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Jan. 25, 2008
Ballyhoo at Metro Theatre
Award-winning play depicts a Jewish family in wartime America.
TOVA KORNFELD
The comedy-drama The Last Night of Ballyhoo, currently running at Metropolitan Co-operative Theatre, confirms there is a theatrical gem hidden in Marpole. Director Paul Kloegman brings his talented cast together in this ambitious undertaking, a charming mix of The Glass Menagerie and Brighton Beach Memoirs. Written by Jewish playwright Alfred Uhry of Driving Miss Daisy fame and commissioned for the 1996 Cultural Olympiad for the Atlantic Olympics, the play opened on Broadway in 1997 to wide acclaim. It garnered a Tony Award for best production, as well as recognition by the American Theatre Critics Association as the best play of the year. Uhry is the only playwright ever to have won the triple crown of literary awards: a Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award and an Academy Award.
Uhry provides the audience with a rare opportunity to study Jewish life in the southern United States. Set in 1939 Atlanta, the play follows the trials and tribulations of the Levy/Freitags, a wealthy, "old-money" German-Jewish family, on the eve of the opening of Gone with the Wind.
The curtain rises on the posh sitting room of the family home, complete with a Chanukah bush – required decoration for the assimilated southern Jews. The family is headed by a bachelor uncle, Adolph, who supports his widowed sister, Boo, her daughter, Lala, his widowed sister-in-law, Reba, and her daughter, Sunny. The story revolves around the relationship of the two cousins and their struggles with their identities, both Jewish and personal.
While war is about to break out in Europe (that "nasty Hitler business in Poland"), Lala's only concern is to find a date for Ballyhoo, Atlanta Jewish society's annual ball, and to attend the opening of the Gone with the Wind première. Her mother is the quintessential Yiddishe mama, worried about her daughter's future and the need to find a suitable husband from the right Atlanta Jewish family. Lala has dropped out of university, not being accepted into the right sorority, to stay home and pursue her dream of writing a novel. In the meantime, her beautiful, blond, smart cousin, Sunny, home for the holidays from her studies at Wellesley, captures the heart of the "gentleman caller," Joe Farkas, a transplanted Brooklyn Jew, brought to dinner by Uncle Adolph. Joe, who keeps the Jewish traditions, is stunned to meet Jews who do not even know what Pesach is.
Running through all of this is the thread of Jewish self-hatred, epitomized by Lala bemoaning her Semitic features, as compared to her cousin's gentile good looks, her mother's referral to Joe as a "kike," as well as the "them versus us" mentality, the not-so-subtle discrimination by the established southern German Jewish elite of their Eastern European counterparts. Banned from gentile upper-class southern social life, these German Jews evolved a parallel social life, culminating every year in Ballyhoo at the Standard Club, an exclusive country club for the "right" kind of Jews.
Richmond Jewish community member Deborah Satanove plays addle-minded sister-in-law Reba to perfection. Stephanie Long makes her Vancouver debut as Sunny Freitag with panache and Christine Iannetta is a convincing Lala. Candice Lindsay, as Boo, brings together the right mix of nastiness and love. All of the women actors nail their southern accents perfectly.
Danny Steele plays the long suffering and hen-pecked Adolph Freitag with style and, rounding out the cast, are Dean Wunsch as Peachy Weiler, the spoiled Jewish rich kid who dismisses the rise of the Nazis as "Europe's problem," and Simon Best as Joe Farkas, the gentleman caller who helps Sunny embrace her Jewish soul.
The set is lovely and the costumes, particularly Lala's "Scarlett O'Hara" ball gown, are stunning. During the intermission, the theatre is appropriately filled with the theme song from Gone with the Wind and one can almost envision the "Moonlight and Magnolias."
The Last Night of Ballyhoo is charming and poignant, yet powerful, in its exposure of racism and Jewish self-hatred in the American South. The final scene is a touching resolution of the family's ethnic conflicts.
The play runs Wednesday through Saturday until Feb. 2, at 8 p.m. Call 604-266-7191 for reservations or visit www.metrotheatre.com.
Tova Kornfeld is a local writer and lawyer.
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