish-out-of-water, American-in-Paris device, in the first act we meet Molly (Casey Sacco), a distant cousin of Marcelle (Elizabeth Price), who is in France for a year of school. Marcelle is the modern-day matriarch, a psychiatrist-turned-professor running a university department. After growing up in a non-traditional Jewish household (her father was Jewish, her mother was Catholic), Marcelle married Charles and
converted to Judaism. Patrick calls B.S. on her Jewish devotion. And Daniel’s yarmulke is maybe a bit of B.S., too, the product of devotion to a girl who is now an ex.

The most outspoken of the family is Elodie, and perfectly cast in the role is Irina Kaplan as the fiercely assertive sister who has no fear of speaking her mind. Kaplan has commanding, comical moments throughout the play but shines in one of the play’s most memorable. In Act II, in a “not-even-room-for-a-breath” monologue, she covers topics from European Jewish suffering, to the United States’ new president, to 9/11, and on and on, testing the limits of patience for the person on the receiving end, Molly, and for the audience. Who hasn’t sat in a bar and listened to an Elodie?

As matriarch Marcelle, Price has played similar high-emotion, authoritative figures in other local productions. Here, she begins with such intensity that it seems daunting for the character to climb even higher emotionally over the course of the multi-hour production. She does, however, find space in more emotionally nuanced moments that show depth beyond the initial fire.

Don Bearden, who shows up later in the play as the now-elderly Pierre, is the perfect congenial host, sort of taking over for narrator Patrick. Bearden, the patriarchal Salomon, who still runs the family’s piano business at eighty-something years old, sits at the piano. He’s the one who, even at his advanced age, still has questions that haunt all of the generations. Pierre says to grandson Daniel: “You’re a thinking person, why do they hate us?” And there isn’t one answer — Daniel says maybe it’s because “we don’t want to be like them,” while Elodie surmises that “they hate us because they cannot understand how we are still here.”

As Harmon play progresses, present day and past are constantly moving in and out of the same Paris apartment. The past and present seamlessly shift, as do projections and lighting, guided with clarity and care, acting as mirrors of memory and reality.

Frank J. Oliva’s set — the sprawling pre-war Paris apartment — and Marina Pareja’s costumes quietly do essential work, creating distinct worlds for the 1940s and present-day while keeping both eras lived-in and immediate. Prop designer Jennifer Wake adds visual authenticity with vintage items that feel truly treasured across generations. Together, the design elements make the apartment itself a character, holding the memories of both past and present. Jessica Winward’s lighting helps define the different periods — with sepia tones creeping into the past and brighter colors for modern day. Sean McGinley’s sound design ties it all together with atmospheric cues that bridge the eras as do Jamie Godwin’s colorfully gorgeous projection designs.

The play is written in English, though Harmon has the characters refer to themselves in the script as speaking in French. Between the lines it seems that Harmon is making a commentary on language– that it, too, is a kind of disguise, another layer in how identity is concealed.

The title “Prayer for the French Republic” comes from a real piece of history: French Jews once had to sign documents declaring their loyalty to the Republic. But as the Benhamou family leaves to head to another country, they don’t feel the need to be loyal anymore.

What makes this play even more “of the moment” is how the family’s questions about belonging feel universal. The uncertainty, the fear of not being safe, the feeling of not fitting in — these are experiences many people, including those in the United States, are right now grappling with. This powerful production leaves a lingering sense that belonging and safety are not bound by time or place.

WHAT: “Prayer for the French Republic” by Joshua Harmon
WHERE: GableStage in the Biltmore Hotel, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables
WHEN: 7 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. 2 p.m. Wednesday and Sunday. 1 p.m., Saturday. Through Sunday, April 19.
COST: $65 and $75 including fees.
INFORMATION: 305-445-1119 or gablestage.org

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