Almost a year ago, in March of 2023, I confessed that I am sometimes in the mood for the theatrical equivalent of a hot fudge sundae, and I proceeded to write about two ethereally entertaining Broadway musicals to illustrate my point. At other times, however, I hunger for theatrical red meat, and when I happen to be served a prime cut, I will ravenously devour it no matter how raw it is. In a recent excursion to New York I stumbled onto two stunning productions of two brilliant plays. I’m still replaying moments from both of them in my head, and I’m still awed by how utterly satisfying they were. Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic dazzled with its intellectual depth even as it managed to break our hearts. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate delivered one emotional jolt after another as it blew our minds.
I have been impressed with Joshua Harmon for many years now, but with Prayer for the French Republic he has made a gargantuan leap in his artistic ambition. I first encountered him in two solid productions in Washington, D.C., Bad Jews and, a few years later, Admission. But those two plays were in the A.R Gurney or Wendy Wasserstein school of mild satire with small casts and easily recognizable targets. With Prayer for the French Republic he has stepped up to the George Bernard Shaw/Tom Stoppard level of taking on great big societal problems and exploring them on an epic level. The cast of eleven certainly doesn’t sound epic, but these superb actors swiftly got the audience grappling with international anti-Semitism, American provincialism, the Holocaust, the purpose of the State of Israel, the value or lack thereof of religious faith, and contemporary French and American politics. If that sounds too heavy or tendentious, rest assured that Harmon is still able to summon plenty of laughs. And also occasional tears. Two branches of the same family, the Salomons and the Benhamous, become as familiar to us as members of our own families, with all their quirks and irritations and prejudices and aspirations, and by the end we have toggled back and forth with them from the mid-1940’s to the mid 2010’s in their struggles to survive not merely as Jews, but as proud French Jews. Anthony Edwards may have been cast for his box office appeal lingering from his Top Gun and ER days, but my favorite actor was Nancy Robinette, who plays a grandmother bravely hoping that some of her children will come home from the concentration camp. The play ran over three hours with two intermissions, and, honestly, I would have gladly sat through three more hours with these people. In addition to Robinette and Edwards, the pitch-perfect cast included Betsy Aidem, Nael Nacer, Francis Benhamou, Aria Shahghasemi, Molly Ranson, Richard Masur, Daniel Oreskes, Ari Brand, and Ethan Haberfield. David Cromer was the visionary, deft director.
As with Joshua Harmon, I first saw the work of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins in Washington, where his An Octoroon sliced and diced Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon, a 19th-Century melodrama that became the launching pad for Jacobs-Jenkins’s hilarious and unsettling examination of legacy racism. And again as with Harmon, when I saw his latest, Appropriate, in New York, I admired how much farther his vision had extended. If Joshua Harmon is joining the company of Shaw and Stoppard, Jacobs-Jenkins is nodding to Sam Shepard, David Lindsay-Abaire, John Guare, and Caryl Churchill as he proceeds to become entirely and impressively himself. We start this play in familiar territory: a Southern family arguing over what to do with the decaying plantation house occupied until recently by their late father. We think that we’ve been here before with Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire and Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes. But now I invite you, dear reader, to consider the main character of that latter play, Regina Giddens (played by Bette Davis in the movie version), who cold-bloodedly allows her husband Horace to die of a heart attack right in front of her because she doesn’t want him to change his will. Please don’t stop there. Revisit the most vicious female characters you have ever seen onstage, starting with Medea and stretching through Edward Albee’s Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. I can assure you that in Appropriate the character of Toni Lafayette, played by Sarah Paulson with deservedly acclaimed ferocity, makes Goneril and Regan seem like Maria von Trapp. Oh. My. God. Not since the Compsons in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury has a family been more dysfunctional (to put it mildly), but miraculously Jacobs-Jenkins manages to keep us laughing (sometimes in astonishment at how awful people can be to each other) between, and often during, occasions when we have to digest a new jaw-dropping revelation.
To avoid spoilers I don’t want to say too much about the plot except to note that Jacobs-Jenkins introduces quite early the presence of a large, unmarked slave cemetery in the woods near the house and then brings onstage a photo album devoted to images of African-American victims of lynching. Toni, her brothers Bo (Corey Stoll) and Frank (Michael Esper), her son Rhys (Graham Campbell), her sister-in-law Rachael (Natalie Gold), her niece Cassidy (Alyssa Emily Marvin), her nephew Ainsley (Lincoln Cohen on the night I saw it), and Frank’s girlfriend River (nicely played by Elle Fanning in her Broadway debut), all find themselves changed by their contact with this album. Bravo to all in the cast and to dots (sic), for the astonishing set design. The director who pulled off this coup is Lila Neugebauer. Ms. Neugebauer, I will follow you anywhere.