features
Photograph by Aaron DuRall
spring 2024
Scenes from Prayer for the French Republic featuring Nael Nacer, BA '07, performed at the Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Left: Nacer with Molly Ranson and Aria Shahghasemi. Above: Nacer with Betsy Aidem.
Photographs by Jeremy Daniel
Nael Nacer, BA ’07, was in the middle of coaching a student on a Sunday morning last fall when he got the call: It was the stage manager from Boston’s Huntington Theatre, where Nacer was serving as understudy. The actor he was shadowing wasn’t going to make the show that night; in just a matter of hours, Nacer would have to fill in.
“I ran to the theatre,” Nacer remembers. He’d never even performed the play, which was then still in previews, but had only observed it from the audience. The director hastily ran him through blocking, and the other actors kindly ushered him through his entrances and exits as the play went up that night. “It was like being shot out of a cannon,” Nacer says. “It went well, I think—I actually don’t even remember it.”
In truth, Nacer wasn’t even supposed to be in the show: He took the understudy gig after another opportunity fell through. “Even during previews, I thought, understudying isn’t for me—it’s hard work, and scary to feel so unprepared.” But work was work, and he resonated with the play, Prayer for the French Republic, an emotional drama about a Jewish family in Paris in 2017 trying to decide whether to stay in Paris or emigrate to Israel after their son is subject of an antisemitic attack.
While not Jewish himself, Nacer grew up in Paris in a family of mixed French and Djiboutian descent, drawing on the experience for the role of the family’s patriarch. “I’ve had times in Paris dealing with aggression and Islamophobia, so I can relate to feeling unsafe,” says Nacer, who is also a father of a 7-year-old daughter. Something he brought to the role must have connected with playwright Joshua Harmon, who was in the audience a few nights after Nacer started performing and asked him to audition for a new production of the play on Broadway.
A week later, Nacer was in New York, auditioning for director David Cromer, whom he’d worked with in the past at the Huntington. Fresh off performing the play on stage, he felt confident. “It was such a warm room, I don’t think I’ve had a better audition in my life,” he says. “And it felt like the one that mattered the most.” Nacer got the part, and after the play closed in Boston in October, he found himself back on stage for previews at the Manhattan Theatre Club in December, alongside such big-name actors as Anthony Edwards (ER, Top Gun) and renowned character actor Richard Masur (Rhoda, Younger). Now, sitting in a Broadway restaurant a few weeks before the end of the play’s run, with lights of Times Square billboards shining through the windows, Nacer still seems shocked at the dramatic turnaround from understudy to Broadway marquee.
“I was thrilled, but I couldn’t quite believe it,” he says, taking a beat. “I still can’t quite believe it.”
By Michael Blanding
Before his dramatic Cinderella story, Nacer had nearly given up on the Great White Way. As a mainstay on Boston stages from the Huntington to Shakespeare on the Common, Nacer had found a level of contentment. “I dearly love the community, and I felt successful in the work,” he says. “I came to redefine what success meant to me and stopped really thinking about greener pastures.” Only recently had he begun considering New York again after participating in an experimental off-Broadway adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard that featured both a robot and dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov—but he hadn’t done anything to pursue it before Broadway practically fell in his lap.
Growing up, Nacer was obsessed with movies, going with friends to film festivals in Paris to see five films a day. “My idols were Robert De Niro and Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman, all those ’70s method actors,” he says. He wasn’t the best student, however, struggling at the American School of Paris, and even though Nacer knew he wanted to act, he didn’t apply to college, instead just taking a few courses at a bilingual acting workshop. A year later, however, he changed his mind, and though it was late in the application process, a guidance counselor who had a connection at Suffolk contacted the school on his behalf and successfully made a case for him.
Once in Boston, Nacer instantly found a place. During his first day on campus, he saw a notice for the fall play, an adaptation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales called Pilgrims of the Night. He tried out for the production, directed by Theatre Professor Wes Savick. “I immediately knew it was where I was supposed to be. I just felt like I had found my people,” he says. The Theatre Department at the time was only a few years old, occupying a black box space that had been somewhat jury-rigged in a former law library in the Donahue Building. “It was scrappy and under-resourced, but we felt like we were doing good work, and we did a lot of it.”
Savick started at Suffolk the same time as Nacer and quickly saw something promising in the young actor. “His emotional life is available to him, very close to the skin,” says Savick, who often finds beginning students have trouble getting out of their daily lives to express big emotions on stage in a genuine way. That wasn’t the case with Nacer, however, who Savick says always brought a “ferocious intelligence” to his performances. “This is his rare gift,” says Savick, who has gone on to become close friends with Nacer, who was best man at his wedding. “I always feel enormous compassion for whatever character he is performing—not because he begs sympathy, but because he honors the complexity of what he’s been handed to play.”
At Suffolk, Savick pushed Nacer and the other students to explore more experimental material, such as Rhinoceros, a 1959 theatre-of-the-absurd drama by Eugène Ionesco in which citizens of a French country town are being turned into rhinoceroses. An allegory for the rise of totalitarianism, the play resonated at Suffolk in the context of the Iraq War. Nacer played a dissolute cynic who is nevertheless the only one to resist the rhinocerine transmutation. “Wes opened up my perspective on what theatre could be, to see it as a political tool that goes beyond the more traditional, naturalistic model,” Nacer says. “There’s a place for entertainment, but there’s also a place for content that goes beyond that.”
The scrappy nature of the early Suffolk Theatre Department led to tight bonds among the students, many of whom have gone on to acting careers. Nacer met his wife Dana (Douglass) Nacer, BA ’06, there; she now works as an independent creative director and graphic designer. Among other fellow thespians, he also overlapped with Jon Orsini, BA ’07, who has gone on to perform on Broadway himself, and Alex Pollock, BA ’07, who acted alongside Nacer in a 2010 production of The Aliens at Boston’s Company One Theatre, where the two played mushroom-popping deadbeat philosophers, living beside a dumpster behind a café in a small New England town. “That was the play that really got the ball rolling for me in terms of my career,” Nacer says.
Throughout his career, Nacer has stayed close to Suffolk. Along with Pollock and other Suffolk alums, he helped Savick found an independent theatre company, the National Theatre of Allston (later Juvenalia), to stage experimental works. When the pandemic hit in 2020 and a scheduled live production at Suffolk had to be canceled, Savick called Nacer and asked if he would be interested in creating a virtual performance with students. He immediately said yes, holding auditions online to assemble a cast of 25 students all over the world, and working with them to brainstorm a unique production called To Gather Apart.
“I had been seeing a lot of Zoom productions that were essentially adaptations of existing plays, and ignored the limitations of the medium,” Nacer says. By contrast, he and the students leaned into the challenge, creating a play based on a virtual support group that spirals out of control.
Ultimately, the play became an uplifting story about the importance of maintaining relationships during challenging times, much of it drawn from students’ own experiences. “It was such a burst of creative energy at a time when I was starved of it, and the whole experience was as wonderful as it was challenging,” Nacer says of the play, which won a Citizen Artist Award at the 2021 American College Theatre Festival at Washington’s Kennedy Center. “I’m so proud of the work the students did, and getting to do this at Suffolk 15 years after I graduated meant the world to me. It helped me work through a lot of my own fears and helped keep a candle lit in a really dark time.”
‘Where I was supposed to be’
Nacer met Prayer director David Cromer at the Huntington in 2013, when Cromer cast him in the role of Simon Stimson, the misanthropic choirmaster in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. The play required Nacer to play piano throughout the production—something he’d never done. Cromer liked him so much for the part he cast him anyway, and the Huntington sprung for Nacer’s piano lessons for three months before the opening. “I would average about eight hours a day,” says Nacer, who thrives on learning new things. “The opportunity to take a deep dive into something and do as much preparation as you can to tell as much of the truth as you can has always been seductive to me.”
Nacer brings the same curiosity to his acting roles, says Steven Maler, founder of the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, which stages Shakespeare on the Common on Suffolk’s doorstep every summer. “A lot of actors come in with what they want to do, but Nael is the opposite—every day, he’s bringing new ideas and discoveries to the table,” says Maler, who directed Nacer in the 2021 production of The Tempest as Caliban, the monstrous servant of the magician Prospero. “He leaned into the danger and violence of the character, and at the same time made him wonderfully sympathetic, charismatic, and compelling. That combination was extraordinary.”
Two years later, he directed Nacer again in Macbeth as Macduff, the heroic foil to the titular villain, who beats him at the end in a dramatic swordfight. The role is challenging, however, since Macduff barely appears onstage until the end of Act 3, when he discovers that Macbeth has had his wife and children killed. “The whole moral weight of the piece rests in that scene,” Maler says. “If it doesn’t break your soul as you watch it, frankly the play doesn’t work. And Nael was so riveting and heartbreaking every night—it was such a joy to see that work.”
All of Nacer’s theatrical gifts were on display during his portrayal of Charles Benhamou during a performance of Prayer for the French Republic in February. The play is an intense trek through thickets of religion, politics, and family as the various Benhamous—protective father Charles, spirited mother Marcelle, devout son Daniel, and manic-depressive daughter Elodie—spar with one another as well as with naïve American cousin Molly and Marcelle’s cynical brother Patrick over the meaning of the antisemitic attack on Daniel. Adding to the complexity are flashbacks to the late 1940s, in which a previous generation of Marcelle’s family struggles to recover from the trauma of the Holocaust. Despite the intensity of the subject matter—and the marathon three-hour run time—the play is also wickedly funny, requiring the actors to display their entire range of emotion.
As Charles, Nacer spends the first part of the play seemingly coiled and ready to snap—which he finally does in an outburst of fear and fury that hits hard without going over the top. Nacer finds the emotional core of the character in his deep devotion to his family. “The depth of his fear is linked to the magnitude of his love for his family, and his desire to keep them safe and protect them,” Nacer says. Later, Nacer is just as effective in cutting through one of his wife’s rants by saying simply and softly, “I’m scared.” That acknowledgement of humanity amid a difficult family conflict lands in the pit of the stomach because of his understated delivery.
Nacer’s performance resonated strongly with a group of Suffolk faculty and alumni who traveled to New York in February to see the Broadway production. Nacer met with the group before the performance to discuss the play, and proceeds from the event went toward the Marilyn Plotkins Theatre Enrichment Fund, which benefits Suffolk theatre majors and is named in honor of the department’s longtime chair, who retired in 2023.
As a non-Jew, Nacer treads carefully around the idea of representation, understanding that despite his own encounters with discrimination, he can’t totally appreciate the Jewish experience—especially in the wake of the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel. Like everything else in his career, Nacer approaches the responsibility with curiosity. “I’m learning and listening. I don’t think I would have felt comfortable doing this if the playwright and director and majority of the cast weren’t Jewish and hadn’t embraced me and welcomed me as much as they have,” he says. “I’ve been trying as much as I can to understand the history of trauma and persecution and the need to feel safe my character has, and to try and honor and speak to that as much as I can.”
The play, whose New York production closed in early March, has only taken on new relevance in a post–October 7 world. When Nacer performed it at the Huntington last fall, the cast went on the night of the attacks. “It did not feel like the right day to be having that conversation on stage, and in some ways it was the right day to have that conversation,” he says. “It makes the central question of where are Jews safe even harder to answer, because it’s not a simple answer. It’s a question the characters of the play are grappling with, and it’s a question people are still grappling with.”
Despite the emotional toll of performing the play night after night—in two different productions, over the course of six months—Nacer has remained grateful for the opportunity to move audiences with such challenging material.
“Many people feel powerless about the state of the world right now,” he says. “As artists we do whatever we can to hopefully shed some light on humanity by investigating who we are.”
A riveting, and heart-breaking, performer
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—Professor Wes Savick
Suffolk University Department of Theatre
“I always feel enormous compassion for whatever character Nael is performing because he honors the complexity of what he’s been handed to play.”
Photograph by Aaron DuRall
Photograph by Aaron DuRall