With Prayer for the French Republic, Joshua Harmon has written two plays.  The first is a comedy about the ways French and American, boomer and millennial Jews think and argue about Israel.  The second is a drama about an old Jewish couple in Paris repairing their lives and business after World War II.  In the first play, a secular American tourist visits her family in France, religious Jews who are considering emigrating to Israel in light of rising French antisemitism.  The family from the first play descends from the family in the second, but otherwise the connection is tenuous.  Why did Harmon compare the time after the war, rather than the time before, a period analogous to our own sense of impending doom?

The connection he proposes is their shared antisemitism.  A lethargic Anthony Edwards links these in a series of monologues about anti-Jewish violence throughout history, and he recites these while noodling on a piano.  (The family business is pianos, but that doesn’t carry the metaphorical weight you might expect.)  His tone is sneering and supercilious: a book that documents the butchering of Jews is “a great read” and a description of a beheading is followed by mock-concern: “Sorry, was that too much?”

The best parts of Prayer for the French Republic are the modern-day discussions about Israel, which do a good job of capturing the shades of various Zionist, anti-Zionist, and pro-Palestinian arguments many of us are having with our family and friends.  Harmon is quite efficient at keeping this dialogue fast and entertaining and funny, as he did in his earlier Bad Jews, and he never puts his thumb on the scale.  But with a runtime of over three hours, the diptych approach cannot be justified.  If he could save the story about the way we live now and extract the one about the way we lived then, he might have a play here.

Prayer for the French Republic runs through March 3rd at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. 254 W. 54th Street New York, NY. 3 hours 5 minutes. Two intermissions. Photograph by Jeremy Daniel.