An Uneven “Prayer for the French Republic” Comes to Broadway
5 / 10
Like any play transferring to Broadway from an Off Broadway success, this “Prayer” is a counterproposal to its earlier, smaller, and more intimate iteration. In some practical ways—for instance, the recasting of Patrick with Edwards, whose discomfort with his narrator duties hobbles the play from the start—the competition is weighted toward the Off Broadway version. That production, though, now feels like a relic from another time, before the recent Hamas attacks and the war in Gaza. The play’s ideas about the utility of fear sound particularly strange in this changed air. The production itself seems more tentative than it was before: Harmon has removed from the script a final recounting of several hate crimes that will occur after 2016, perhaps so that the audience will not think about other, more recent events. The room in 2022 where I first saw “Prayer” is lost now. The play was built for it, and sometimes you can’t go home.
