Like many playwrights, Alfred Uhry makes fun of the people he loves and loves the people he makes fun of. He showed this in "Driving Miss Daisy," his most honored play, and he does it again in "The Last Night of Ballyhoo," which opened last night at the New Jewish Theatre, to run through Dec. 18 a the NJT's home in the Jewish Community Center.
"Ballyhoo," commissioned for the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, ran at the Rep in 1999; the NJT production, directed by Gary Wayne Barker, is smooth and mostly funny, but it deals with serious matters in terms of Southern American Jews, very different from those in the North. These second- and third-generation Jews are wealthier, descended from German immigrant stock and not at all receptive to more recent Jews arriving from Eastern Europe.
The "Ballyhoo" Jews of 1939 consider themselves only a step or two behind those original WASPs, the Episcopalians. They may not be welcome in the Episcopalian clubs, but the Russian and Polish Jews are not welcome in theirs. The biggest news in Atlanta that year was the premiere of the movie, "Gone With the Wind," and the biggest social event is Ballyhoo, a dance for the most elite of the young Jews — think something comparable to the Veiled Prophet Ball in the same year, if Jews were allowed.
Adolph Freitag (the excellent Greg Johnston) is a lifelong bachelor whose widowed siste and sister-in-law, and a daughter of each, live with him in a neighborhood much like then one where Daisy Wortham lived. Boo (fine work by the calm, mature Peggy Billo) resents that she never had a chance to run the family bedding company. Reba (a grand performance with sparkling comic timing by Laurie McConnell) is prone to malapropisms and responses that don't quite fit their questions. She's happy to shop, cook and serve in her wifely role.
Lala (Uhry's characters' names force their so-called humor and cheapen them), Boo's daughter, lasted six weeks at the University of Michigan, and seems committed to seeking a rich husband, though her more immediate goal is a date for Ballyhoo, and Rachel Fenton is properly flighty and air-headed in the role. Sunny, Reba's daughter, is a good student at Wellesley College, seemingly interested in things slightly more solid than her cousin. She wants more than a husband from her life, and she's obviously her uncle Adolph's favorite. Alexandra Woodruff says she reads the works of Upton Sinclair, but her performance still leaves her slightly vacuous and not totally invested in Sunny.
The two men, Joe Farkas (Adam Moskal) and Peachy Weil (Dylan Duke) are not nearly as well drawn, both tending more to caricature than to character, and they are not written as well as their female counterparts. Peachy is missing only a letter sweater to become totally trite, and Joe, a recent hire by Adolph, is in over his head trying to explain the entire history and structure of Judaism in a couple of scenes. Barker's direction works well, and Justin Barisonek's set is good, though a little modest for the family's economic stature. Michele Friedman Siler designed costumes that fit the period. On the debit side, however, is the fact that at least two songs, including "White Christmas," were not written until several years after the play's date of 1939.
It's a mostly entertaining play, but Uhry never seems sure whether he wants his Jews to be more Jewish (or more religious), and if he does, how they should have gone about it in Atlanta in 1939.
The Last Night of Ballyhoo opened Thursday, Dec. 1 as a New Jewish Theatre production at the Jewish Community Center, to run through Dec. 18
— Joe