"The Last Night of Ballyhoo"

Theatre review
"The Last Night of Ballyhoo" at Ithaca College
The Ithaca Journal
December 13, 2007
746 words
"Selco bows out with a fine 'Last Night of Ballyhoo'"

full text here

Selco bows out with a fine ‘Last Night of Ballyhoo'
By Mark Tedeschi
Special to The Journal

The “ballyhoo” in Ithaca College's latest production, Alfred Uhry's dramedy “The Last Night of Ballyhoo,” referred to an exclusive Jewish country club's annual social shindig, an event that is built up higher than it deserves. The characters' disappointment following the function suggests the dictionary definition of the word: “used to refer to one who uses any means necessary to inflate an object or idea to a status to which it does not rise.” IC's production, on the other hand, offered quite the opposite.

“Ballyhoo,” which closed Dec. 9, was award-winning director and IC theater professor Arno Selco's final show (after over 80 directing credits and 25 years teaching at IC), and he certainly rose to the expectations; it was a smart, sophisticated, well-directed production devoid the frills or extravagance you might find in a less attentive director's grand finale.

The story, written in 1996 for the Olympic Arts Festival in Georgia (along with “Driving Miss Daisy” and “Parade”), was a significant personal choice for Selco. “[It's] about the recognition and acceptance of each individual's way of life, in spite of societal pressure to be like everyone else,” he wrote in the program notes. “This is a phenomenon I have experienced.”

“Ballyhoo” takes place in Atlanta in 1939 and follows a Jewish family (the Frietags) through their holiday season. They seem happy enough, but eventually the discontent hidden beneath hoop skirts and Christmas trees boils over. For the most part, they're good people, too - just misguided by the identity crises related to being Jewish, American and southern. For them, the premiere of “Gone With the Wind” supersedes in importance anything Hitler may be up to across the globe.

The set design (Samantha Yaeger), though, was the first element that grabbed my attention. The hardwood floors and wallpaper - both hand-painted, though you'd never guess by looking - served as the backbone of a confident set layered with depth that allowed the actors to move up and down, back and forth, left and right across the stage. There was a living room, a kitchen, a staircase, a second-story facade, and two extra pieces of scenery that appeared (literally) when they needed to.

The lighting (Teresa Sears) was at once subtle and prominent, as it worked closely with the sound design (Jeff Strange); the unmistakable noise of a car pulling into a driveway fit precisely with the understated glow of headlights from the windows at stage left. The scenes were punctuated mostly with Christmas music, an auditory reminder that these characters, donning beautiful, time-and-locale-appropriate costumes (designed by Katie Delaney), remained stuck in a perpetual cultural confusion.

There was Lala (Lauren Wightman), the graceful but socially unsuccessful “natural born usherette” daughter, and her supposedly “less-Jewish”-looking sister Sunny (Abbe Tanenbaum); Boo (Meredith Ashley Beck), the mother who was ever eager to find Lala a date for Ballyhoo; Reba (Dani Stoller), the absentminded aunt; and Adolph (Daniel Greenwood), the sagacious bachelor uncle. Wightman and Greenwood offerred standout performances with natural, well-timed delivery.

Romantic interests for the girls showed up later: Joe Farkas (Michael Haller), an actual practicing Jew whose only shortcoming, to the members of the Frietag's club, is that he is of Eastern Orthodox descent; and Peachy Weil (Ace Heckathorn), a charming jester of a young man who rivets listeners with fantastic stories, only to throw his audience off guard with a goofy catch phrase (which I won't spoil). The strongest conflict emerged when Joe discovered the nature of the Ballyhoo club's exclusivity.

At first, I couldn't decide why Selco didn't choose a “bigger” production for his final work. With his credentials, it probably wouldn't have been hard to create a show teeming with flamboyance, even flamboyance that could enhance the story's message. Instead, he chose a work that raised clear and familiar yet relevant and universal questions. To name a few: What does it mean to “be” Jewish, or for that matter, to be born into any sort of label? Is it a question of inheritance, practice, or both? Moreover, should following one's heritage be a conscious choice or an obligation? Do certain inborn characteristics or harmless practices discredit one's right to acceptance?

The answer to that last question was obviously “no,” but you don't need to look far to see that too many people disagree. I imagine that Selco was eager to take this last chance to encourage cooperation amid discord, while at the same time, exercising the satisfying opportunity to showcase the talents he fine-tuned through his illustrious career.

"Nine Parts of Desire"

Theatre review
"Nine Parts of Desire" at the Kitchen Theatre
Ithaca Times
December 12, 2007
768 words
"Lone Survivors"

full text here

Lone Survivors
By: Mark Tedeschi
12/12/2007

Shia Islam founder Amam Ali said, "God created sexual desire in 10 parts; he gave nine parts to women and one to men." (I suppose I should be offended at the blanket generalization of one-dimensionality, but for some reason, I'm not.) His quote is the genesis for the title of the Kitchen Theatre's current mainstage production, Nine Parts of Desire.

Nine Parts was written and originally performed by Iraqi-American playwright and actress Heather Raffo. Here, the actress-director team of Lanna Joffrey and Carmel O'Reilly unite again - they worked together on this piece last year in Boston - and they've collaborated with the creative staff at the Kitchen to generate a moving, intense, and overall remarkable production.

Raffo's creation of the work stems from her visits to women of different social situations in Iraq. Their stories provided the basis for the nine separate, completely unique characters in Nine Parts. Joffrey meanders, drifts, rushes, and creeps to and fro across the stage, entering different spaces and lighting schemes while drastically altering her clothing, hair, and voice dozens of times throughout the show.

There isn't a straight story to Nine Parts as much as there is an arc of immediacy to the monologues delivered. Joffrey addresses the audience as if they were a pair of ready-to-listen Western ears and avoids pigeonholing her listeners into stereotypes by avoiding them herself; she plays characters we can identify with, but who clearly have their own specific experiences and biases to relay.

Some of the memorable characters include an Iraqi woman who lost her entire family from an American bombing, a pseudo-intellectual British woman sporting a grey blazer and a flask of Scotch, a teenage Iraqi girl in an *NSYNC t-shirt obsessed with American pop culture, a nurse in an Iraqi ward, an elderly hunchbacked merchant, and an Iraqi-American woman with relatives to whom she can't get closer than a long-distance telephone call.

The women all profess a unified quality: an unquantifiable love that can only be touched upon by language heavy with imagery and emotion.

The scenery intensifies the words. The background consists of empty white frames over splashes of white, black, and midnight blue paint and a winding river that connects at the ground, where the river turns into a real-life waterway, splitting the dusty tile floor to make way for a narrow creek in the middle of the stage. Woven baskets of clothing on the ground give Joffrey a few places to extract and deposit her many fluid wardrobe changes.

Nine Parts is a challenging undertaking for an actress, to say the least, so it's almost obvious to say that Joffrey holds her own. But she knows the material intimately and, as far as I could tell on opening night, flawlessly. She visits all the corners of emotion in this show, and will surely hold your attention steadfast for 90 minutes.

Joffrey's musings and stories become most relevant, understandably, when she addresses Americans' attitudes about the war in Iraq. An American character criticizes her friend for calling the war "heartbreaking" while she enjoyed a pedicure; then the character remembers she was getting a pedicure at the time, too. "I am so stressed out," she says. "Maybe I should take a yoga class."

It's indeed depressing to think that we live in a country responsible for irreparable destruction in Iraq, and it's even more frustrating to think most of us physically can't be part of the solution -and if there were a solution, the complete arresting of daily life in America wouldn't be part of it.

The graphic description of some probably true horrors sounds a bit gratuitous - does their existence alone merit their mention? - but in a production with such close attention to language, I have to give the benefit of the doubt; Raffo is not trying to incite a revolution, but rather to stir up conversation.

I also question her depiction of Iraqi (and Iraqi-American) women's perceived glossing over of the American involvement in Iraq. Judging by all the devastation the characters have detailed, wouldn't the vast majority of Iraqis be consistently furious with Americans? But again, Raffo would know better than I; perhaps it's a temporary coping mechanism to perceive bombings in nearby towns as a form of entertainment. Few people can claim knowledge of what people in other parts of the world truly think about Americans.

There is at least one assertion that's absolute: "You have our war inside you now," she tells us. She's right; the Iraq war is already a part of our history, and historical events inspire important conversations - and so will Nine Parts of Desire.