Get the latest gossip
‘Prayer for the French Republic’ Review: A Three-Hour Lesson in Recent History That Never Takes Flight
This timely show presents pointed and direct arguments between Jewish characters who represent differing points of view on the nation of Israel.
Back in the near-present, though, the Benhamous’ departure seems so foreordained — and so relentlessly argued towards, with Molly and Patrick representing a sort of naïve and ungenerous unawareness and Daniel vacillating in a way that the story can’t make credible — that the tension seeps away. As the 2016 section staggers into 2017, Molly, far from home, mourns the inauguration of her new president and, more pertinently to the play’s story, the Benhamous fear the electoral success of right-wing leader Marine Le Pen, who reached the second round of voting in that year’s French presidential election before being wiped out by Emmanuel Macron. But the ways she is interesting — notably her committed anti-Muslim sentiment, extending France’s so-called “laïcité” tradition of secularism to a proposed ban on headscarfs in public, a potential counterpoint to Daniel’s being beaten for his own religious garb — lay beyond the reach of Harmon’s pen.
Or read this on Variety