Triple Crown

Alfred Uhry received a Pulitzer Prize and an Oscar for Driving Miss Daisy.
Now, he won a Tony Award for his latest play.

MICHAEL ELKIN SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

most uncivil war has broken out
between the yin and yang of
Yankee Yids and self-hating
outhern Semites on the stage
of New York's Helen Hayes Theatre,
where The Last Night of the Ballyhoo bal-
lyhoos the return of playwright Alfred
Uhry to the center stage spotlight.
Not that he's ever left.
But the Pulitzer Prize-winning play-
wright, whose Driving Miss Daisy made
all the right turns on its way to interna-
tional acclaim as well as an Oscar for the
film version, just garnered his first-ever
Tony for Ballyhoo. He is the first play-
wright to win all three honors.
In Ballyhoo, Uhry uses his early sense
of Southern discomfort at being Jewish to
showcase a Jewish family at war with its
roots.
The Atlanta of Ballyhoo burns with
brush fires of self-betrayal and denial, with
the play's Levy family levying their future
for the price of modern-day acceptance in
a society sotted with Chanukah bushes
and Jew-bashing.
Ballyhoo rings of Southern belles and
their gentlemen callers, with Dana Ivey,
Jessica Hecht and Paul Rudd standouts
in a star-studded cast.
Over sodas at Sardi's, the play-
wright plays up the idea that you
don't have to be Jewish to be tak-
en with what the play has to say.
One could almost substitute any
ethnic group for the one in the play
and still sense the theme of as-
similation.
But there is no substitute for the
original voice that is Uhry's, and
the play at the Helen Hayes res-
onates with the religious upbring-
ing Uhry recalls.
It was more a religious wrong
than religious right, he says.
"This play represents a lot of
me," says the 59-year-old writer,
who remembers his local rabbi at-
tired in a frock coat and his rela-
tives' house decorated lavishly for
Christmas.
`The message we got was that it
was better to be Episcopalian."
Alfred Uhry felt better about his
own sense ofJewishness after writ-
ing Daisy. What drove him to do

ny's family, the Levy Confederates, who
spirit and spirituality he felt from visiting consider her Northern Neanderthal a
Israel. -
"kike."
"I accompanied Manny Azenberg to Is-
Sometimes it's not just charity that be-
rael," he says of the
gins at home, but anti-
prominent Broadway
Semitism, too.
producer's mesmeriz-
"To be Jewish and
ing missions of discov-
so disconnected," Al-
ery.
fred Uhry marvels of
`That helped me re-
his own upbringing.
ally get in touch with §
"Were we Jewish?
my Judaism. Just the
We were really South-
reality that everyone
erners with Jewish
there was Jewish," he
faces."
says with an affection-
In facing the past,
ate smile.
Uhry comes face-to-
"I couldn't have done
face with his future.
this play without Man-
He is also working on
ny and those trips."
a new musical about
The trip onstage is a
the infamous Leo
time warp for Uhry,
Frank case, about a
who based two of the
New York Jew, trans-
play's more committed
planted to Atlanta,
and comely characters
who was tried for the
— Joe Farkas and Sun-
Alfred Uhry's memory
murder of a 14-year-
ny Freitag — on his own folks.
sparks his scripts.
old girl at the National Pencil
`This is my mother's and father's
Co., where Frank was a su-
love story," he says.
perintendent.
There is no love lost on stage between
Amid the frenzy of anti-Semitism
Joe — the Yankee transplant — and Sun- spurred by a heinous hate group, Frank

BONEAU/B RYAN-BROWN

As

Ballyhoo was the even greater sense of

2

Michael Elkin is entertainment
editor of the Jewish Exponent in
Philadelphia.

The cast of The Last Night of the Ballyhoo, this year's Tony Award winner for Best Play.

was framed and hanged in 1915, lynched
amid the leers and catcalls of hatemon-
gers.
The case hits home for Uhry, whose Un-
cle Sid, he says, was an owner of that pen-
cil factory.
Three plays, three attempts at dealing
with Jewish, gentile and not-so-gentle At-
lanta.
Is the Driving Miss Daisy writer driven
to unearth his roots onstage?
"Well, that's where I go when I write,"
he says of his map of the mind that is out-
lined with the road signs of the South.
Not that there aren't detours: Alfred
Uhry wrote the magical Mystic Pizza
(1988), a warm and winning movie about
a Connecticut pizza parlor that connect-
ed to the heart.
Then there was the Tony Award-nom-
inated musical The Robber Bridegroom,
on which Uhry collaborated with longtime
buddy/colleague Robert Waldman. Earli-
er, the two wrote Here's Where I Belong,
a musical adaptation of John Steinbeck's

East of Eden.

Just where did the non-Jewish Jew be-
long? Not until he went east to his own
Eden— Brown University —in 1954, did
Alfred Uhry find what was missing from
Jewish life.
Unfamiliar with so many of
Judaism's rites and rituals, the
writer recalls going to his first
seder at Waldman's home.
Why was that night different
from all other nights?
"It was like being at a ritual in
Swedish," says Uhry. "I had nev-
er had a yarmulke on my head.
It was like being on stage and not
knowing your lines."
But Alfred Uhry does have a
good memory for the past. "I
have a very good sense memory,"
says Uhry of the images that
spark his scripts.
The writer also senses that it
is more than his intellectual need
to write about being Jewish in
Atlanta that drives him, that the
hunger comes from deep within.
"I feel, from the deepest part
of my gut, that I must get this
[work] out," says Uhry, the right-
fully ballyhooed writer whose
opening nights have opened his
heart to the pleasures and pains
of his people's past.

