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:

 

 

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.