The Last Night of Ballyhoo (Criticism)

Criticism

Rena Korb

Korb has a master’s degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, Korb discusses the anti-Semitism felt by the Jewish family in Uhry’s play.

Uhry’s The Last Night of Ballyhoo is a humorous play that still raises a serious social issue: anti-Semitism inflicted by Jews. Although the Levy/Freitag family lives in a society in which Jews are discriminated against on a regular basis and although they personally have experienced prejudicial treatment because of their Jewish faith, they persistently regard “the other kind” of Jews — those who do not descend from German Jewry — as socially inferior. Like their friends, the Nachmans, Strausses, and Lillienthals, they see nothing wrong with their behavior, nor do they ever equate their prejudicial treatment of others with the discrimination that is wrought upon themselves. Indeed, their greatest efforts are seen, not in attempting to thwart discrimination but in imitating their Christian neighbors. Through their negative reaction to their Eastern European brethren as well as their own embrace of Christian traditions over Jewish ones, the family demonstrates marked anti-Semitic characteristics. This issue is compellingly explored against the hardly mentioned but ever-present backdrop of the events leading up to the European Holocaust, thus serving as a chilling reminder of the pervasive and dangerous effects of anti-Semitism, or prejudice in whatever form it chooses to take.

The play opens with a scene that sets the family’s glorification of Christianity over Judaism: Lala is decorating the family Christmas tree. The fact that she is “surrounded by cardboard boxes of ornaments” clearly shows that a Christmas tree is a family tradition in the Levy/Freitag home. Boo, however, is unhappy with Lala’s adorning the tree with a Christmas star. As she chastises her daughter, “Jewish Christmas trees don’t have stars.” A star would be as bad as setting up a manger scene on their lawn; both decorations would make people think “we’re a bunch of Jewish fools pretending we’re Christians.” Irony abounds in this scene. First, although Boo, supported by Reba, insists that Christmas is an American holiday, on par with Valentine’s Day or Halloween, it is a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. Second, and more notably, Boo and Reba and all of their upper-class Jewish milieu actively and eagerly take on the trappings of their Christian neighbors. They imitate the social activities of the Christians, from forming their own country club to creating a closed membership list at those clubs. As Sunny tells Joe, “Ballyhoo is asinine.... a lot of dressed up Jews dancing around wishing they could kiss their elbows and turn into Episcopalians.”

Despite the pretensions that the upper-class Jews make to society, they are bitterly aware of what they lack. Lala succinctly sums up their status in this important first scene. “Guess what, Mama? We’re Jews. We have no place in society,” she says. Boo concedes that maybe the Levys and Freitags are “not right up there at the tip top with the best set of Christians, but we come mighty close.” The fact that the family is the only Jewish household on Habersham Road supports Boo’s assertion, but no one stops to analyze the dysfunction inherent in this situation; not only has the Levy/Freitag family chosen to live amidst people who do not regard them as equal, but the family also can make no claims to actually belonging amidst these people because even they think they are actually inferior.

For the most part, however, the Levy/Freitag family does their best at overlooking their self-perceived inadequacies resulting from their Judaism. December 25 finds them in a living room strewn with the remains of ribbons, wrapping paper, and gift boxes. In stark contrast to this celebration is their ignorance of and disinterest in Passover, an important Jewish holiday. When Joe mentions this holiday, Boo has to remind her daughter of “[T]hat time we went to the Seder supper with one of Daddy’s business acquaintances.... You were in the sixth grade.” Lala’s remembrance of this holy occasion, however, centers on spilling red wine and being terribly bored by “all the ish-kabibble.”

The family feels drawn to Christian traditions despite the fact that they have experienced very real instances of discrimination. For example, the only reason Ballyhoo even takes place is that southern Jews were denied entrance to the private country clubs. More telling and more personal, however, is Sunny’s recollection of being discriminated against the summer she was going into seventh grade. At the Venetian Club Pool with her best friend, Sunny’s name was called out by a man who “said I had to get out of the water.” She tells Joe, “And Vennie Alice asked him why and he said Jews weren’t allowed to swim in the Venetian pool. And all the kids got very quiet and none of them would look at me.” The reaction to this discrimination also provides insight into the relationship between the Jews and their Christian friends. Sunny recalls how Vennie’s mother called up her mother and apologized, and she and Vennie “stayed friends — sort of. Neither of us ever mentioned it again, but it was always there.” Sunny’s recollection shows that while southern society prefers to pretend that such discriminatory treatment does not happen, they are aware of these instances as well as the inherent validity behind them; after all, no one protests such rules or such humiliations. Like the rest of her community, Sunny, who always

wanted “to be like everybody else,” accepts that being Jewish and being Christian are distinct from each other. Interestingly, Joe agrees with her but for a very dissimilar reason; where he comes from, in Brooklyn, Jews are proud of being Jews.

More disturbing than the glorification of Christianity, however, is the Jews’ imitation of Christian behavior to such an extent that they, too, have created their own social echelon. In their class system, Jews like themselves — from German background — are at the top, whereas Jews who do not come from a German background, or Jews “east of the Elbe,” the river that separated Germany from Czechoslovakia, are seen as vastly inferior. Joe’s entry into their lives sets off this alarming and perhaps unexpected prejudice. Many theater critics commented on the surprised gasp that Boo’s words, which close the second scene of act I, drew from the audience: “Adolph, that kike you hired has no manners.”

To Boo and her Jewish set, Joe is simply one of “the other kind.” Although Jews of Eastern European ancestry are different from German-descended Jews, no one really specifies in what way. Reba claims that a person can identify them merely by the “way they look,” but despite her foolish words, when Sunny tells her mother of the Ballyhoo date with Joe, Reba refers to him as “that good-looking boy who works for Adolph” and is pleased. Ironically, the whole family recognizes that Lala looks more like “the other kind” than the good kind of Jew; Lala herself regards her physical characteristics in comparison to the blond, Aryan-featured Sunny as proof that God prefers her cousin. “Look at my hair! Look at my skin! Look at my eyes! Listen to my voice!” she exclaims to Sunny. “I try, and I try, and no matter what I do it shows, and there’s just nothing I can do about it.” Physically then, Lala is like Joe: “too Jewish.”

The family is forced to deal with their anti-Semitism on the night of Ballyhoo. The insensitive Peachy lets Joe know that the Standard Club is restricted. By rights, people like Joe, “where you people went.... The Other Kind.... Russian. Orthodox,” go to the Progressive Club. The Standard Club is historically limited to German Jews, although they have started to let in a few non-German Jews, “but they try to only take ones that are toilet trained.” The argument that Joe and Sunny have as a result of this revelation is the most pointed discussion of Jewish anti-Semitism in the play. Despite her experience of being discriminated against because of her Judaism, it never occurred to Sunny that Joe would not want to be at a place that would discriminate against him because of his particular Jewish background. When Sunny tells him that the discrimination practiced by the Standard is not the same as the discrimination that was perpetrated against her by the Venetian Club, that in fact she regards herself and Joe as “equals,” Joe becomes extremely offended. Then Sunny tells him how embarrassed she felt at his impolite behavior of leaving her alone at the dance. She says, “How could you know any better?” which Joe interprets as Sunny saying that he could not possibly know any better because “the other kind” of Jew lacks the manners that the genteel German Jews possess. “Jew hater talk,...” he lashes out. “I been hearing that garbage all my life, but damned if I thought I’d ever hear it coming out of a Jewish girl.”

As Edward J. Mattimoe wrote in America, this anti-Semitism inflicted by Jews “show[s] that any ethnic group, once put down, absorbs some of the negativity into themselves.” The Jewish self-hatred plays out against the muted backdrop of the events in Europe. By December 1939, German Jews, living under the Third Reich, had already been deprived of their citizenship and segregated from Aryan society, and they had experienced numerous physical assaults in attacks on their person and in the destruction of their businesses and synagogues. As Don Shewey writes in American Theatre, “It’s a mark of Uhry’s skilful understatement that, without a word being spoken, the audience is agonizingly aware that on the other side of the Atlantic, Hitler’s ’final solution’ is making a mockery of distinctions between German Jews and ’the other kind.’” The historical knowledge of the losses the Holocaust inflicted upon the Jewish population renders Sunny’s belief that Hitler is an “aberration” painfully and terrifyingly naive.

The Last Night of Ballyhoo ends with the challenge it presents to the family to reject this ethnic negativity and stop turning on each other and, instead, to recognize the fallacy of Jewish anti-Semitism. They must embrace themselves as they are, with Jewish warts and all, and come to the recognition that being Jewish does not make them inferior, no matter what their Christian counterparts might think. The final image the play presents shows a future in which Sunny, at the very least, has come to learn about and value her Jewish heritage.

Source: Rena Korb, Critical Essay on The Last Night of Ballyhoo, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

Catherine Dybiec Holm

Dybiec Holm is a published writer and editor with a master’s degree in natural resources. In this essay, Dybiec Holm discusses multiple sources of tension in Uhry’s story that make it so effective.

In all storytelling, including drama, tension is a necessary element that makes the story interesting. Tension can be created by conflicts that characters need to overcome or by obstacles that their environment presents to these characters. In Alfred Uhry’s The Last Night of Ballyhoo, tensions abound, creating layers of nuances and dilemmas. These make for an interesting play and quickly let one know that this story goes far beyond the surface.

The primary source of tension in this play is the characters’ shame and denial of their own Jewish religion. But Uhry takes an already interesting premise and adds additional twists. The characters live in the South and are a minority in Atlanta, a predominantly Christian community. It is 1939, and Hitler is in power across the ocean. Jews in this community label each other in a racist fashion; German-American Jews feel that they are superior to Eastern European-American Jews.

Uhry’s loosely knit, extended family of characters knows little about their Jewish heritage and chooses not to pursue it. So desperate are these people to fit in with the rest of Atlanta’s non-Jewish population that the Freitag/Levy family puts up a Christmas tree every year, though no evidence of menorah candles (to celebrate Hanukkah) is found in the house. Boo, a character completely concerned with presenting the right appearance to society, justifies the presence of their Christmas tree without a star by making it clear to her daughter Lala that “Jewish Christmas trees don’t have stars.” Boo walks a fine tightrope between realizing she is not a Christian and not wanting to seems too Jewish:

Boo: If you have a star on the tree, you might as well go... buy a manger scene and stick it in the front year.

Lala: I’d like that.

Boo: Fine. Then everybody that drives down Habersham Road will think we’re a bunch of Jewish fools pretending we’re Christian.

Both Boo and Lala emphasize that their presence on Habersham Road is significant, since it’s the most upscale street in town and they are the only Jews on it (the other Jewish family lives “at the tacky end of the street where it doesn’t count”).

Boo is so concerned with appearances that she expends great energy to make sure that Lala doesn’t foul up and make the rest of the family look bad. She berates Lala for getting rejected by a college sorority, but Uhry never loses sight of the opportunity to show the audience the strange tightrope that these Southern Jews walk:

Boo: You keep making the same mistakes over and over! Your place in society sits there waiting for you and you do nothing about it.

Lala: Guess what, Mama? We’re Jews. We have no place in society.

Boo: We most certainly do! Maybe not right up there at the tip-top with the best set of Christians, but we come mighty close. After all, your great-grandma’s Cousin Clemmie was —

Boo and Lala: The first white child born in Atlanta!

Even the superficial and immature Lala has a sense for what their community really thinks about Jews. Much later, Lala again shows evidence of shame and self-hate when she compares her looks with Sunny’s:

Lala: Oh come on, Sunny. You’ve always gotten the attention. Even from God!

Sunny: What?

Lala: He didn’t give you one Jewish feature and look at me!

Sunny: That’s absurd.

Lala: Look at my hair! Look at my skin! Look at my eyes! Listen to my voice! I try and try and no matter what I do it shows and there’s just nothing I can do about it.

For Lala, her looks are the ultimate stamp of disgrace, something that cannot be disguised or hidden, something she is stuck with.

In scenes like these, Uhry plays with tension. The obsession that Lala and Boo have with appearances and societal mores is paired (and sometimes overshadowed) by the larger tension that these Jews are never completely accepted by society around

them. For example, both Lala and Boo are determined to find Lala a date for Ballyhoo, a prestigious holiday dance for Atlanta’s well-off, young Jews. But even the prestige of Ballyhoo is dampened with the knowledge that the local Christian population has their own holiday party, and Jews are not invited. Adolph and Joe discuss the Standard Club, the country club where Ballyhoo will be held:

Joe: Sounds pretty spiffy.

Adolph: I wouldn’t say that.

Joe: Jews only?

Adolph: You bet.

Joe: No Christians allowed?

Adolph: Technically, but the truth is none of ’em would wanna come anyway. They’ve got clubs of their own, which they won’t let us near.

Then, in the next line of dialog, Joe gets his first hint of discrimination between Jews, though he does not learn the details until later:

Joe: So this is where all the Jews go.
Adolph: Oh no. We’re restricted too.
Joe: What do you mean?

With some discomfort, Adolph explains that only wealthy Jews get into this club. It is much later that Joe learns the real reason: the club is open to German-American Jews and closed to American Jews of Eastern European descent. It is yet another layer of tension that Uhry weaves into this play.

With the introduction of Joe Farkas, the Jew from New York, Uhry places further illumination on the Freitag/Levy family’s shame and denial of their own heritage. Joe, a practicing Jew from a community where people are proud of their heritage, is a perfect foil for the denial and ignorance of people like Boo and Lala. Even the well-educated Sunny (who is a foil herself for the less-sophisticated Lala) knows very little about her Jewish traditions. But she knows enough to see that she does not fit in. And Sunny reveals, inadvertently, that she has some discomfort with the dysfunctional tightrope her family walks regarding their religious beliefs.

Joe: Are you people really Jewish?

Sunny: ’Fraid so. A hundred percent back — on both sides.

Joe: ’Fraid so?

Sunny: Oh, you know what I mean.

Joe: Yeah. You mean you’re afraid you’re Jewish.

Sunny: No. Of course not. That’s just an expression.

Joe: Ok. What do you mean?

Sunny: I don’t think I mean anything. It was just something to say. Can we please talk about something else?

Joe’s initial comment is also telling; these Jews are so unlike the Jews whom he lives among that he questions whether they are really Jewish.

Uhry also uses Joe to vocalize things Jewish, such as common Yiddish words like klutz or the Yiddish word for William (Velvel). It’s even more telling that the Freitag/Levy family usually does not know what the Yiddish words mean. Joe is also able to elaborate on traditions of which the family is either ignorant or disdainful, including Passover:

Lala: You have to sit through one of those boring things every single year? One night of all that ish-kabibble was enough to last me the rest of my life.

Boo: Now, Lala. Be tolerant.

Joe: I sit through two every year. First night at Aunt Sadie’s. Second night at home.

Lala: Poor baby!

Joe: Are you kidding? I wouldn’t miss either of ’em for anything in the world.

Not lost in the exchange is the irony of Boo telling Lala, a Jew, to be tolerant of Jewish customs. These Jews truly want to separate themselves from anything Jewish.

Shamed by their own Jewishness, the Freitag/Levy family holds onto the hope that as German-American Jews, they are at least superior to other Eastern-European American Jews. When Joe reveals his lineage (“Russia, Poland, Hungary. My family came from everywhere”), Boo takes an immediate dislike to him. In one of the most explosive and loaded moments in the play, Joe dodges taking Lala to a movie. After he leaves, Boo says, “Adolph, that kike you hired has no manners.”

Because Sunny is more aware and educated than the self-centered Lala, it makes sense that Sunny will, in the course of this play, honestly confront her own discomfort and puzzlement with the family shame. Sunny even has a hurtful story of discrimination from her own past that she shares with Joe. But Lala’s ignorance provides the perfect opportunity for Uhry to introduce another character to demonstrate the tension of self-hatred and denial that is so present in this play. Peachy Weil provides an excellent foil: he’s the opposite of Joe; he’s ashamed of his Jewishness (but vehemently proud to be a German-American Jew rather than an Eastern European one); he’s rich, of old southern money, and extremely concerned with appearances. Uhry makes Peachy’s obnoxious and ignorant persona obvious from the start. Here, Peachy not so subtly alludes to his alleged superiority as a German-American Jew, while making some pretty heartless statements:

Joe: Howza’ war news, Mr. A?

Adolph: Not so good.

Joe: Yeah, I got relatives over there.

Adolph: Poland?

Joe: Uuh-hunh. And Russia.

Adolph: Well. Let’s hope for the best.

Joe: Yep.

Peachy: Let’s hope they can dodge bullets.

Joe: Excuse me?

Peachy: Hey! Easy there, bud! None of this mess is my fault. It ain’t even my problem.

Joe: That right?

Peachy: You bet. It’s Europe’s problem and they gotta solve it on their own. Right, Adolph?

Adolph: I’d say that depends on where your family is.

Peachy: Well, mine’s been in Louisiana for a hundred and fifty years.

At times, Uhry’s characters touch upon subjects that could be considered feminist or gender role issues. These create interesting minor tensions of their own, though not as important to the story as some of the other contrasts that have been presented. Still, these moments serve to further compare the difference between Joe’s background and the Freitag/Levy family. Boo, for example, seems surprised and none too pleased when Joe informs her that he can cook and do dishes. However, when Sunny later mentions that she makes coffee in her dorm room all the time, Lala snipes, “I can imagine what that must taste like!” It is as if Lala is determined to hang on to something that she might be able to do better than Sunny, even if it is traditional “women’s work.” It is a credit to Uhry’s talent as a writer that he manages to keep the tone of the play both light and serious at the same time, amidst the sniping that takes place in this family.

The Last Night of Ballyhoo is a complex play with many opportunities for tension and for the exploration of troubling subjects. Despite this, the story manages to maintain a simultaneous mood of comedy. Don Shewey of American Theatre describes the play as edging “toward a sitcom formula without falling into it.” Amazingly, Uhry accomplishes the balance of comedy and seriousness, of subtlety and directness, all within the layers of tension that this story encompasses.

Source: Catherine Dybiec Holm, Critical Essay on The Last Night of Ballyhoo, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

Kate Covintree

Covintree is a graduate of Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, with a degree in English. In this essay, Covintree discusses the impact of southern culture on Jewish identity for the characters in Uhry’s play.

To be southern or to be Jewish in 1939 is to be part of a specific community with principles, ceremonies, language, attitude, and actions that represent and reinforce the culture. To be southern and Jewish is to be a part of a unique community that Alfred Uhry focuses on in his play The Last Night of Ballyhoo. Though the play primarily takes place in the house of Adolph Freitag, it coincides with two major events — the opening of the movie Gone With the Wind and Hitler’s rise to power — that stand like bookends at either side of the story and its characters. These events and the characters’ reaction to them reflect the struggle for allegiance this family must find. Are they true to their southern upbringing or their Jewish religion? This family is both southern and Jewish, and they stand in the midst of both cultures. As Tony Horwitz states in his book Confederates in the Attic,”[i]t was the honor-bound code of the Old South. One’s people before one’s principles.” For Jews in the South, the statement is compounded: who are the people, Jews or southerners, and which are the principles, orthodoxy or upbringing? The answer to this question for a southern Jew could completely alter his or her life. In The Last Night of Ballyhoo, Uhry argues that the Freitag family has misunderstood their priorities and improperly answered this question. These southern Jews have currently chosen the South before their Jewishness, but when introduced to Joe Farkas, the Freitags are forced to examine their southernness and their Jewishness.

For years, the Freitags and Levys have lived together as southerners. Since the deaths of Adolph and Boo’s brother and then Boo’s husband, Adolph has shared his home with his sister, Beulah, his sister-in-law, Reba, and their daughters, Lala and

Sunny, respectively. Like others of southern high society, Beulah Levy goes by her nickname, Boo, Adolph is a past president of the club, and they can trace their bloodline to “the first white child born in Atlanta.”

Lala Levy is a typical southern girl. She and her mother, Boo, are constantly worrying about keeping up appearances in the city of Atlanta. From the very first pages of the play, Lala’s two main concerns appear to be seeing the new movie Gone With the Wind and finding an appropriate escort to the social event of the season, Ballyhoo. Boo is constantly pressuring her to make acceptable choices and to rise to her place in society. She is embarrassed at her daughter’s choice to leave college after the disgrace of not getting into the right sorority. She vigorously works to ensure a date to Ballyhoo for Lala and to marry her off to someone acceptable and appropriate.

As German Jews, Boo and Lala clearly see themselves as superior to “the other kind” of Jews, the Orthodox Jews from Eastern Europe. But Lala, as with the rest of her family, is keenly aware of how being Jewish means that there are those in society superior to her. Nothing will ever make her completely acceptable in southern Christian society. The family struggles with being a part of the Jewish upper class, knowing they will never be a part of the Christian upper class. Adolph is past president of the Standard Club, a Jewish club, just as restrictive but started because Jews were not allowed in the other clubs. Lala has been raised with southern culture at the forefront, but she cannot reconcile the fact that her looks will always proclaim her as Jewish:

Look at my hair! Look at my skin! Look at my eyes! Listen to my voice! I try and I try and no matter what I do it shows and there’s just nothing I can do about it.

Lala blames her Jewish features for her inability to get a date to Ballyhoo and perhaps for her social failures at college.

As Sunny tells Joe, she and her family are a part of a class of “dressed up Jews... wishing they could kiss their elbows and turn into Episcopalians.” Perhaps this is why there is a Christmas tree in the Freitag home, a lifetime tradition for Sunny, a tradition that Boo justifies by comparing it to a Halloween decoration and banning the star. Perhaps, like other southern Jews of the time, their meals are not completely kosher, their weenie-roasters not strict about using all-beef hot dogs. Tony Horwitz gives an example in his book Confederates in the Attic of one such restaurant that fuses Jewish and southern culture: “Gershon Weinberg’s Real Pork Barbeque.”

This desire to be something else also explains Lala’s obsession with Gone With the Wind, a Hollywood movie that focuses on the survival of plantation owners following Emancipation near the end of the Civil War. In his book Confederates in the Attic, Horwitz argues that the movie “had done more to keep the Civil War alive, and to mold its memory, than any history book or event since Appomattox.” Though Jews went back as far as the Civil War, the movie clearly omits this. When Lala talks of writing a related story, she wants to name the plantation “something elegant and pure and real Protestant.” She chooses the name of her own street, not because her own Jewish family lives there but because it is a street that primarily belongs to “half the membership of the Junior League!”

It could be assumed that the Freitags and Levys are a family of Reform Jews, but they are so far reformed that they seem removed from the real Jewish center of this culture. As Uhry himself confesses to Alex Witchel in the New York Times article “Remembering Prejudice, of a Different Sort,” this family is “ashamed of being Jewish,” and there is “an ignorance, a hole where the Judaism should be.” It is not enough that there is a Christmas tree in their house, but none of the family members even knows what time of year Passover occurs. The Freitags do not know the Hebrew name for it, Pesach. They respond to the mere mention of the holiday as if it has nothing to do with their heritage, calling the seder meal “interesting” (Boo) and “boring” (Lala) and referring to the Hebrew prayers as “all of that ish-kabibble.” Even one of the most sacred of Jewish holidays and the basic language that surrounds it are foreign to the Freitags.

When Joe Farkas enters the home of this family, he is entering a Jewish home that is southern first and Jewish much further down the line. Ofcourse, Joe is a part of “the other kind,” an Orthodox Jew raised in New York on food from the “Old Country,” who “think[s] being Jewish means being Jewish.” He finds this type of southern Jewish home completely unbelievable and questions its very validity. Boo feels no conflict of loyalty in treating him poorly, even calling him a “kike,” as she believes that Eastern European Jews are also lower-class Jews. Of course, Joe’s desire to pay for Ballyhoo and Adolph’s response to the exchange briefly suggest that Boo’s assumption of class is inaccurate. Still, Boo, Lala, and Peachy see no conflict in mistreating Joe because he is more Jewish than they are.

Within this family, Joe withstands hurts like the ones Sunny admits to, hurts of which she herself is afraid. Though Adolph, Reba, and Sunny treat him with general kindness, it is still clear they are unfamiliar with his type of Jewishness and are not always able to prepare him for hurtful situations. Sunny has had her own experience with being the victim of unreasonable prejudice, when she was pulled out of a country club pool as a child for being Jewish. Even though Sunny tells Joe this story, she does not forewarn him about the possible attitudes and assumptions held by those at the Standard Club for Ballyhoo. When he comes to pick her up, he is not wearing a tuxedo and does not have a corsage. He is also unaware of the restrictive attitude of the club, and so Sunny unintentionally puts Joe in a situation that is just as insulting and humiliating as her own childhood experience with prejudice was.

In addition to this personal insult, Joe is appalled that these socialite Jews barely seem aware of the rising situation with Hitler in Europe. Peachy sees no connection between himself and the Jews in Europe. With the audience’s knowledge of the Holocaust, it almost becomes unreal that these Jewish characters think nothing of insulting other Jews nor of remaining ignorant to the injustices caused by the Hitler regime. In a time when southern society is so careful to separate types of Jewish people, there is a German government putting all Jews into one community, one that cannot tolerate any type of Jew.

Adolph and Sunny are perhaps the only people in their family even slightly aware of what it might really mean to be Jewish and its universal connection. Sunny is a stellar student, reading forward thinkers like Upton Sinclair, yet she remains removed from these ideas, never claiming any of them personally. She is guided by her southern culture and upbringing and has many prejudices to overcome and much to learn about what it really means to be Jewish. Her romantic relationship with Joe forces her to a private off-stage epiphany during which she must reassess the questions of who are her people, what are her principles, and how do these two things share company?

Sunny’s answers to these questions comprise the final scene of the play. Though the scene could be argued either as fantasy or reality, it clearly answers the question of southern/Jewish loyalty for her, for Joe, for the rest of the cast, and for the audience. Sunny’s ideal wish, her “something good,” is her answer — a shared Sabbath with her family, a moment when community is formed through the deep bond of the Jewish religion. Through Sunny, Uhry has also answered this question, scripting every character to speak in Hebrew. Uhry ends the play with simple stage directions, “the candles shine,” closing the play with this vision of hope and religious devotion and making his point and his position clear.

Source: Kate Covintree, Critical Essay on The Last Night of Ballyhoo, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

What Do I Read Next?

• Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy(1987) is the play that rocketed the author to success. Uhry won the Pulitzer Prize for this play about a southern Jewish matron’s decades-long relationship with her African-American chauffeur.
• Lanford Wilson’s play Talley’s Folly(1980) is set in the South in the 1940s. It tells of the courtship of a Protestant woman by her persistent Jewish suitor.
• Many critics have compared The Last Night of Ballyhoo to Tennessee Williams’s play The Glass Menagerie(1944). One of Williams’s finest dramas, this play revolves around a down-and-out St. Louis family. In hopes of finding a husband for her painfully shy daughter, Amanda encourages her son to bring “gentlemen callers” home to his sister, but her plans backfire.
• Wendy Wasserstein’s play The Sisters Rosenswieg(1992) deals with issues of self-hatred among expatriate Jewish New Yorkers. The sisters are three Brooklyn-born women who gather to celebrate one sister’s birthday and end up confronting their past and future.
• Southern writer Eudora Welty’s novel Delta Wedding(1946) focuses on the relationships between members of a plantation family gathered for a wedding in 1923.