Theater Is a 'Place of Healing' for Prayer for the French Republic's Anthony Edwards

Anthony Edwards has a couple of seriously iconic screen roles to his name. The actor played “Goose” in the 1986 action film Top Gun and Dr. Mark Greene in the long-running medical drama ER. But the actor, now performing in Prayer for the French Republic, will always regard the theater as his “original love.” Stage acting is about “being with actors you trust,” he told Tamsen Fadal for The Broadway Show. “You have to find that trust. And that’s exciting. You’re not relying on an editor.”

Edwards grew up in Santa Barbara. It was a big theater town, home to the Granada and Lobero Theatres, where performing and seeing shows was a big part of schooling life. “If Indiana was about playing basketball, Santa Barbara was just full of theater. I fell in love with it.”

Indeed, by the time Edwards got to high school, he had performed in 25 shows, and by 16, he had already started his professional acting career. After attending the University of Southern California, where he majored in drama, he launched headfirst into doing plays, including producing a production of Look Back in Anger directed by Forest Whitaker.

But after starting a family, and with screen acting keeping him occupied—"I was in the right place at the right time," Edwards said of his Top Gun role—theater took a backseat. He then took a break from acting altogether to focus on raising his children in New York.

In recent years, though, Edwards has made his return to acting in a big way. He made his Broadway debut in Children of a Lesser God in 2018, followed by screen roles in Inventing Anna, WeCrashed and Tales of the Walking Dead. In 2022, he made his Broadway musical debut at a few hours’ notice, filling in for the actor Robert Joy in Girl From the North Country (joining his wife, Mare Winningham, on stage) after Joy tested positive for COVID-19.

Prayer for the French Republic is a long way from Top Gun. A play about contemporary and historical antisemitism, when it premiered off-Broadway in early 2022, it felt incredibly timely: In January of that year, four people at Congregation Beth Israel in Texas were taken hostage. The new Broadway production arrives at a time when the Israel-Hamas war is still raging and antisemitic incidents have seen an unprecedented rise in the U.S.

Edwards plays Patrick Salomon, a secular Jew contemplating five generations' worth of his family history. “Antisemitism has been around for centuries and centuries,” said Edwards. “Great playwrights are always interested in crises of the human condition.” But the writing, by Bad Jews and Significant Other playwright Joshua Harmon, is never didactic. “He’s not hitting anybody with a message: ‘You have to do this,’ or ‘You have to feel that way.’ He just keeps presenting truths.”

Edwards is also a firm believer in the power of theater to offer catharsis and healing. “My friend Bryan Doerries runs an amazing thing called Theater of War, where he talks about and exercises this idea that the Greeks knew that theater was a place of healing,” said Edwards. “They created this place where a group of people could come together, and hear, and look, and interact when tragic things are happening. That's the healing that we all need. It's part of who we are, which is why here we are in 2024 and theater is still going. We do need it.”