Southern exposure

Uhry's Ballyhoo examines 'outsider-ness'

by Johnette Rodriguez

THE LAST NIGHT OF BALLYHOO. By Alfred Uhry. Directed by Elysa Marden. With Ennalls Berl, Susan Deily-Swearingen, Sandra Laub, Jill Blythe Riemer, Ben Steinfeld, Pat Toppa and Taylor White. At Brown Summer Theatre through July 24.

The Last Night of Ballyhoo, a 1997 Tony Award winner for playwright and Brown alum Alfred Uhry, takes us into the heart of the Atlanta he touched on in Driving Miss Daisy. The earlier play focused on the South of the '60s and the friendship between two outsiders, an elderly Jewish woman and her African-American chauffeur. Ballyhoo gives us ever-deepening layers of "outsider-ness," as Uhry more closely examines what it meant to be Jewish, and specifically German-Jewish vs. Russian or Polish-Jewish, in the Atlanta of 1939.

German Jews had settled across the South as early as the 18th century, gradually creating their own well-ordered and well-restricted society. As the non-Jewish population excluded them from social and recreational clubs -- an incident where Uhry's 11-year-old sister was asked to leave a swimming pool comes to light in Ballyhoo -- so did the German Jews exclude "the other kind," the newer, less well-heeled Eastern European Jewish immigrants from their club and social functions.

Ballyhoo in Atlanta was a week-long fling of teas, parties and dances between Christmas and New Year's -- Uhry went to one of the last Ballyhoos in the '50s. It was a place for young people to meet, mingle and, hopefully, wend their way to marriages between "good families."

This is what Boo Levy has her heart set on for her daughter Lala, who dropped out of the University of Michigan after not getting picked for the upper crust Jewish sorority. Lala (played to a pouty, swoony, adolescent turn by Susan Deily-Swearingen) has retreated into daydreams of writing a novel, a la Gone with the Wind, which is premiering at that very moment in Atlanta. But she is hounded by her mother (Sandra Laub, in a finely nuanced performance) to call Peachy Weil, a boy she met on at least two other social occasions out-of-state, a boy whose family is as eager to make a good match as is hers.

Ballyhoo's opening scene takes place around a Christmas tree on which Lala has placed a five-pointed star. When Uncle Adolph (superbly portrayed by Ennalls Berl) comes home, he insists that "Jews don't have stars on their Christmas trees." This irony is not lost on the young man in his employ whom he has invited for dinner, Joe Farkas, one of those "other kind," from Brooklyn. Ben Steinfeld is great as Joe, his New York accent contrasting sharply with the drawls in the Levy/Freitag family. He conveys Joe's puzzlement over Jews who celebrate Christmas and not Passover, who know no Yiddish or Hebrew and who seem to him still quite ashamed of being Jewish.

Despite Lala's not-so-subtle hints that she still needs a date for Ballyhoo, Joe extricates himself from her designs and falls instead for her cousin Sunny (sweetly, convincingly played by Jill Blythe Riemer). Sunny and her mother Reba Freitag (Pat Toppa) make up the rest of the household since Sunny's late father was Boo and Adolph's older brother. In an understated portrayal, Toppa gives us one of those Southern women who may not get all the facts straight but who understands the emotional subtext better than anyone.

And Peachy Weil does show up in Atlanta -- Taylor White nails his prep-school brashness and rude sense of humor. It is, in fact, Peachy's blindness to the bigotry built into "the other kind" distinctions that sets in motion the play's terrific payoff.

Uhry obviously knows and loves these characters, giving them dialogue that clearly and succinctly defines who they are while deftly weaving in the Southern idiom. He's also skillful at showing the struggles each character has gone through, even the overbearing Boo, who can grate on our nerves as much as on Lala's and Adolph's.

Both Boo and Reba have had the sorrow of losing husbands; Boo mentions several times her disappointment at not being a member of the family business because she's a woman; and she takes all of her disappointments in life and bundles them into an oversized burden for Lala. "I never dreamed of anything like this when we were little," she says to Adolph. "I thought we were gonna be happy when we grew up."

Director Elysa Marden has kept a tight rein on her ensemble, and they do Uhry proud. The players give abundant life to their characters and laughter to their lines. Phillip Contic's period costumes, from dressing gowns to hoop skirts, accentuate the personality of the characters. William Roche's set design and David P. Crowley's lighting enhance the sense of a '30s parlor in the home of a genteel Southern family.

You don't have to be Southern or Jewish to be captivated by The Last Night of Ballyhoo. The dreams and disappointments of Uhry's characters are universal. Unfortunately, so is the ethnic intolerance.