She’d never played a Jewish character before. Then, a hit play about antisemitism came along.
Francis Benhamou. Courtesy of BBBroadway
Until she was cast in Prayer for the French Republic, Joshua Harmon’s play about five generations of a Jewish family in France, Francis Benhamou had never played a Jew. Though she is very much a Jew — her mother’s side of the family is Ashkenazi, her father’s Sephardic — she had usually been cast as Arab characters.
“I’m a Jew who never played a Jew,” Benhamou said. “It’s my first time.”
Now the play, which won acclaim off-Broadway in 2022 for its depiction of a family contending with the rising tide of antisemitism, is opening on Broadway. And Benhamou is coming along with it.
“When I first read the play there were so many things about it that hit so close to home for me,” Benhamou told me. “I am an actor who has played a variety of different characters and ethnicities and ages, and I never got to play a role like this. My mom’s side of the family are Ashkenazi, Polish and Russian, and my father’s side is North African Moroccan Sephardic. And the character I play, Elodie, has exactly that background. My mother in the play is a therapist, and my mother in my life is actually a therapist. The name of the family in the play is Benhamou, and I am a Benhamou. And I didn’t know the writer, so these things are all just weird coincidences.”
The title of the play, which won the 2022 Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards for best new off-Broadway play as well as Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel awards for Benhamou, comes from a prayer that has been said in French synagogues for more than 200 years.
A focus of the play is the mid-2010s, when a troubling increase in French antisemitism led a good number of that country’s roughly 500,000 Jews — the third largest population in the world, after Israel and the United States — to leave, and many others to consider doing so. The three-hour play is set from 1944 to 1946 and in 2016 and 2017. The family must face two key questions: “Are we safe?” and “Should we leave?”
Benhamou was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, grew up in Miami, and graduated from NYU. She said she herself has been fortunate not to have experienced antisemitism. “Most people don’t even know I’m Jewish,” she said.
In Miami, she went to “a school with a lot of Jews,” she said. And people “couldn’t make out where I was from, what my background was.”
Her family, however, did not have the same experience — something she says she found out in part because of the play.
“My mother always stayed away from religion,” she said. “The traditions were passed down from my grandmama. My mother had me very young, so my grandma was a big part of our lives. We had Shabbat dinners at her house, Passover dinners, all those things, at my grandma’s house. My mother tended to stay away from all of that. She was more like a hippie, more secular. She didn’t want to engage in that way. But when I started doing this play — because every time I play a character I want to go really deep into the background, I study it in depth — this made me start asking questions of my mother. And I found out things I never knew.”
While she was researching the role, Benhamou asked her mother if she had experienced antisemitism growing up in Uruguay. “Yeah, a lot,” her mother told her, adding, “I don’t know why I didn’t talk about it.”
“And that kind of opened up a whole new world of conversations with her. This whole play has. It’s been affecting my family in this amazing way of looking back,” Benhamou told me.
And Benhamou’s grandmother? “I wish my grandma was still alive so I could ask her all these questions. I do remember asking her something.”
Her grandmother “left Poland when she was 7 years old,” Benhamou said. “It was right before the war, for economic reasons. Her family was looking for opportunities. Thankfully. When I started asking her things about her family — I remember this clearly — I was pretty young, 12 or 13. And my grandma would do this thing — she was very open and warm, but when she didn’t want to talk about something she just ignored you. She pretended she couldn’t hear you. So I knew it was an area I couldn’t really go into, and I realized there was so much trauma there. That she really wasn’t ready or wanted to talk about.”
With Oct. 7, and the Israel-Hamas War, and the huge increase in antisemitism in the United States and Europe, the play is likely to engender even stronger reactions from audiences than it did in its off-Broadway run. But Benhamou said that however important and challenging current events may be, certain things remain unchanged.
“The play takes place in 2016,” she said. “Even though the climate is different now, it doesn’t really change the play itself. It was written before Oct. 7, and we’re just staying true to that. To me, that’s the important thing. When you’re doing a piece of work that takes place in a certain time, what happens afterward is irrelevant to the play. Obviously, it’s going to hit differently. But that’s not something I concern myself with as an actor. I can only do justice to what my character is experiencing in that time.”
Which is in a sense also what her own family experienced years ago. “We were lucky enough that everybody left before things got bad. Which is a big part of the question for the Benhamous in the play. When is it time to leave? Should we leave? The family in the 1940s asks that question and they don’t leave. In 2016 that’s the open question. Is it time to leave again?”
The play, though, is not just about antisemitism, she said. “There are so many dynamics between family members. It’s about love. It’s about relationships. It’s about everyday life and humanity.”
Her wish, she said, is for audiences to leave the theater “with a perspective that they hadn’t thought of. That it opens up their awareness.”
“That they leave with hope.”
The play A Prayer for the French Republic is currently playing at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.
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