Wrongs of the South

When playwright Alfred Uhry’s mother was a junior at Wellesley, she spent New Year’s Eve back home in Atlanta with a young man who worked for her father. They had a quarrel, after which she returned to school and ignored his persistent pursuit. When he wrote her a note trying to apologize, she tore it up.

She did, however, keep the torn letter. That souvenir of his parents’ courtship, augmented by memory and imagination, is at the heart of Uhry’s romantic comedy, “The Last Night of Ballyhoo.” Starring Rhea Perlman, Harriet Harris and Peter Michael Goetz, the Tony-winning play opens today at the Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills.

Uhry, 61, has again chronicled what he knows best. Much as his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Driving Miss Daisy,” was rooted in memories of his grandmother and her longtime black chauffeur, so does “Ballyhoo” re-create faded rituals of his parents’ era. For “Parade,” which opens at Lincoln Center here in December, Uhry again shapes universal tales from the fabric of Atlanta’s rich Jewish history.

“Ballyhoo” began as a commission from the 1996 Cultural Olympiad in Atlanta and focuses on what Uhry calls “the last time Atlanta was in the international spotlight”--December 1939, the time of the world premiere of “Gone With the Wind.” It was also when Hitler was invading Poland, which offered the playwright a larger context for his story of Jews who were not comfortable being Jews, and the prejudices they nourished and fought.

“I was always aware of the dichotomy of being a Jewish Southern boy and wanting to be the center of things in high school,” Uhry recalls during a rehearsal break for “Parade.” And, he says, he was similarly aware “that there were clearly in our city two kinds of Jews--’us and them.’ ‘Them’ were of Eastern origin, wore yarmulkes and were conservative. It was a very interesting prejudice, and one I never understood.”

In “The Last Night of Ballyhoo,” named after the German Jewish social event that thrived in Atlanta from the 1930s to the 1950s, Uhry alters family history here and there to create the Freitag family, assimilated German Jews often as intolerant toward Eastern European Jews as the non-Jewish community was toward Jews. The romance of Sunny and Joe, German Jew and Russian Jew, is as much a cultural duel as a romantic one.

Uhry’s own family’s German Jewish ancestors--on both sides--settled in the South in the mid-1800s and were more overtly Southern than Jewish. Like the Freitags, the Uhrys had Easter egg hunts and a Christmas tree. While they belonged to a synagogue, it was simply called the Temple, Uhry says, and the rabbi, who called himself Doctor, preached in a frock coat. On Easter Sunday the year he was 12, young Uhry sang the solo in “Lord, I Want to Be a Christian” with the Atlanta Boys Choir.

“He brings his unique background to his stories,” says Martin Bell, senior producer of Toronto-based Livent, which developed “Parade.” “Like Faulkner and Fitzgerald, he is from a specific time and place--the Jewish community of Atlanta in the 20th century--and has become the chronicler of that time and place. And like all great chroniclers of a time and place, he is kind of a fish out of water.”

Uhry expresses similar sentiments, talking about the prejudice he experienced as a boy because of “my Jewish face.” Feeling “out of the loop” as a Jew in Atlanta, he went off to Brown University where, among other things, he met Robert Waldman, his future songwriting partner, and Joanna Kellogg, his future wife--an Episcopalian. Bolstered by $50 a month from his mother, he moved to New York after graduation, got married and, with Waldman, worked as a songwriter for composer-lyricist and music publisher Frank Loesser.

In 1968, he and Waldman musicalized John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden,” an experience Uhry calls “a baptism of fire.” At its out-of-town opening, there was an electrical fire in the first act and a death in the balcony during the second. It ran one night on Broadway, recalls Uhry, who says “before I could write the thank-you notes for the telegrams, the show was gone.”

Saying “you learn how to get back up again,” Uhry got a part-time job teaching high school drama at New York’s Calhoun School. He didn’t set aside his musical passions, continuing to write amid the distraction of his growing family. “In those days,” he recalls, “there were four children, their friends, hamsters, gerbils, dogs and cats in our apartment. My wife was making much more money [as a teacher] than I was, so I was often the one that was home. My office was my bed, and when I really got going I would sit there and have to put my fingers in my ears.”

Uhry turned out score after score with composer Waldman (who today also writes incidental music for Uhry’s plays). The two men worked on one musical that didn’t get produced and another, “Swing” (about ‘40s swing bands) that he says died in Washington, D.C. On his own, Uhry received a Tony nomination for his book for the musical “The Robber Bridegroom” in 1976.

Still teaching part time at Calhoun, Uhry began to rework books of old musicals for Connecticut’s Goodspeed Opera House. Much as he learned brevity from Loesser--”Frank said, ‘You don’t waste words’ “--he also learned playwriting from resuscitating musicals and teaching Shakespeare to ninth-graders. “Teaching those plays and getting inside their rhythms, you understand the craft really well,” he says. “And if, at the same time, you’re writing silly musical comedy scenes, you learn a lot about the construction of a play.”

His final disappointment as a lyricist came in the late ‘80s when he, Waldman and book writer John Weidman worked on “America’s Sweetheart,” a musical based on the life of Al Capone. Working with the Northwestern University drama department, they lived in student apartments and ate dorm food for 10 weeks. Uhry was miserable, he says, and decided he would not write lyrics anymore; he would stick with teaching.

Enter fate in the person of producer Jane Harmon, a longtime friend who sought his opinion one day on a play about a white woman and black woman. Doing so, says Uhry, “I was convinced that I could write a better play. And, almost immediately, it popped into my head to write a play about my grandmother and her driver. I’d written all these musical books, but I had never written a play. It took me six months to get up the guts to do it, and another three maybe to write it.”

The play, which Harmon went on to co-produce with Playwrights Horizons, was “Driving Miss Daisy.” Running more than three years off Broadway as well as touring extensively here and abroad, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.

Uhry, who said at the time he wouldn’t have been more stunned if he’d been named Miss America, had waited a long time for his success. He first met with director Ron Lagomarsino about “Driving Miss Daisy” on his 50th birthday, and thinks it is no coincidence that his last child was just finishing high school then. “I think in looking back on it all in those years, what I probably wanted the most was the family, because I think if I had wanted the other more I would have had it. The older I get, the more I believe that people control their destinies, and some instinct told me this is the most important thing for me. I was so lucky--I see a lot of people in my business, my age, with nothing.”

Richard Zanuck, who produced the film of “Driving Miss Daisy,” recalls how, shortly after they bought the play, Uhry drove Zanuck and his wife, Lili, around Atlanta, pointing out places important to his--and Miss Daisy’s--family. Visiting with Uhry and his mother, looking at scrapbooks of the real Miss Daisy and her chauffeur, Zanuck says, “I thought, here was a guy writing from his heart as much as from anyplace else. I realized that besides being a great talent, he was a gentleman and very untouched by it all.”

Uhry, who won the Pulitzer for his first play and an Academy Award for his first screenplay, still seems far more like a ninth-grade Shakespeare teacher than an Oscar-winning screenwriter. He is unassuming and earnest, his conversational mantra is the word “lucky,” and he seems determinedly unaffected by all his success and celebrity. He and his wife, today a professor of reading at Fordham University, still live in the same Upper West Side apartment where they raised their children on teachers’ salaries.

But after “Daisy,” worried about what he calls “the sophomore curse,” Uhry threw himself into screenwriting rather than playwriting. Over the next decade, he wrote more screenplays, including “Mystic Pizza” and “Rich in Love,” which got made, and several that didn’t. He also did movie doctoring on films, working at one point on a version of “The Bridges of Madison County.”

Finally, he says, he was able to write “Ballyhoo.” Unlike “Daisy’s” 27 scenes and two characters, “Ballyhoo” sets its seven characters in a play so traditional in its structure that several critics said it seems as if it were written in 1939 as well as set then. It is still about the South and family, says director Lagomarsino, but Uhry’s canvas is larger.

The two plays also share what Lagomarsino calls a “cumulative effect.” “They begin with the laughter of recognition,” says Lagomarsino, who is also directing the Canon Theatre production of “Ballyhoo.” “But the depth of the characters is something that grows as the evening progresses. Suddenly, we find ourselves being very moved by these characters in ways that are surprising.”

Zanuck says he received thousands of letters from people who saw their own families in “Driving Miss Daisy,” and Lagomarsino reports similar reactions from theatergoers at both plays. And, he adds, the people reacting weren’t all Jewish. “I’m Irish-Italian Catholic, and I can relate to these characters.”

Uhry and associates are hoping for that same universality with “Parade,” a musical that concerns the 1913 arrest and, later, lynching of Jewish factory supervisor Leo Frank for a crime he did not commit. With a score by 28-year-old composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown, it is directed by Harold Prince, who also comes from a family of German Jews who settled in America during the mid-1800s.

Uhry had talked earlier with Prince about a musical project that never materialized, and the two men stayed in touch. Chatting about “Ballyhoo” a few years ago, the director “asked me why I thought the Jews of Atlanta were just hurtling so wildly toward assimilation--more than in other places,” Uhry says. “I said, ‘Well, I guess it’s because of the Leo Frank case.’ ”

“Parade” is particularly important to Uhry, he says, “because it’s my guts. My great-uncle owned the pencil factory in Atlanta where the crime happened, and my grandmother was a contemporary of Leo and Lucille Frank. If anybody mentioned the Leo Frank case, the older generations would get up and walk out of the room; it was just too painful to talk about.

“Before the Leo Frank case, German Jews [in Atlanta] had pretty much assimilated themselves into American life, and anti-Semitism was not a problem. All of a sudden, Jewish store windows were being broken, and there were virulent, vicious anti-Semitic newspaper articles. From the time I was 20 years old, I saw the dramatic possibilities.”

Uhry continues to write films. Bruce Beresford, who directed “Driving Miss Daisy,” is set to direct the film version of “Ballyhoo” for ABC next year, and Uhry recently completed a screenplay based on the novel “Taft,” commissioned by “Driving Miss Daisy” star Morgan Freeman. Sally Field and Disney have also commissioned him, he says, to do a screen version of Eudora Welty’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Optimist’s Daughter.”

He has not put plays aside, however. Uhry is already thinking about his next play, which he describes only as based on nonfiction historical events taking place in Italy in the middle of the 19th century. “After I won the Oscar, I thought, ‘Why should I worry about the theater?’ ” Uhry says. “It was cold and cruel and hard. But I found that the real heart of my joy of writing is for the theater. That’s what I was raised to do.”

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“The Last Night of Ballyhoo,” Canon Theatre, 205 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills. Opens today. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 p.m.; Sundays, 3 and 7 p.m. Ends Jan. 3, 1999. No performances Nov. 26, Dec. 24, Dec. 25 or Jan. 1. (310) 859-2830.

“Parade,” Vivian Beaumont Theater, Lincoln Center, New York. Opens Dec. 17. (212) 239-6200.