An Uneven “Prayer for the French Republic” Comes to Broadway

Harmon’s other major plays have been sour-sweet domestic comedies: “Significant Other” joked about loneliness within friend groups; “Bad Jews” got its many laughs from intrafamilial hostility. “Prayer,” which was first produced Off Broadway, in 2022, incorporates that wry perspective on kinship into a political drama, in the sense that Harmon considers the polis, or the city-state. Is that city Paris, as it seems to be? Sensorily, perhaps. Harmon’s stand-in, Molly, is bewitched, as American visitors always are, by the croissants; she soon starts dating her (distant) cousin Daniel, as a self-conscious adventure. (“I had a French boyfriend, in France, in Paris. Do you know how sexy that is where I come from?”) And the production, directed by David Cromer, pauses several times to marvel at the eau-de-vie light streaming in through the set’s tall windows.