Keen performers enliven ‘Ballyhoo’

BY BARBARA TRAININ BLANK 
FOR THE PATRIOT-NEWS

When Alfred Uhry was commissioned to write a play for the cultural festival accompanying the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996, he was already an internationally renowned playwright for “Driving Miss Daisy.”

Both plays deal with prejudice, as well as the ups and downs of forming emotional attachments. Both draw on Uhry’s background as a Southern Jew.

Though “Daisy” is probably the stronger theatrical vehicle, “Ballyhoo” is still a play worth seeing.

Centering around a 1939 Ballyhoo, the society ball attended by affluent and assimilated Jews of German descent from throughout the South, the play’s conflicts are resolved too quickly and easily. In such lines as, “I always thought we were going to be happy when we were growing up,” Uhry hints at darker conflicts beneath the squabbles of the Freitag family but doesn’t fully develop them.

This gives director Thomas Hostetter fewer challenges, in a sense, than he is capable of handling.

But there are many moments of humor and insight in Uhry’s portrait of an Atlanta family that plays out one of the worst effects of prejudice -- self-hatred. This is a response made all the more chilling coming as it does after Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

Although Sunny, the young college-educated woman who falls for the “other kind” of religiously more traditional, non-Germanic Jew, claims “ignorance” of their heritage is the culprit, Uhry is asking us to look deeper.

Hostetter has elicited some fine performances and been responsive to both the humor and the tension in the play.

Leigh Detra Mallonee is elegant and intelligent as Sunny, whose half-baked prejudices are challenged by her growing feelings for Joe. We pay attention when she’s on stage.

David Wagner, appearing for the first time on this or any stage, makes an auspicious debut. He conveys the likeability of Joe, even if he seems not quite strong enough at times to precipitate change in Sunny and her family.

Ed Costik brings the right touch of self-deprecating humor and awareness to the role of Adolph. He’s the family patriarch who is more interested in the news from Europe than in Ballyhoo or Atlanta’s other big social event, the world premiere of “Gone With the Wind.”

Beth McIntosh is absolutely delightful as Adolph’s ditsy sister-in-law. Reba, who turns out to have more basic common sense than his ostensibly smarter sister. Her Southern accent is also flawless.

Paulette Lee is surprisingly subdued in her portrayal of that sister, whom Adolph calls “the Jewish Talullah Bankhead.” Her best moments come in the pursuit of Peachy Weil, a young rich gentleman, on her daughter’s behalf.

As Boo’s daughter, Lala, Tanya Leshko is appropriately histrionic and self-pitying -- especially as she competes in her reminiscences with her cousin Sunny as to who got more attention at their respective fathers’ funerals.