It’s not every day that two respected Chicago Theatre companies band together to bring audiences an epic production like Prayer for the French Republic. Northlight Artistic Director BJ Jones sat down with Theater Wit Artistic Director Jeremy Wechsler to see how he plans on bringing Joshua Harmon’s words to life.

BJ: This is a new experience for us, Jeremy, but we both have a strong feeling that Prayer for the French Republic should be produced in Chicago and that Northlight and Theatre Wit are the theatres to produce it. Can you talk about that?

Jeremy: Joshua has an uncanny knack for exposing unresolved tensions in our communities and turning them into ruthlessly entertaining drama. Bad Jews explored young Jews grappling with religion amid American secularism; Skintight tackled contradictions in our rhetoric on beauty and aging; Admissions dove into the explosive mix of college anxiety and white fragility. Theater Wit has produced all his Chicago premieres, but Prayer for the French Republic is the largest show we’ve ever contemplated—too big to handle alone.

When considering a partner, I thought of Northlight. I’ve admired your productions for decades—The Real Thing in the ’80s (which I saw three times), but more recently, Selling Kabul, Charm, Birthday Candles, and Faceless. Theater is about its audience: who are we speaking to, and what conversations can emerge? I know Wit’s audience after fifteen years, but I wondered how Northlight’s community would engage with Prayer’s provocations.

But maybe I could guess? Wit’s first foray with Harmon’s work, Bad Jews, ran six months in 2015, drawing 18,000 people. When we transferred it to Northlight’s stage, the response was electric—I’ll never forget sitting in that audience. It wasn’t a Northlight production, but some of the crowd obviously was your audience; theater is local. That audience embraced the drama of the argument wholeheartedly. Bringing a play into the heart of the community it speaks to is powerful. I’d vaguely hoped to return to your stage with Prayer, but it wasn’t until we had brunch a few years ago and talked about the play. I thought, “Man, BJ really loves this play. And thinks his audience will love it.”—that it clicked. So, in conclusion: Audience, Art, and Brunch!

BJ: You talked about the play being firmly set in 2016 and not reflecting the current situation in the Middle East, and that was Josh Harmon’s feeling as well. Can you talk about that?

Jeremy: Prayer was written in response to specific events: the Charlie Hebdo bombing (and subsequent supermarket shootings) and a surge of antisemitic incidents in France culminating with Sarah Halimi’s 2017 murder. In the U.S., synagogue vandalism, the Unite the Right rally, and arson attempts from 2015 to 2017 created a parallel rise in antisemitism, making the play feel quite immediate by its 2022 premiere.

Then there was a peculiar accident of history: after the initial 2022 production, a Broadway transfer was announced in June 2023 with previews set for December—only for the October 7 attacks and Gaza invasion to unfold in between. When I asked Harmon about revising the play, he said he considered it but chose not to. Gaza falls outside the work’s original scope; shoehorning it in would muddle the focus on this family’s story. Antisemitism and racism, sadly, aren’t going anywhere. Keeping up with current events is the job of the audience, not the author. The play stands in relationship to our lives and knowledge and is no less real for being set five years prior to the present rather than one.

BJ: The play is somewhat epic, spanning decades and generations with shifting world views. How do you get your arms around that directorially?

Jeremy: A lot of reading and documentaries Even working out the basic history for the 1944-1946 timeline required considerably more knowledge about the Vichy government and French reconstruction than I ever had. But this is all essential so I could make sense of some remarkable moments in Harmon’s story. Here’s a small example: when trying to reconcile the date two Auschwitz survivors returned to Paris, I could not understand why the details of what happened to them were so unknown to their family. “Why didn’t every newspaper have stories about this from day 1?” I naively asked myself. The answer of course is that almost no one returned. Of the 76,000 French Jews deported (by the French police!) to the camps, only 2,000 survived, and it would take months for some of them to be repatriated home from Russia. So, in 1945? How many survivors had even returned to tell the story? And how many French citizens wanted to hear about it? This crime that occurred with their complicity for years? That’s worth a whole book, and in this show, it is embedded in a bit of dialogue under 20 seconds.

But the joy of Harmon’s work is his even-handedness. None of this background is necessary for the viewer. It motivates the characters, who then have sharp and hilarious arguments. The characters need the details of history to move them. They, in turn, move us.

Fortunately, we’ve also been assembling a genuinely remarkable group of scholars and historians who will be participating in CityTalk, our examination of French and American anti-Semitism. (citytalkchicago.org) Tragically, they can’t read the books for me, but they are an invaluable resource for the reading list itself!

BJ: Talk about the timeliness of the piece and how it fits in this moment.

Jeremy: I want to answer this personally because the play is, at its core, about the personal over the political. Its central question is simple: Am I safe here? For those in cultural minorities, that question is never far away. I’ve never knowingly been the target of antisemitism in my 55 years, but watching Charlottesville in 2017 was a jolt—those Nazis felt closer, bolder, and more numerous than I’d ever imagined. I didn’t feel personally threatened, but I wondered: If I lived there, how safe would I feel? How secure is the promise of assimilation?

Today, that anxiety hasn’t eased. Rhetoric from the current administration is chillingly reminiscent of 1940s Vichy France, with an upswing in the same racist tropes that fueled 20th-century fascism. In the U.S., far-right movements flourish—I can’t forget hearing about “good people on both sides” in 2017. You only have to look at a movement’s fellow travelers to understand its core. After the Tree of Life shooting, I spoke with Josh Harmon. He’d gone to temple, guarded by armed security. The rabbi, too shaken to fully address the tragedy, offered only a stark truth: “To be Jewish in America is to be White. Until you are not.”

Over the next few years, I fear many of us—Jewish, Black, Latino, Arab—will keep asking, Am I safe? Who knows what our answer will be?