BY JONATHAN ABARBANEL
Alfred Uhry didn’t write a play until the age of 48, and then won the Pulitzer Prize his very first time out with Driving Miss Daisy. He also received an Oscar for his screenplay adaptation. It then took him almost a decade to write his next play, The Last Night of Ballyhoo, because, as he confesses, "I was terrified to write a play because I didn’t know exactly what I’d done" with the first one.
Although he waited until middle age to become a dramatist in the formal sense, Uhry was already well-credentialed as a lyricist and librettist with three Broadway shows to his credit, two of which opened and closed in one night. The third one; however, was the charm. A musical adaptation of Eudora Welty’s The Robber Bridegroom was a hit, with lyrics and book by Uhry for which he received his first Tony Award nomination.
The standard admonition to playwrights is to write about what you know. Uhry seems to exemplify that. Born and raised within the highly assimilated German Jewish community of Atlanta, Uhry has set both his hit plays, and his most recent musical, Parade, within that same context. What’s more, both 'Daisy’ and Ballyhoo have autobiographical flourishes.
After studying at Brown University, Uhry came to New York in the early 1960’s to write. He began his career working for the great lyricist and composer, Frank Loesser (Guys and Dolls, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and The Most Happy Fella!). He considers Loesser one of his great mentors and teachers.
"I was hired by his publishing company to write songs and jingles and things," said Uhry. "We’d go up to Frank’s office and play our stuff for him every few weeks. It was like a master course in writing. Everything I learned about how to write, I learned from Frank. He was talking about lyrics, but it all applies to plays, too. That’s why my stuff is usually short. My first drafts are half as long as they’re supposed to be because I play it right down to the bone, and then I add to it. Most people do it the other way around. He drummed it into me that every syllable counts."
Uhry entered the Broadway arena in 1968, writing the lyrics to a musicalization of Steinbeck’s East of Eden called Here’s Where I Belong. The book was by the young Terrance McNally. Not only was the show a one-night wonder, but it also had a disastrous Philadelphia try-out. Uhry says the director was thoroughly inept, but that he didn’t know it at the time because it was his first show. He recalls, "There was a fire in the lights, in the gels, on the opening night in Philadelphia, and the director ran out of the theater screaming. He was the first one out. It was not a good sign."
An apprenticeship of sorts followed, with Uhry teaching a Junior High "Introduction to Shakespeare" class to make ends meet. He also began working at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, CT, where he helped rewrite and reconstruct the books to classic musicals. A hit at Goodspeed, a reconstruction of George M. Cohan’s 1904 show, Little Johnny Jones, became his second Broadway show. With Donny Osmond in the title role, it also opened and closed in one night. However, in addition to Loesser, Uhry says these experiences taught him his craft.
"For years, I was introducing ninth graders first to Romeo and Juliet and then to Macbeth. You get inside of those plays, you see how important structure is," said Uhry. "I really came to know all that at the same time I was revitalizing old musicals at the Goodspeed. Everyone who had written those shows was long dead, so I had a chance to experiment. Do a character set up, see how many jokes I could (write) and stay within character. So, between Shakespeare and George M. Cohan, I learned a lot."
By the time The Robber Bridegroom was produced on Broadway in 1978 (after several earlier productions, including a touring version by the Acting Company), Uhry was ready to move away from lyric writing–which he says he found extremely difficult, even painful–and towards playwriting.
After the success of Driving Miss Daisy, it took a commission from his native city to get him moving again as a playwright. He was asked to write a play for Atlanta’s cultural festival, to be held in conjunction with the 1996 Olympic Games held in the city. That’s where The Last Night of Ballyhoo premiered, before its Broadway production.
"It occurred to me that I would write a play about the last time Atlanta had been in the spotlight, which was 1939 when Gone With the Wind opened," said Uhry. I realized I’d always wanted to write a play about the atmosphere I grew up in. I’m from this German-Jewish family. And in that society, there was a lot of anti-Semitism. There really was a looking-down on the later immigrants from Eastern Europe, I think, because that particular bunch of people wanted to be as American as possible. It sort of was a stigma, they felt, to be Jewish. No one ever said that, but there was that anti-Semitism floating in the air. I thought, what a great field to write a play. You’ve got Scarlet O’Hara and Gone With the Wind on one side, you’ve got Hitler on the other side, and you’ve got these confused Jews in the middle."
That sounds like pretty serious stuff, but Ballyhoo is a romantic comedy, nonetheless. The tale is of his parents’ courtship "sort of," Uhry says. The "ballyhoo" of the title refers to a week of formal parties and dances held each year by Jewish society, an equivalent of the cotillions and coming-out parties to which Jews were not invited.
Of the social environment, Uhry says, "Mostly it was controlled by the women, who were–in the 30’s and 40’s and 20’s–underused as people, and they were smart. They didn’t have enough to do with their brains. I mean, how many pot roasts? How many games of mahjongg can you play? They were very involved in making sure their progeny married the right kind of Jew. It was a very screwed-up way to be. I thought I could get some comedy out of it, and some reality."
Uhry attended rehearsals of Ballyhoo here in Chicago (opening April 30 at the Mercury Theater), and was impressed with the cast. He says that rehearsals are what he likes most about theatre.
"The most fun I always have is at rehearsals, I love rehearsals," says Uhry. "Nothing bad can happen to you in rehearsals. I love the part of giving the play to somebody else who loves it. I love the exchange with actors," he enthuses, even though he says that first director in Philadelphia threw an ashtray at his head. "I think he was having a snit," Uhry added.
Uhry’s most recent effort, the Tony Award-winning book for the musical, Parade, also has an Atlanta Jewish setting, although the year is 1913 and the circumstances vastly different and darker. The show is based on the case of Leo Frank, a factory manager convicted of murder and lynched when the governor commuted his sentence. Issues of racism, anti-Semitism and southern jingoism cut through the piece. The same material was treated non-musically in the play, The Lynching of Leo Frank, produced last season by Pegasus Players. Directed by Harold Prince, Parade had a limited run at Lincoln Center a year ago. A national tour is scheduled to play Chicago in the fall, most likely at the Cadillac Palace.
Despite all the Jewish subject matter, Uhry does not pretend to be particularly religious. "I realize that I grew up in a damaging way. I was denied something that everybody should have, which is a clear identity of what you are. We were busy wishing we weren’t Jewish. I’ve probably come late to the party accepting, and being proud of, the fact that I’m Jewish. But I’m here. Am I an observant Jew? No. Maybe I’ll get there."
Uhry’s current projects both have Jewish connections, too. The estate of Anne Frank has asked him to write a new film script based on the complete diaries, as recently published. This one will not be as sentimental as the earlier play and film, Uhry promises.
He also recently returned from Bologna, Italy, where he researched his next play, based on history. As yet untitled, it is the tale of a Jewish baby boy, secretly baptized by his Christian nurse and snatched away from his family by the Catholic Church when the local Grand Inquisitor heard about the baptism. Raised as a Catholic, even though he knew his true parentage, he became a priest who preached against Jews. Sounds like a medieval tale, doesn’t it? But it took place in the 1850’s.
Over the last decade, Uhry’s success has catapulted him to a seat on the Council of the Dramatists Guild. Not a union, the Guild is a voluntary association of playwrights, composers and lyricists. Uhry urges young writers to join, or at least to understand their contractual rights, especially in a writing world dominated by film and TV.
"Most young playwrights don’t understand a simple fact, and that is that they own their own copyrights," he says. "Most playwrights who are under 30 assume that it’s going to be like the movies, and that somebody else can tell 'em what to do. It’s vitally important for a playwright, or a composer or a lyricist to understand that they are in control of what they write, and that nobody can tell 'em what to do if they don’t want to do it. The theater may not pay a lot of money, but it gives an artist the right to have performed what he or she wants to be performed. And sheer ignorance is eroding into that. Producers nowadays are playing on this, and are trying to get movie kind of rights for no money."
Uhry also strongly asserts that American drama is healthy, despite the virtual disappearance of new work from Broadway. "You go to any major city in America–certainly Chicago, which is the best example–there’s always new plays being performed. You go off-Broadway in New York right now, there are five or 10 really good new plays. In the old days they would have been playing on Broadway. Yes, I think the American theater is fine."