Looking In and Out in ‘Ballyhoo’

“The Last Night of Ballyhoo” is, on one level, a soft-focus period piece, casting a gentle and good-humored glow on a curious slice of Americana in 1939.

Yet Alfred Uhry’s comedy also resonates beyond its time and place. It examines an ever-simmering feature of American culture--the assimilation of “the other.”

Uhry’s play opened at the Can~on Theatre in Beverly Hills Sunday, in a sterling staging by Ron Lagomarsino, who also directed its much-lauded New York run. It should provide stimulating food for thought, as well as laughs, in Los Angeles, where immigration and assimilation are the subjects of everyday conversation.

The melting pot certainly worked its will on the German American Atlanta Jews depicted in “Ballyhoo.” The younger generation--represented by first cousins Sunny Freitag, 20, and Lala Levy, 22--can’t even identify Passover or say “Shabbat Shalom.”

Sunny (glamorous Rebecca Gayheart), home from Wellesley for Christmas vacation, could pass for a blond shiksa--though she wouldn’t know the word. Although she remembers one incident of anti-Semitism from her childhood, she appears generally untroubled by her easily overlooked status as a dormant Jew.

Lala (Perrey Reeves) is another story. A college dropout, she yearns to be Scarlett O’Hara, Margaret Mitchell, or both--the play begins on the day “Gone With the Wind” premiered in Atlanta. In her first scenes, Lala is decorating a Christmas tree. She believes she looks entirely too Jewish. It might

even prevent her from getting a date for Ballyhoo--a seasonal ball for upper-crust, young Southern Jews.

The two cousins, whose fathers are dead, live in the same affluent household as their mothers and uncle. Lala’s tough and testy mother, Boo (Rhea Perlman), channels most of her energy into worrying about her daughter--reminiscent of Amanda Wingfield in “The Glass Menagerie.” Sunny’s mother, Reba (Harriet Harris), is cheerfully naive and scatterbrained. Boo’s brother Adolph (Peter Michael Goetz) is a genial teddy bear who runs the family business, Dixie Bedding.

These middle-aged Jews don’t know much about Judaism, either. However, the older women have clearly absorbed that it’s better to be German American Jewish than it is to be “the other kind”--shorthand for the more recent wave of Eastern European Jews. Sunny is more open-minded, especially when she’s courted by her uncle’s young employee Joe (Mark Kassen), a Brooklyn Jew of recent immigrant stock.

Joe’s arrival is the play’s strongest narrative engine, yet Uhry doesn’t open it up full-throttle. He fails to explain why Adolph not only readily accepts Joe as an employee but actively encourages Joe’s wooing of Sunny. Adolph is a past president of a club that’s closed to “the other kind,” yet he lacks Boo’s virulent prejudice or even Reba’s more benign variety. Just when we ought to hear an explanation, Adolph instead offers a sappy account of a long-ago flirtation with a woman on a bus. Goetz’s performance isn’t at fault; he delivers his under-written lines with complete assurance.

There are traces of sap near the end, too. But in the final scene, which is detached from the previous level of realism, Uhry achieves genuine poignancy, particularly given our knowledge of what the immediate future held for Europe’s Jews in 1939. The play’s rich social comedy overshadows its mushier moments. Although Boo is saddled with a couple of the script’s most unlikely lines (as when she momentarily wonders whether the police have arrived to arrest her daughter for stealing a glossy Scarlett O’Hara photo), Perlman’s Boo and Reeves’ Lala make a memorably funny pair. Perlman, her features generally knotted with anxiety, plays a honeyed Southern belle herself when necessary, showing us where Reeves’ Lala learned her lessons.

The comedy is enhanced in the second act by the arrival of Ryan Hurst’s Peachy Weil, a wealthy suitor for Lala. Peachy amuses himself no end with his loud, overbearing jokes and hair; and because he’s onstage for such a short time, he doesn’t overstay his welcome.

Uhry’s next project, the musical “Parade,” opening this fall at New York’s Lincoln Center, sounds much darker--it’s about an anti-Semitic lynching in 1915 Georgia. This may help explain why the “Ballyhoo” characters, 24 years later, kept their Christmas tree visible through the front window.

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* “The Last Night of Ballyhoo,” Can~on Theatre, 205 N. Can~on Drive, Beverly Hills. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 and 7 p.m.; Oct. 29, Nov. 25, 27, Dec. 23, 2 p.m.; New Year’s Eve Gala, Dec. 31, 4 and 8 p.m. Dark evenings, Nov. 1, 26, 29, Dec. 25, Jan. 1. Ends Jan. 3. $32.50-$42.50. (310) 859-2830, (213) 365-3500. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

Perrey Reeves: Lala Levy

Harriet Harris: Reba Freitag

Rhea Perlman: Boo Levy

Peter Michael Goetz: Adolph Freitag

Mark Kassen: Joe Farkas

Rebecca Gayheart: Sunny Freitag

Ryan Hurst: Peachy Weil

Susan Dietz and Joan Stein present Alfred Uhry’s play. Directed by Ron Lagomarsino. Sets by John Lee Beatty. Costumes by Jane Greenwood. Lights by Kenneth Posner & Jeff Croiter. Sound by Jon Gottlieb. Incidental music by Robert Waldman. Production stage manager Meredith J. Greenburg.