NEW YORK—Is there anywhere in the world that’s truly safe? This is the question at the heart of Joshua Harmon’s drama “Prayer for the French Republic,” a tale that focuses on cultural identity and the reality of how the more things change, the more they stay the same. The play is now at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Off-Broadway City Center Stage I.
In 2016, Marcelle (Betsy Aidem) and Charles (Jeff Seymour) are a Jewish professional couple—he’s a doctor, she’s a psychiatrist—living in France with their grown son Daniel (Yair Ben-Dor) and daughter Elodie (Francis Benhamou). Neither Marcelle nor her brother Patrick (Richard Topol) were particularly religious as children. That changed for Marcelle when she married Charles, whose family arrived in France from Algeria when he was 4 years old.
