The Last Night of Ballyhoo
at the Garage at Steppenwolf
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Ballyhoo resonates with all these influences. Like Hellman, Uhry is a southern Jew who draws on his own family history–though nothing in the play suggests the Uhry clan was anything like Hellman’s venal ancestors. The family here more closely recalls the gentile gentry of Gone With the Wind or the impoverished Episcopalians of The Glass Menagerie. Ballyhoo’s Boo Levy, a middle-aged widow, frets over her daughter Lala with the same angry obsessiveness that Menagerie’s matriarch Amanda Wingfield does over “painfully shy” Laura. But there’s nothing shy about Lala: flighty and flirtatious, she dreams of being the next Margaret Mitchell and behaves like Scarlett O’Hara, right down to the catchphrase “fiddle-dee-dee” and her white, green-sashed hoop skirt. Where Scarlett seethed with jealous resentment of her gentle, self-sacrificing rival Melanie, Lala bristles at the seemingly favored status afforded her brainy, beautiful cousin, Sunny Freitag, whose sweet, somewhat dim mother, Reba, was married to Boo’s late brother.
The four women live together with Boo’s bachelor brother, Adolph, owner of a successful bedding company. But the family’s material comfort (set designer Robert Odorisio has transformed the stage into the living and dining room of a bungalow designed in stucco-walled Spanish-Moorish style) is at odds with their often strained interactions. Adolph may be Boo’s brother, but he seems to care more for Reba and Sunny than he does for Boo and Lala. Boo competes with her sister-in-law over everything from pot roast recipes to the proper way to decorate a Christmas tree (“Christmas is just another American holiday if you can leave out all that silly business about Jesus,” she insists). Boo also attempts to squelch her daughter’s ridiculous dreams of becoming a novelist, insisting that Lala settle down to the business of finding a mate who will elevate her socially. The starting point is securing a date for Ballyhoo, the social event of the season for southern Jews of German ancestry like the Freitags, who try to brush off discrimination by Christian country clubs while turning their own brand of snobbery on less assimilated eastern European Jews.
Among Southern’s other novels are Blue Movie, about a world-famous filmmaker who sets out to create the ultimate porn flick (the book came out two years before Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris), and The Magic Christian, the tale of a madcap millionaire named Guy Grand whose mission is to prove that people will do anything anywhere anytime for money–including diving for dollars in a huge vat of animal waste that Grand sets up in downtown Chicago. Southern’s film credits include coauthoring the screenplays for Roger Vadim’s sci-fi sex farce Barbarella, for Tony Richardson’s over-the-top adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s satire of the funeral industry, The Loved One (written with Christopher Isherwood), for Easy Rider (written with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda), and for Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece Dr. Strangelove, the tale of a mad military officer who starts a nuclear war to combat a communist conspiracy to destroy Americans’ “precious bodily fluids” through fluoridation. (The script was based on a deadly serious cold war thriller, which Southern and Kubrick turned into brilliant, horrifying comedy.)
