A Night at the Theater

“Is this the only story we have?”

As the lights came up at the end of Act One, Olive and I looked at each other.

“I have some problems with this play,” I said.

“Yeah,” Olive said. “So many problems.”

If I hadn’t paid $200 each for front row center mezzanine seats I would have suggested leaving right then. I was crushed. The New York Times had given this one a rave: “Thought-provoking, heart-wrenching and wickedly funny.”

Based on the advertisements I saw, I’d imagined that this play would be something like Leopoldstadt, our last mom/kid theatrical evening together a year earlier. Tom Stoppard’s play told the story of a Jewish family in Vienna, following them through decades, from prosperity to persecution. War and genocide, loss and diaspora. This narrative echoed that of my own family in so many ways; it felt intimate and biting. These were our people.

Instead we were not at all liking Prayer for the French Republic.

“For one thing,” I whispered to O, “this family doesn’t seem French at all.” We whispered, because this is a fraught moment to be Jewish anywhere, even in this mostly Jewish audience. Maybe especially so, since we appeared to be outliers. Everyone else was clapping with gusto.

But for me, everything on stage felt so wrong. The play mostly took place in the recent past, not in the wartime era of the advertisement and the playwright had chosen to have the French Salomon family dress, argue, and crack wise like New Yorkers. They ate croissants for breakfast, but they might as well have been eating bagels and lox from Zabar’s or Russ & Daughters. Only the two tall windows on the left side of the stage—through which we heard the distinctive two-tone wail of a French police siren—kept me geolocated in Paris.

During Act One people all around us had laughed heartily, even clapped between scenes. I’ve laughed at plenty of jokes about neurotic Jews and I can own the dark humor of my inherited generational trauma. But to my ear, the comedy here felt predictable and flat. Jokes aside, the real issue was the tone-deaf politics.

“Maybe it will get better,” Olive said as we stood up to stretch our legs.

“Maybe, I replied. “Well, let’s go pee. There might be a line.”

I doubted we would like Act Two and Three any better. We resettled in our excellent seats, and I promised my heart to keep my mind open. Also, if we left after Act One, I wouldn’t feel entitled to fully hate on this play.

Spoiler alert: brief plot summary and commentary for Prayer for the French Republic below.

Patrick Salomon steps out under a spotlight. Patrick is such an Irish name, so right away I was confused. Also, I always worry when a narrator appears.

Olive remarked, “Shakespeare pulled it off, but…he was a genius.”

Shakespeare was a genius. Here, however, as in many a movie with voiceover, a narrator signals editing problems.

Back to Patrick under a spotlight. It’s Paris, 2016. Anti-Semitism is on the rise in France and everywhere. One year earlier, two Muslim extremists broke into the Paris offices of a satirical magazine called Charlie-Hebdo, killing employees. During this time of high anxiety, Patrick introduces the audience to his sister Marcelle, her husband Charles, their two grown children and the rest of his family, who have lived in France for generations. They love France. It has been their refuge. The Salomons have owned a piano business for several hundred years, no longer flourishing, but Pierre, Patrick and Marcelle’s father, won’t think of closing the business. A glossy Salomon baby grand sits center stage in the living room—talk about a heavy metaphor of multi-generational burden.

Marcelle (the only family member of the family with any sense of Parisian sartorial style) and Charles welcome Molly, a distant American cousin who is studying in France for a year. Their daughter Elodie is in her twenties, but she schlumps around the house in pajamas, venting her hostility like a fifteen-year-old. We learn that she has been diagnosed as manic depressive, which would explain why she is so miserable and still living at home. But then Daniel, their twenty-something son, also returns home—bloodied from a beating on the street.

Okay, okay, I thought. In Europe kids often stay home longer because it’s hard to find an apartment as nice as the one Marcelle and Charles have, in some central arrondissement, with sunlight streaming through lovely tall windows.

Daniel has recently become more religious and wears a kippah outside. His mother begs him to wear a baseball cap over his kippah, to protect himself from anti-Semitic attacks. After all, Marine Le Pen’s rightwing Freedom Front is having a moment. But Charles, whose family came to France from Algeria and is more observant, protests. If Daniel wants to wear a kippah, he should feel free to do that anywhere he goes. They are safe in France!

French men I’ve known—Jewish or otherwise—would rather die by guillotine than wear a baseball cap. This was still the case when I last visited Paris in 2018.

The family argues about Daniel’s kippah, and Marcelle, a psychotherapist, becomes hysterical. Mon Dieu, I sighed, quelle stereotypical profession for a neurotic Jewish mom. I winced at the cliché; the audience laughed.

The family sits down for Shabbat dinner, Marcelle lights the candles. Molly is uncomfortable around observance since her family is secular. They argue about the election of Trump and what it means and which country is speeding faster on the highway to hell. Molly expresses her opposition to the policies of Israel’s regime, the settlements, the way Palestinians are treated. More arguing. After dinner Daniel and Molly argue some more in the now darkened living room, then make peace, then lean towards each other to kiss, but are interrupted by Charles. Shouldn’t they have argued at least into Act Two? Maybe build some romantic tension—like Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice? Even the romantic subplot was a fail.

Seated with Molly in a trendily grungy café, Elodie delivers a long rant about anti-Semitism in Europe and how Americans, especially secular Jews like Molly, just don’t get it. Poor Molly can’t get a word in edgewise. Are we supposed to laugh at Elodie’s diatribe? How are we supposed to feel about Molly whose voice as a non-observant American Jew is now silenced, as if she doesn’t deserve the opinions she expressed so forcefully during dinner in Act One? I wasn’t quite sure how to feel, except that I was getting antsy. Good scene writing 101: get in late, get out early.

Fast forward. After a few more incidents in Paris, Charles decides that Paris is no longer safe for Jews and he wants to move—to Israel. Marcelle wants to stay, so there is more arguing. Will Charles persuade Marcelle or leave her behind? And now that Daniel and American Molly are an official couple, will he stay with her or move with his parents? Whatever plot tension remained hung on these slim plot threads and unfortunately, I’d already correctly predicted the ending.

Even in 2016, the wisdom of Daniel’s decision was debatable. For an audience in 2024, well, no.

I was shocked by Hamas’s brutal and unjustifiable acts of murder, assault, rape, and kidnapping on October 7, 2023 and I am just as shocked by the brutal and unjustifiable murder of Palestinian civilians and destruction of Gaza since then. It is possible to identify as a Jew, be opposed to Zionism and the politics of Israel’s current rightwing regime, and not be anti-Semitic. Much has been written on this topic by intelligent journalists.

This play presented a stark either/or, a lack of nuance. This play was feeling a lot like Zionist talking points. As such, it clearly worked on this audience. At the second intermission, a young man seated next to Olive tried to connect. “Heavy stuff,” he said, by way of an opener. Olive nodded and then poked me, our private Morse code. Time for another pee break.

The story shifts back and forth in time from the Salomon’s quandary in 2016 to the previous generation during and just after the war. The scenes in the past were moving but there were too few of them. By now, the 2016 Salomons just pissed me off.

In the end, Charles, Marcelle, Daniel, and Elodie pull their wheelie luggage off stage, leave France, and the loyal French family of the past gathers around the Salomon piano to sing “La Marseillaise.” Recalling the famous scene in Casablanca, I wondered if the audience was going to stand up and join in.

And cut to black.

The actors came out for bows, the audience clapped and cheered as Olive and I looked at each other with relief. It was over.

As we gathered our coats and bags, I whispered to Olive, “I hope the family didn’t give up that nice apartment in Paris, because they all might want to come back in a year—or less.”

“I know, right?” Olive said. “Such a nice apartment!”

The audience filed out. This is when I noticed a French family making their way down the stairs. They were speaking quietly among themselves. I wondered if they also objected to the American-ness of the supposedly French family on stage.

On the street, we walked to the subway.

Olive said, “The woman next to me was crying at the end. Is this the only story we have?”

We talked more about the overt slant of the play, amazed that such complex political history had been so whitewashed. Anti-Semitism led to the destruction of European Jewry, Western colonialism to the creation of a European ally in the Mideast. Palestinians have had nothing. I am a Jewish person whose family suffered during the Nazi era (and I have written about that in my memoir Eva and Eve), but I don’t want to be part of this story.

We talked about the upcoming presidential election. I hoped that young people would vote, at least to protect their reproductive rights. Olive wasn’t so sure that this would be enough. Biden had made serious mistakes in his handling of the Mideast war, enough to turn away many young voters. Would they stay home? Olive said it was possible that Trump could win. France had at least temporarily pushed back against right-wing Marine Le Pen but we might not succeed here.

“At worst it will be four terrible years,” Olive said. “Democrats are always so terrified. MAGA types aren’t terrified. They’re just angry.”

“Except maybe now they’re scared of Taylor Swift and her bazillions of voting-age fans.”

“We will survive,” Olive said.

For this I was grateful, that a young person could look at the mess we’re in and have confidence in the future. Olive’s cautious optimism about the fate of the American Republic was worth the price of admission.

For a brief chronology of the events in the Middle East since 1920 and especially the events of 1948, see Emily Bazelon’s conversation with several historians of Palestinian and Jewish history in the New York Times Magazine, Feb 4, 2024 edition. I can also recommend Elizabeth Asbrink’s book 1947 for an overview of politics and culture in the post-war world. For an incisive read about the origins of the “America First” movement, I recommend Sarah Churchwell’s Behold America: A History of America First and The American Dream.

Thank you for reading and as with all posts here, I’d love to hear from you! More to follow each Friday. I hope you’ll subscribe and share with other readers. You can find out more about my memoirs Perfection and Eva and Eve here and purchase here. I work privately with writers on creative non-fiction projects. If you are interested, you can contact me through my website: juliemetz.com. A first consultation is free of charge.

---

Thank you for reading and as with all posts here, I’d love to hear how you like this one. More to follow each Friday. Hope you’ll subscribe and share with other readers.