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Can You Put Your Faith in Prayer for the French Republic?
It’s a timely and engaged play, but that engagement is glib.
Sweet and sincere — but not as much of a naïf as her Parisian relatives take her for — Molly has arrived for a school year abroad, a little embarrassed to be carrying A Moveable Feast in her suitcase but unable to disguise her American enthusiasm. Despite commitment from the actors — particularly Oreskes, who brings a subtle but vivid physical life and a fine sensitivity to the nearly blind Adolphe — Prayer ’s 1940s scenes have a soft-focus, by-the-numbers quality that doesn’t let us register their heartbreak at full force. Patrick is a kind of middle-aged Tom Wingfield: a dry, heart-sore skeptic who’s more muddled than he lets on, inviting us to an elegy for a beloved sister who seems to have access to a part of the spirit that’s been denied him, or that he’s cut himself off from.
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