![]() ![]() While The Last Night of Ballyhoo deftly explores this anti-Semitism, Uhry also intersperses his serious message with sparkling banter, comedic non sequiturs, and hilarious characters and characterization. The prejudice that they experience as a result of their religion does not deter them from embracing mainstream southern society or from replicating this discrimination within their own culture German-Jews such as the Levys and Freitags look down on “the other kind” of Jews-Eastern European Jews. All these trappings and conveniences of wealth, however, cannot change the fact that they are Jews who live in an overwhelmingly Christian society. ![]() Their children may attend prestigious private universities. They live in a large home on one of Atlanta’s finest streets. Uhry combined these two interests to create the privileged world of the Levy / Freitag families. As he told Don Shewey from American Theatre, “I went to one of the last Ballyhoos there was, when I was 16-it was like a German-Jewish debutante ball.” However, Uhry also had a keen desire to explore Jewish identity, including prejudice inflicted on Jews by other Jews. ![]() The setting and plot of The Last Night of Ballyhoo developed from stories Uhry heard growing up in a southern Jewish family, as well as his own experiences. In his second play, The Last Night of Ballyhoo, Alfred Uhry explores the lives of Jewish southerners, a society that he introduced to the American theater-going public with his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Driving Miss Daisy. ![]()
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