'The Last Night of Ballyhoo' Comedic explores high society Southern Jewish life

Author: Joshua Axelrod

Continuing the celebration of Hillel's 50th anniversary at Middlebury College, as well the 350th anniversary of American Jewry, this past weekend's production of Alfred Uhry's Tony Award-winning play "The Last Night of Ballyhoo" was a shining blend of true-to-life comedy framed by serious social undertones.

The story follows the life of the Freitag-Levy family in the weeks leading up to and directly after Christmas 1939. Though the family is Jewish, their lives in the South have demanded that they try to conform to the Christian standards of their neighbors, so much so that they have replaced most of their traditional ancestry with the outward symbolism of converted Christians. Yet, when Joe Farkas (Andrew Zox '05), a New York Jew and business associate of Uncle Adolf (John Stokvis '05) arrives in town, the family begins to fracture in ways they have never before experienced.

As Christmas comes and goes, Joe's presence provokes the play's two central concerns: Who's taking who to the last night of the Ballyhoo dance? And, more importantly, what are the implications of division, bigotry and ignorance within the Jewish faith on the very eve of Hitler's invasion of Poland and the subsequent Holocaust?

Under the direction of Professor of Theatre Douglas Sprigg, the play came to life in a series of brilliantly believable situations as Boo (Eliza Hulme '05.5), Reba (Nell Wright '05) and Lala (Retta Leaphart '06) sit around the Freitag-Levy household, more concerned with Ballyhoo and Lala's dropping out of college than the more "important" events that make up the play's context. Only when Reba's daughter Sunny (Sally Swallow '07) comes back from Wellesley do the play's familial tensions begin to mount as Lala's hidden jealousy flies in Sunny's face and Joe's thoroughly Jewish upbringing rubs against the family's seeming flippancy about their heritage.

And yet, in the face of seriousness, it was refreshing to listen to the audience chuckle and laugh through every scene of the play. Hulme, as the dominant woman in the family, seized control of the stage from her first line and showed us the tragic humor inherent in her position as a widow and a dependent of Stokvis' Uncle Adolf, whose calm, bumbling presence seemed to hold the family together with his understated views of life and the world. Playing off of everyone else, Wright's loopy portrayal of Reba Freitag was continuously hilarious, even if it was overdone at times.

Likewise, the play's lovers - Leaphart's dreamy romantic Lala, Swallow's precise and exuberant Sunny and Zox's driven, but uncomfortable Joe - allowed the conflicts in the relationships to develop naturally and tragically. Indeed, all three performances, augmented in the second act by Peachy Weil's (Bill Army '07.5) appearance as Lala's suitor, were imagined with a great deal of emotional deference. It was only the play's own forced and unnaturally happy ending through which any aspect of the production suffered.

Completing the package were Assistant Technical Director Hallie Zieselman's beautiful living room set and senior Laura Eckelman's warm, homey lighting that lent a cinematic, refined feel to the production. And, finally, Technical Director Allison Rimmer's hilarious work with sound design kept the audience's laughter rolling with overly-dramatic renditions of Christmas carols between each scene change that fit perfectly, even if that fit was deliciously blasphemous.