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Reviews

Broadway Musical Review—Kelli O’Hara in “Days of Wine and Roses”

Brian d'Arcy James and Kelli O'Hara in Days of Wine and Roses (photo: Joan Marcus)
 
 
Days of Wine and Roses 
Book by Craig Lucas; music and lyrics by Adam Guettel
Directed by Michael Greif; choreographed by Sergio Trujillo and Karla Puno Garcia
Performances through April 28, 2024
Studio 54, 254 West 54th Street, NYC
daysofwineandrosebroadway.com
 

 

 
Based on the 1962 Blake Edwards film starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick, the musical version of Days of Wines and Roses hews fairly closely to the script by JP Miller (itself based on Miller’s 1958 teleplay), exploring the relationship between go-getter ad exec Joe Clay and the boss’s attractive secretary Kirsten Arnesen, which begins when he charms her into having her first drink (she dislikes the taste of liquor but loves chocolate, so he orders her a Brandy Alexander—and she’s hooked). They are soon married, but Joe’s excessive drinking while keeping up appearances with his clients and superiors kills his work ethic and gets him fired.
 
Meanwhile, once Kirsten discovers a taste for liquor, she becomes an even worse alcoholic than Joe. He is able to clean up his act but can’t convince his wife to do so—she soon leaves Joe and their daughter Lila to sleep with strangers she picks up to fuel her drinking habit. It’s certainly not an original story, but Days of Wines and Roses works effectively, even touchingly, because Joe and Kirsten are an ordinary couple whose relationship is destroyed by addiction. 
 
While I doubt anyone was begging for a stage musical of Roses, it does have a quiet power. Craig Lucas’ book distills the essence of Joe and Kirsten’s descent into darkness in a series of fleet scenes, even if it lays on the water imagery too thickly, apparently to show that these lives are awash in liquid. Adam Guettel’s music (his lyrics are mostly commonplace, sadly) often excitingly adapts the musical idioms of the ’50s and ’60s setting, the jazzy and bluesy chromaticism underscoring the initial ecstasy and culminating agony of the couple’s long and winding journey.
 
Most tantalizing is how the song interludes are used. Aside from Lila briefly joining in near the end, only Joe and Kirsten sing, and only occasionally in a duet; it’s usually one or the other. It’s an interesting way to separate the couple from those around them, even close to them (like Kirsten’s skeptical elderly father or Joe’s frustrated Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor), underlining their walled-off world of pain and addiction. The subtly imaginative choreography by Sergio Trujillo and Karla Puno Garcia visualizes both their togetherness and separation.
 
Michael Greif’s exemplary staging keeps its focus on the couple even as it sketches the surrounding, and vibrant, New York milieu. (Miller’s teleplay and movie script were set in San Francisco.) Especially helpful in this regard are Ben Stanton’s illuminating lighting, Dede Ayite’s on-target costumes, Lizzie Clachan’s expressive sets and Kai Harada’s clever sound design. 
 
Of course, nothing would work without powerhouse performers at its center. Brian d’Arcy James’ natural charm, likability and stellar singing gain sympathy for Joe even when he’s selfishly sending his wife to her ruin. And, as Kirsten, Kelli O’Hara is again spectacular, another indelible portrait of a woman damaged by the man and the circumstances around her in a career filled with such characters. (See The Light in the Piazza, Far from Heaven and The Bridges of Madison County, for starters.) O’Hara’s exquisite vocals are nearly unmatched at harnessing pure emotion from a single note, and she and her scene partner together become a singular, memorable vision.

February '24 Digital Week I

In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week 
American Fiction 
(MGM)
Writer-director Cord Jefferson’s often savagely funny satire of how deeply racism is embedded in the American psyche, based on Percival Everett’s 2001 novel, Erasure, explores the many ramifications of frustrated author Thelonious “Monk” Ellison’s transparent attempt to write a banal novel that white publishers and audiences will lap up as “authentically Black”—and is disgusted when it becomes a major phenomenon. 
 
 
The film also tenderly chronicles Monk’s dysfunctional family, and these scenes, playing off the sardonic episodes, provide its heft. The magisterial acting comprises Jeffrey Wright’s towering portrayal of Ellison, Sterling K. Brown’s wounded brother Cliff and a fabulous female quartet: Tracee Ellis Ross (Monk’s sister Lisa), Issa Rae (successful author Sintara Golden), Erika Alexander (Monk’s love interest Coralie) and the ageless Leslie Uggams (the family matriarch Agnes).
 
 
 
Ennio 
(Film Forum/Music Box)
Ennio Morricone, the great Italian film composer, is the subject of Giuseppe Tornatore’s loving 2-1/2 hour glimpse at the incredible career of a musical artist who worked with many different directors—including Sergio Leone, Marco Bellocchio,  Bernardo Bertolucci, Roland Joffe and Tornatore himself, for whom Morricone composed the score of the international breakthrough, Cinema Paradiso—and in many different styles, from conservative to postmodern; it’s exhilarating to simply watch Morricone discuss his music so casually and so charmingly. 
 
 
Of course, Ennio is also crammed with paeans from adoring colleagues and admirers, including Bellocchio, Clint Eastwood, Oliver Stone, Pat Metheny, Hans Zimmer and even Bruce Springsteen.
 
 
 
My Sole Desire 
(Omnibus)
In director-cowriter Lucie Borleteau’s intriguingly off-kilter character study, Manon, a young woman, starts performing at a Parisian strip club under a new name: Aurora. While working there, she becomes very close to Mia, one of the place’s star attractions, and finds herself falling in love, confusing the issue for herself, Mia and Mia’s boyfriend. 
 
 
Borleateau paints a dramatically effective portrait of the grimy milieu in which these people interact, making it much more than a spectacle of the flesh—although it succeeds at that too. In the leads, both Louise Chevillotte (Manon/Aurora) and Zita Hanrot (Mia) given complexly layered performances. 
 
 
 
Perfect Days 
(Neon)
Nominated for best international film at this year’s Oscars, Wim Wenders’ sensitively directed feature follows Hirayama, a Tokyo public-bathroom cleaner, in his quotidian activities and daily interactions whether his usual routines or occurrences that shake him out of his comfort zone. 
 
 
It may seem prosaic, but Wenders has made one of his best and most persuasively understated character studies, centered by Kôji Yakusho’s exquisitely low-key portrayal of Hirayama, who has a slightly bemused look on his face no matter how absurd or offbeat things become.
 
 
 
The Taste of Things 
(IFC Films)
Culinary eroticism—a better euphemism than food porn—is at the heart of Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung’s film, set in 1885 at a rural French chateau, that explores the relationship of a wealthy epicure, Dodin, and his beloved cook for two decades, Eugénie. Hung—who won best director at last year’s Cannes Film Festival—and his expert cinematographer, Jonathan Ricquebourg, linger over Eugénie or Dodin making meals, ther camera roving about the kitchen trying to catch every detail…and the viewer can almost savor the aromas. 
 
 
As Eugénie and Dodin, Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel are beautifully restrained; they may not create conventional sparks but that doesn’t mean there’s a lack of chemistry. Rather, the joy in their lives comes from subtle moments like culinary creations and not overt emotion. The same could be said of the movie itself, whose subtext is largely “food is love,” which isn’t very illuminating. But a marvelous ending links past and present satisfyingly, as Eugénie finally gets the final word.
 
 
 
Blu-ray Release of the Week
A Creature Was Stirring 
(Well Go USA)
In this bizarre but surprisingly dull horror flick, Chrissy Metz (This Is Us) plays Faith, a nurse who keeps her daughter (named Charm, of course) uncomfortably numbed by methadone—soon they both find themselves battling, first, a few dumb intruders and, later, an lethal entity that is both figurative and literal. 
 
 
First-time feature director Damien LeVeck tries to make this into something quiet and subtle early on, but Shannon Wells’ flimsy script doesn’t help out, so the geysers of blood and monster appearances pop up at regular intervals to try and save face. The elaborate effects and creature design by master Tate Steinsiek help overcome the undercooked addiction theme. There’s an excellent hi-def transfer.
 
 
 
DVD Releases of the Week 
Magnum P.I.—Complete 5th Season
Magnum P.I.—Complete Series 
(CBS/Paramount)
The final season of this breezy reboot of another beloved TV series consists of 20 episodes that highlight the entertaining interplay of actors Jay Hernandez and Perdita Weeks, whose portrayals of the investigators (and couple) Thomas Magnum and Juliet Higgins make these familiar tales of crime-solving in visually stunning Hawaiian locales pleasurable. Extras on the five-disc set are deleted scenes. 
 
 
The complete series set, which comprises 24 discs holding all of the five seasons’ 96 episodes, includes more than two hours of special features, including on-set featurettes, a Hawaii Five-O crossover episode, deleted/extended scenes and gag reels.
 
 
 
CD Release of the Week
César Franck—Les Béatitudes
(Fuga Libera)
French composer César Franck (1822-90) is best known for his innovative Symphony in F Minor and a pair of lovely chamber works, the A-major Violin Sonata and F-minor Piano Quintet. But this remarkable oratorio (which took Franck a decade to write, between 1869 and 1879, and which he only heard in a reduced version before his death), nearly two hours and composed for a huge array of instrumental and vocal forces, might even eclipse those masterpieces as his greatest work. (And I say this as someone unfamiliar with it until now.) 
 
 
The sheer beauty and majesty of the music even surpasses what one would expect from such a thrilling religious vocal work, particularly in this monumental performance by the Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège, led by conductor Gergely Madaras, the Hungarian National Choir and a superlative group of eight vocal soloists

“Never Look Away: Serge Daney's Radical 1970s" at Lincoln Center

The Big Red One


From January 26th to February 4th, Film at Lincoln Center presented a series titled “Never Look Away: Serge Daney's Radical 1970s,” in conjunction with the publication of Footlights, the English translation of that critic’s 1983 collection of essays from Cahiers du Cinéma, La Rampe. (The retrospective was co-programmed by Madeline Whittle and the book’s translator, Nicholas Elliott.)

One of the greatest films screened was also the earliest to be made, Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men, which—as interestingly documented in Bernard Eisenschitz’s useful biography of the director—had a very complicated genesis and was a somewhat difficult production. Dave Kehr’s capsule review for the Chicago Reader provides a fine summary and an accurate assessment:

A masterpiece by Nicholas Ray—perhaps the most melancholy and reflective of his films (1952). This modern-dress western centers on Ray’s perennial themes of disaffection and self-destruction: Arthur Kennedy is a young rodeo rider, eager for quick fame and easy money; Robert Mitchum is his older friend, a veteran who’s been there and knows better. Working with the great cinematographer Lee Garmes, Ray creates an unstable atmosphere of dust and despair—trailer camps and broken-down ranches—that expresses the contradictory impulses of his characters: a lust for freedom balanced by a quest for security. With Susan Hayward, superb as Kennedy’s wife.

The Lusty Men was extravagantly praised by Jacques Rivette in his review in Cahiers du Cinéma to which critic Jonathan Rosenbaum alludes in his insightful comment that “One suspects that what Ray represented for many of the younger Cahiers critics was [ . . . ] a florid romantic imagination, dramatic intensity, and visual bravado that could make The Lusty Men evidence of an obsession for abstraction equal to [Robert] Bresson’s,” while Robin Wood had this to say about Susan Hayward’s performance: “Nicholas Ray's use of her in The Lusty Men is, on the contrary, fascinating in its perversity: her aggressiveness is allowed its full expression (including rage and physical violence) but exclusively in the interests of home and settling.” Several distinctive deep focus compositions highlight Ray’s debt—like that of several other major postwar Hollywood directors such as Paul Wendkos—to Orson Welles. It was projected in an excellent 35-millimeter print.

When Akira Kurosawa undertook to direct the Japanese-Soviet co-production Dersu Uzala, an adventure film from 1975—which, according to the Film at Lincoln Center program note, is about “an unexpected friendship [that] arises between a Russian military geographer and the Nanai hunter he has hired to guide his expedition across the Siberian taiga”—he had been removed in 1968 from the production of Tora! Tora! Tora! by 20th Century Fox and his independent—and first color—feature Dodes’ka-den (1970) had been a commercial failure. Photographed magnificently in 70-millimeter Sovcolor with abundant reliance upon the telephoto lens—and recorded in six-track stereophonic sound—Dersu Uzala eschews the intricate montage andmise en scèneof earlier Kurosawa films like Ikiru (1952) or High and Low (1963) for a simpler, more classical approach. The important critic, Noël Burch, defending a materialist, modernist aesthetic in his seminal 1979 book, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema, expressed a negative view in a footnote there—“Dersu Uzala is lovely literature . . . but can scarcely be said to bear any of the hallmarks of Kurosawa’s maturity”—but such hostility to commercial norms seems narrow in the wake of the revolution in sensibility represented byla politique des auteurs.It was also shown in a very good 35-millimeter print.

Film at Lincoln Center’s description of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, another release from 1975, includes this précis:

Among world cinema’s most infamous works, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final film transposes the Marquis de Sade’s seminal 1785 novel about the depravity and perversity of the French ruling class to Italy in 1944, one year before Mussolini’s death and the end of World War II. Divided into four sections (drawing inspiration from The Divine Comedy), Salò chronicles four wealthy brutes—referred to only as the Duke, the Magistrate, the Bishop, and the President—as they abduct a group of prostitutes, teenage boys, and their own daughters for a bacchanal that rapidly becomes a shocking and grotesque experiment with the limits of human cruelty (and pleasure).

About the film, in an interview with French television before its premiere, Pasolini stated: “I believe to give scandal is a duty, to be scandalized a pleasure, and to refuse to be scandalized is moralism.”

Salò has had many noteworthy admirers besides Daney, including critics Wood and Richard Roud and filmmakers Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Catherine Breillat, and Gaspar Noé. Roland Barthes famously objected in an appreciation of the film that it was an error to render Sade as real and fascism as unreal. Rosenbaum said about it: “It’s certainly the film in which Pasolini’s protest against the modern world finds its most extreme and anguished expression.” One of the most revealing comments on Salò is from the outstanding director, Michael Haneke, in an interview from the Paris Review, in response to a question about whether he had seen it:

Forty years ago, that was a key moment in my career as a viewer. Now Salò isn’t much like Funny Games at all. Funny Games is unbearable for its ­relentless cynicism — I don’t actually depict much physical violence. But in Salò, there are people tied up naked on dog leashes, they are force-fed bread stuffed with thumbtacks, blood runs from their mouths while their tormentors are boiling up shit in massive pots to be served up, eaten, and of course they all end up puking. It is unbearable, and Pasolini shows everything. After watching that film I was devastated and unresponsive for several days. Yet Salò was how I realized what you can do in cinema — what the true possibilities of the medium are. That, to me, is still the only film that has ­managed to show violence for what it is. All these “action movies” are merely spectacular. They make violence a consumable good. They may be scary, but they’re still a turn-on. Salò won’t turn you on at all — it will turn your stomach. Funny Games was meant as a counterpart to Salò, except that I tried to treat violence in a different way — in the context of a self-reflexive thriller that doesn’t depict physical violence but works through psychological cruelty alone.

One of the most unsettling films I have ever seen, after several viewings, Salò for mestill resists definitive evaluation.

Jean-Luc Godard’s Numeró deux was originally proposed as a remake of Breathless (1960) but any specific connection with the earlier work is not discernible. After Week-end in 1967, the director temporarily abandoned commercial filmmaking for a more guerrilla approach; in that period, he undertook only one more commercial project with stars—Tout va bien in 1972 with Yves Montand and Jane Fonda—before returning to the mode with an amazing series of movies beginning with Every Man for Himself in 1980. Numeró deux, one of Godard’s most radical works, is illuminatingly described here in a capsule by Rosenbaum written for the Chicago Reader:

Often juxtaposing or superimposing two or more video images within the same ‘Scope frame, Jean-Luc Godard’s remarkable (if seldom screened) 1975 feature — one of the most ambitious and innovative films in his career — literally deconstructs family, sexuality, work, and alienation before our very eyes. Our ears are given a workout as well; the punning commentary and dialogue, whose overlapping meanings can only be approximated in the subtitles, form part of one of his densest sound tracks. Significantly, the film never moves beyond the vantage point of one family’s apartment, and the only time the whole three-generation group (played by nonprofessionals) are brought together in one shot is when they’re watching an unseen television set. In many respects, this is a film about reverse angles and all that they imply; it forms one of Godard’s richest and most disturbing meditations on social reality. The only full ‘Scope images come in the prologue and epilogue, when Godard himself is seen at his video and audio controls.

Rosenbaum’s and Daney’s were not the only distinguished voices to have defended this film—others who have include Wood, Harun Farocki, Kehr, and J. Hoberman—but after several viewings over a few decades, I remain unsure of its significance, although I look forward to seeing it again someday.

The other masterwork under review here, Bresson’s astonishing youth film, The Devil, Probably—from 1977—is one of only two professional features by the director that has an original screenplay—the other is Au Hasard Balthazar from 1966. The two films are linked by their titles—the later one originates in a line of dialogue about who or what governs the world and it might be judged a correction of the earlier idea that it is chance that does this. Such suggestions explicitly thematize the director’s invitation to seek the clues that might account for the crucial actions undertaken by his characters—in The Devil, Probably,the key action in question is the suicide of the protagonist, Charles. (Bresson has with absolute consistency resisted facile explanations.) The director had dramatized this subject before in Mouchette (1967)—adapted from the novel by Georges Bernanos)—and Une femme douce (1969)—from a novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky—and with the emergence of this preoccupation one might discern a deepening pessimism in the director’s work which in The Devil, Probably takes the form of a jaundiced and maybe despairing view of radical politics, ecological destruction, drug addiction, progressive Christianity, and psychoanalysis. In more ways than one, then, inThe Devil, Probably,the director seems to be in dialogue with his earlier works. For example, the protagonist’s announcement of his own superiority recalls the similar claim of the main character, Michel, of Pickpocket (1959)—itself derived from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment—but in the earlier film, events conspire to disprove that proposition even as the character is redeemed; in the later film, by contrast, Charles’s statement is if anything affirmed even as his death scarcely seems to bear any redemptive connotation, unlike that of the titular figure of Bresson’s early masterpiece, Diary of a Country Priest (1950), adapted from the extraordinary novel by Bernanos.

The conclusions of Bresson’s next three films—A Man Escaped (1956), Pickpocket and The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962)—were also redemptive, but with Au Hasard Balthazar and Mouchette, the prospect of salvation seemed to recede as the endings became more ambiguous, even tragic. Bresson has been commonly interpreted as ideologically aligned with the austere, Jansenist strand of Catholicism, and in that almost Manichaean tradition, suicide is a mark of grace and saintliness since the rejection of this fallen, diabolical world is a holy act. However, with Bresson’s last five features—Une femme douce, another Dostoyevsky adaptation, Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), Lancelot du Lac (1974), The Devil, Probably, and L’Argent (1983), from a short story by Leo Tolstoy—the endings seem unremittingly bleak.

Bresson’s incomparable command of the possibilities of color in this film owes something to the cinematographer Pasqualino De Santis—the brother of the notable Italian director, Giuseppe De Santis—who is famous for his remarkable collaborations with Luchino Visconti. The Devil, Probably was presented in a beautiful 35-millimeter print.

Finally, one of the supreme filmmakers whose work was selected for the series was Samuel Fuller—his The Big Red One was screened in the 2004 reconstruction overseen by Richard Schickel. The late Positif critic Jean-Pierre Coursodon valuably discussed the movie—in his entry on the director from his indispensable book, American Directors—by way of comparison with the superlative Budd Boetticher:

Fuller's Arruza is The Big Red One, the autobiographical World War II saga that was his most cherished project since the fifties and that finally became a film in 1980. It is far from being the major disappointmentArruzaturned out to be, to be sure; it can even be described as one of Fuller's better war pictures. However, much of his war experience had gone into his earlier films—especially The Steel Helmet, Fixed Bayonets, and Merrill's Marauders—and The Big Red One strikes one more as a recapitulation of themes and scenes than as an entirely original work, although some familiar statements do come across more successfully than before. Thus, Fuller manages to convey the horror of the concentration camps through a method that is the exact opposite of the one used in Verboten! (i.e., showing as little as possible and relying on suggestion). The theme of childhood, too, is more convincingly integrated, as it becomes one of the film's leitmotifs (there is a child in almost every sequence). In The Big Red One, as in his other war films. Fuller is more interested in what takes place in between battles than in combat itself, yet some fighting scenes stand out—not as spectacle (Fuller eschews the spectacular, lyrical violence that most war films exploit and that culminated, a couple of years before his film, in [Sam] Peckinpah's Cross of Iron) but because they emphasize the plight of the individual soldier. Perhaps no other scene in the history of the genre conveys the terrifying vulnerability of the foot soldier in an attack with as much power and immediacy as the Normandy landing sequence. On the whole, however, the film does not add much to Fuller's body of war pictures; most of what he had to say in the genre he had said before.

Auteurist critics have objected that a narrative in which several characters seem to be in no physical danger on the battlefield is profoundly antithetical to Fuller’s vision of the world but others have replied that the perspective is justified because the subject of the film is survival. In a review in the Chicago Reader, Rosenbaum clarified that Fuller’s first cut of The Big Red One “was 260 minutes, his second two hours.” He added:

Schickel and producer Brian Jamieson recovered as much of Fuller’s footage as they could — some of the cut footage had been lost — and they had his script. Their 163-minute film isn’t so much a restoration of either of Fuller’s versions as a more thoughtful and nuanced reworking of the 113-minute release.

He went on to offer some background:

We also have his posthumously published autobiography, A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking(just out in paperback), which is an account of the real experiences that inspired the novel and script.

In that book Fuller wrote, “I was driven to turn my wartime experiences into a movie in order to convey the physical and mental upheaval of men at war. That’s how I ultimately came to grips with my experiences. Tactics, strategy, troop movements on maps were for military historians. My screenplay reduced the war to a small squad of First Division soldiers — a veteran sergeant and four young dogfaces — and their emotions in wartime. Each fictional character was an amalgam of real soldiers I’d known.”

And further:

Fuller’s stint in the Big Red One took him to North Africa, Sicily, England, France, Belgium, Germany, and Czechoslovakia, where he helped liberate a concentration camp in Falkenau and shot his first film footage, on a 16-millimeter camera. His experiences were too various, extreme, and traumatic to be contained in a single feature, particularly given that he wanted to move beyond his combat unit and include scenes with French and German characters, underlining the idea that all soldiers are in the same boat. In The Big Red One he was obsessed, as he was elsewhere, with the moment when a treaty is signed, when what was formerly deemed killing becomes murder — a reality he highlights in the black-and-white prologue devoted to the end of World War I as perceived by Lee Marvin’s character, known only as the Sergeant.

As a consequence, The Big Red One— despite all the framing devices and self-imposed conceptual limitations, such as the decision to omit basic training and flashbacks to home life — comes across a bit more as a compendium than as a single story. Adding to that impression are the bold stylistic shifts from realism to surrealism, from action to horror to lyricism to black comedy to allegory and back again.

About the reconstruction, he judiciously averred:

Schickel’s cut is incomparably better than the 1980 release, though it only reduces rather than eliminates the offscreen narration Fuller objected to. There are defensible reasons for keeping it, such as making the action easier to follow and identify with, but I can’t help wondering what conceptual aspects of the original it obscures.

After a few viewings, despite the enthusiasm of critics like Rosenbaum and Kehr, I still agree with Coursodon thatThe Big Red Oneprobably does not rank with the director’s greatest achievements—it seems to me less formally rigorous than most of Fuller’s films—but once again I remain open to reconsidering its true stature.

Broadway Play Review—Joshua Harmon’s “Prayer for the French Republic”

Prayer for the French Republic
Written by Joshua Harmon
Directed by David Cromer
Through March 3, 2024
Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47th Street, New York, NY
manhattantheatreclub.com
 
The cast of Prayer for the French Republic (photo: Jeremy Daniel)
 
Joshua Harmon’s earlier plays spotlighted his strengths and weaknesses. The bluntly titled Bad Jews alternated between hilariously devastating takedowns and being strident and redundant, with characters that exist merely to show off his cleverness. He followed that with Significant Other, a dark comedy also crammed with riotously funny dialogue alongside crass and snide moments, that at least carried an emotional weight that the sour Bad Jews lacked.  
 
Harmon’s new play, Prayer for the French Republic, is both more ambitious than and an extension of these works. At his best, Harmon chronicles relationships in constant flux, usually through amusing conversations that lay bare their fraying bonds. In Prayer, the Salomon family precariously lives through two eras of intense anti-Semitism in France: the years 1944-46 and 2016-17. 
 
The family’s patriarch and matriarch, Adolphe and Irma, fearfully live in their Parisian flat during World War II.  Their daughter Jacqueline and her family fled to Cuba before the war began. But both sons, Robert and Lucien, and their families were arrested and taken away to a concentration camp. Only Lucien has returned, his teenage son Pierre in tow. The older couple, with Adolphe the proud proprietor of the family’s long-running piano store, starts rebuilding their shattered postwar lives as Lucien and Pierre try to come to terms with what they lived through.
 
Seven decades later, Pierre’s children, son Patrick and daughter Marcelle, have their own families in Paris. Patrick—the play’s cynical narrator—is at arm’s length from his sister, her husband Charles, and adult children, son Daniel and daughter Elodie. Molly, a distant American cousin from New York, arrives to stay awhile (she’s attending college a couple hours away and spends every weekend at their apartment), and her appearance coincides with ominous occurrences like when Daniel is attacked while simply walking on the street. A bemused Marcelle can't believe he won’t wear a baseball cap over his yarmulke so passersby won’t notice he’s Jewish, while Charles—a Sephardic Jew from Algeria—is starting to think the family should move to the Holy Land because it’s too dangerous in supposedly civilized France.
 
Charles lays bare his feelings to his wife in the play’s most emotionally powerful monologue:
 
I’m scared, Marcelle. You lay everything out, you lay it out so rationally, and I hear every word you’re saying, but I’m scared. We are Jews. We are Jews. The only reason we're still on this planet is because we learned to get out of dangerous situations before they got the better of us. Something is happening in the world, and it’s happening in our country, too—I can feel it. I feel it when I walk with Daniel, I feel it when I read the left-wing editorials, I feel it watching Le Pen and her base, all stirred up. Something is happening, and when that thing comes, I don’t want to have to pray so my own country will protect me from it.
 
For more than three hours, Harmon juxtaposes scenes of the Salomons 70 years apart, and although some are wry or incisive, the overall arc of the play remains shapeless, with no dramatic climax or revelation. The closest Harmon comes is the late arrival of the elderly Pierre, who is told his beloved daughter’s family is leaving France for good, but the scene is sadly more perfunctory than profound, as is the final image of several generations of the Salomons gathered around the piano at center stage to sing the French national anthem.
 
Sprinkled throughout are clumsy, clunky passages that feel like outtakes from his earlier plays. When the cousins begin falling for each other, Daniel flirts with Molly: “You want me to take my shirt off and play some Bob Dylan?” Later, after Molly tells him how sexy it is that she has a French boyfriend in Paris, we actually get such a scene, as a shirtless Daniel strums his guitar and sings “Forever Young” to her as if we’ve suddenly been dropped into a rom-com.
 
The ’40s scenes cover familiar ground for anyone who’s seen movies, plays or TV series about the Holocaust, but the scenes set in our racist present are more compelling, if only because the friction between the curt Patrick and accomplished Marcelle underlines this dramatization of assimilated Jews realizing that all that’s been accomplished since Hitler’s defeat and the creation of Israel is starting to be erased by the casual antisemitism and hatred that has surged as autocrats (and would-be dictators) have risen to power.
 
David Cromer’s direction adroitly smooths over the ragged edges of Harmon’s less than felicitous writing; Takeshi Kata’s evocative set, Amith Chandrashaker’s astute lighting, Sarah Laux’s spot-on costumes and Daniel Kluger’s excellent music and sound design give the play all the trappings of a masterpiece without actually being one.
 
The acting is, with one exception, superb, led by Betsy Aidem’s magisterial Marcelle, Nancy Robinette’s devastatingly wounded Irma, Richard Masur’s quietly shattering cameo as the old Pierre and Francis Benhamou’s sardonic Elodie—the latter even excelling in a hamfisted bar scene where Elodie destroys Molly’s oblivious liberal jargon about supporting Israel. Benhamou makes the clichés her character spouts sound truly organic, a real accomplishment.
 
Only an uncomfortable Anthony Edwards as our guide Patrick (a showy role that’s not particularly illuminating) falls short. In that he’s similar to Harmon himself, who aims high but often misses. 

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