Show and Tell Post #2

 The Last Night of Ballyhoo by Alfred Uhry 

Recently I have read The Last Night of Ballyhoo by Alfred Uhry, so I thought I would share it with y’all.  Uhry wrote it in 1996 and it, along with Driving Miss Daisy, is one of his most produced plays.  It premiered July 20^th, 1996 in Atlanta, Georgia at the Olympic Arts Festival.  This play can easily be found at Middleton library, which is where I first came across it. 

            The story takes place in 1939 Atlanta, Georgia.  The play is about a Jewish Family living in Atlanta around the time when Hitler is taking over Poland.  This family consists of Adolf Freitag and he lives with his two sisters Boo and Reba and their two daughters Lala and Sunny, even though they are Jewish they are very self conscience of their Jewish identity and even though they consider themselves to be Jewish, they try and hide that in order to fit in with the surrounding people who are predominantly Christian. They even decorate their house with a Christmas tree, but they don’t put a star on it, so they do very subtle things like that.  At the beginning of the play, Ballyhoo is lurking which is a ball of sorts that everyone is very hyped up about, especially Lala.  Uncle Adolf brings home his new employee, Joe from New York, home for dinner and Boo isn’t too happy to have his company because he is “the other kind of Jew” which sparks the self-hating prejudice that these Jews categorize themselves in.  Despite Boo’s opinions, Adolf seems to really like him and thinks he is a good young man, and Lala sure thinks he is cute.  The play progresses when Sunny, Adolf’s favorite niece, comes home for her winter break from Wellsey College and gets thrown into all the Ballyhoo business.  Joe is smitten by Sunny and Sunny returns the feelings.  It is through their relationship that the Jewish prejudice becomes apparent.  Sunny is not “as Jewish” as Joe is and Sunny explains what it is like to grow up and be apart of her non-Jewish community as a Jew and the hate she had to come through.  Joe ends up asking Sunny to Ballyhoo as Boo is constantly down Lala’s throat to get a date to Ballyhoo and call Peachy Wiel from Lake Charles and get him to go with her.  Now, I feel like if I say anymore I will kill the rest of the show for anyone who is reading this, put that is the premises and read the play!

            Ok so as for dramaturgical choices, I really like how the year that Uhry decided to set the play in.  Since he decided to set it in 1939, with WWII beginning to brew prejudices and tension towards Jews and Jews being self-consciences of their identity was higher than ever.  The year of it was really the driving source of every characters feelings towards themselves and those surrounding them in the play.  Especially for Joe, considering that his family is Russian and Polish Jewish, while the other characters are German Jews so there is a heavy underlying tension.  The play itself is very funny and quaint, but the year it is set in adds so much more of a stronger message and if were to be set in other time, it would still have it’s southern charm, but speak less volumes on acceptance of identity and prejudices that these characters have to live with and overcome. 

            Another dramaturgical choice that I really enjoyed was that Uhry chose to include the Gone with the Wind movie premiere in the plot that Lala was so fascinated by and I loved the parallels that I found in the plot of The Last Night of Ballyhoo with Gone With The Wind.  I think Uhry intentionally chose Gone With the Wind because it is very romanticized and so is Ballyhoo, they both have the same grandeur kind of air and play on the charming south vibe, despite the fact that they both have very intense issues within the plots, including the brink of war in both stories and racism.  It was very fun for me to read through this play and see how they both connected with one another, because I am a fan of the novel Gone With the Wind.  I don’t believe that the play would have nearly the effect it had on me when reading it if Uhry had used another movie other than Gone with the Wind in his script.  That reference sparked a lot of the thoughts of the prejudices in the South that were going on at that time and it really set up the entire play and the tone very nicely.