I remember trudging upstairs to the tiny 74-seat Studio Theater at Playwrights Horizons in the spring of 1987 to see a play that sounded distinctly unpromising. It was about -- gads! -- an elderly white woman and her black chauffeur. On one hand, it sounded politically unsavory: have we progressed no further than portraying African-Americans onstage as servants? On the other hand, it sounded theatrically too dreary for words: how could it be anything but a parade of predictable Sunday-school pieties about how we're all alike under the skin and we should all get along? I personally resisted every inch of the way the feeling I left the theater with that night: wow, Driving Miss Daisy is a good play!

Of course, it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and to run for three years Off Broadway while regional theaters everywhere snapped it up. Inevitably it became a movie that cost $7.5 million to make and earned $93.6 million, not to mention three Academy Awards for best actress (Jessica Tandy), best screenplay adaptation (Uhry himself), and best film of 1990. It even found itself the punchline to a joke. The actress laments that Hollywood movies recognize only three ages of womankind: babe, district attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.

But before it became famous for being famous, Daisy proved itself through the subtlety and subversiveness of its storytelling. The basic outline still makes snobs snicker; it seems almost cynically calculated to appeal to the matinee ladies who remain the backbone of the Broadway audience. On closer inspection, though, you're forced to realize that Uhry places front and center characters who usually hover on the sidelines of traditional family plays. Intense relationships between little old rich white ladies and their black caretakers exist everywhere, and we know less about them than we think we do. Far from being a lovable granny, Miss Daisy is cranky and suspicious. And even though as a retired schoolteacher she's smart enough to know better, she's no less susceptible to racial prejudice than any other Southerner of her time; a single missing 30-cent can of salmon is all she needs to convict all black males of congenital thievery. Her physical and social vulnerability, because of her age and because she's Jewish in an overwhelmingly Christian society, only exacerbates the sharpness with which she hides her fear and fragility. Meanwhile, we in the audience want Hoke, her middle-aged companion, to be sassy and wise-cracking and give her her comeuppance. Instead, he's servile and uncomplaining, dignified yet taciturn. The play's final tableau -- she's in a nursing home and he's feeding her with a spoon -- leaves the audience with a sigh whose sweetness has to be measured against the distance this odd couple has traveled to this moment of human intimacy.

Uhry has made no secret of the fact that these characters are based on real people he knew growing up in Atlanta. He doesn't give us fairy-tale platitudes about them but makes us suffer the tension between what's real and what's right, mostly in silence. Miss Daisy's realization that the decorum she clings to reeks of racial injustice, and the grace and inner strength that Hoke musters not to be destroyed by it, exist almost completely between the lines -- which is also why the play demands exceptional actors. Uhry and his director Ron Lagomarsino were fortunate to land Dana Ivey and Morgan Freeman for the original production.

Freeman, who had established his forceful presence in both classical theater (Coriolanus, The Gospel at Colonus) and contemporary roles (Richard Wesley's The Mighty Gents), called on his own upbringing in Greenwood, Mississippi, to portray a black man who maintains his own integrity and sense of humor without disturbing the mask of submissiveness he must wear to survive around white people. His performance, captured for posterity in Bruce Beresford's film, made metaphor of reined-in power. Miss Daisy called for a similar kind of show-not-tell restraint -- no problem for Ivey, whose vividly detailed comic performances had already won her an Obie Award (Quartermaine's Terms) and two Tony Award nominations (Heartbreak House, Sunday in the Park with George). The tricky part was that Ivey, not yet 40, had to impersonate convincingly a woman of 75 who ages almost 20 years in the course of the play. More conventional casting would have looked to veteran actresses like Nancy Marchand, who appeared in the first reading of the play, or Frances Sternhagen, who eventually did play the role Off Broadway.

But Ivey had two aces up her sleeve. She'd spent most of the first 15 years of her career in classical theaters all across Canada, from Theatre Calgary to the Shaw Festival, acquiring a formidable mastery of the "what-if" that makes stage acting magical. Plus she'd grown up in Atlanta herself and carried the world of Miss Daisy in her bones. "I didn't know Dana before Driving Miss Daisy," says Uhry. "She was the embodiment of my character. I mean, she was it."

Ten years after the success that catapulted both of them to higher visibility in the theater world, the playwright and the actress have creatively reunited for The Last Night of Ballyhoo, which was commissioned for the Olympic Arts Festival in Atlanta last summer and is currently running at the Helen Hayes Theatre on Broadway. Uhry's new play returns to the affluent Jewish community in Atlanta where Driving Miss Daisy took place, and like its predecessor it operates by stealth, adopting a disarmingly conventional form to tell a story we haven't quite heard before.

To all appearances, The Last Night of Ballyhoo declares itself to be nothing more than an old-fashioned, family-centered, living-room comedy. The time is December 1939, when the most important thing in young Lala Levy's life is the Atlanta premiere of Gone with the Wind. More urgent to her widowed mother, Boo, is the question of who will be Lala's date for the last night of Ballyhoo, the formal dance that crowns the party season for Atlanta's Jewish society. Lala is flighty and fancies herself an artist, which to her mother's anxious imagination means she's destined to housekeep for 85 cats and be arrested running down the street in her wrapper if she doesn't settle down and get married right quick. Hope of salvation arrives in the form of Joe Farkas, a newly hired employee of Boo's brother Adolph, with whom Boo and Lala live. Joe, however, is more taken with Adolph's other niece Sunny, a more sophisticated college girl home for the holidays to visit her mother, who also lives with Boo and Adolph. It's a Jewish Glass Menagerie with two rivals for the Gentleman Caller.

A darker tone emerges, though. Without ever departing from its basic structure as a rich, often hilarious romantic comedy, Ballyhoo exposes the previously unexplored territory of Southern anti-Semitism and how Jews turn it against each other and themselves. Joe, a New York Jew who's proud of it, is bewildered to find a Jewish family that celebrates Christmas and Ballyhoo but not Passover. Sunny, who reads Upton Sinclair and has clearly acquired a critical intelligence away from home, dismisses Ballyhoo as "asinine" and describes it to Joe as "a lot of dressed up Jews dancing around wishing they could kiss their elbows and turn into Episcopalians." Yet she also tells him a story -- one that actually happened to Uhry's sister -- that goes a long way toward explaining the origin of separatist social events like Ballyhoo:

Uhry deftly sketches an environment where every mark of difference is instantly noticed and judged, sometimes to comic effect. Lala's ditsy Aunt Reba, for instance, counsels her against dating a boy named Ferdie Nachman because "his father picked his nose during his own wedding ceremony." But this nitpicking has its vicious side as well. Apart from her wounded pride at Sunny's winning Joe's attention over Lala, Boo takes a dislike to Joe once she pegs him as "the other kind" -- Eastern European, looked down on by German Jews and excluded from their social clubs as ruthlessly as the Gentiles snub the Jews.

This talk of "our kind" and "the other kind," which Joe denounces to Sunny as "Jew-hater talk," is hardly a relic from the distant past. A friend recently reported overhearing someone at a New York dinner party crow, "I grew up on Mosholu Parkway, and now my cousin is marrying a Loeb!" It's another version of the skin-tone hierarchy among African-Americans and other petty civil wars that outsiders may consider absurd but that constitute a byproduct of oppression. It's a mark of Uhry's skillful understatement that, without a word being spoken, the audience is agonizingly aware that on the other side of the Atlantic Hitler's "final solution" is making a mockery of distinctions between German Jews and "the other kind."

Part of the triumph of The Last Night of Ballyhoo is that Uhry allows ethical dilemmas and class tensions to arise without turning his characters into stick figures or the drama into a predetermined "issue" play. And though the plot turns on a series of comic reversals involving two young couples, the play edges toward sitcom formula without falling into it. Also remarkable is Uhry's gift for creating a stageful of characters so rich they all seem like leading roles -- a quality that recalls some of the underrecognized ensemble vehicles Lanford Wilson wrote for the now-defunct Circle Repertory Company, such as Angels Fall and Talley and Son.

If one character stands out, it's Boo, the character Dana Ivey plays. She emerges as the heavy, if not the villain of the piece, especially after she turns to her brother and announces, "That kike you hired has no manners." She may epitomize Jewish self-hatred, but Uhry doesn't judge her for it or give up on her. In some ways, the journey of the play is Boo's journey from calling Joe a "kike" to the final scene, when she joins the family in its first seder to say the prayer, "Shabat Shalom." Starting from what seems like a narrow palette of grim joylessness, Ivey excavates a multitude of facets to Boo. She evinces an almost orgasmic pleasure at piecing together family connections three generations back and slips effortlessly into a Southern belle's grotesque cheerfulness when telephone duty calls. And she summons a tigerish defensiveness when it comes to securing her daughter's future (another echo, perhaps, of Glass Menagerie).

One chilly January afternoon between rehearsals for The Last Night at Ballyhoo, I had lunch with Uhry and Ivey to talk about the intersection of their lives and their work. Uhry, who lives in Manhattan with his wife, Joanna Kellogg, and their four daughters, has spent most of his adult life writing books and lyrics for musicals with composer Robert Waldman. Best-known for adapting Eudora Welty's The Robber Bridegroom for the stage, they're currently at work on a musical about the notorious anti-Semitic lynching of Leo Frank by an Atlanta mob in 1913, which Hal Prince will direct next season. Driving Miss Daisy was the first play Uhry ever wrote, when he was 51, and he retains a neophyte's enthusiasm (about, for example, attending rehearsals). Well-traveled and well-read, Ivey moved to New York in her mid-'30s and made her Broadway debut playing George C. Scott's secretary in Noel Coward's Present Laughter. Reviewers frequently liken her to Maggie Smith, perhaps because her she has a fierceness and a comic vitality that makes an indelible impression on every role she plays, whether it's Gertrude to Kevin Kline's Hamlet or the mayor's wife in Steven Spielberg's film The Color Purple. Earlier this season she was screamingly funny as a rabid right-wing political wife in Christopher Durang's savage (and savagely panned) Sex and Longing. Although I knew she was from Atlanta, I didn't realize how Southern she was until she ordered a soyburger and pronounced "soy" with two syllables so it rhymed with Zoe or Bowie.

Uhry: It took me a while to get up the courage to write another play. Miss Daisy was the only play I'd ever written. When all that stuff happened to it, it was a little scary. I had some other ideas floating around. I had always wanted to write about that prejudice against "the other kind."

Uhry: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That wasn't just Southern. It's German-Jewish. New York people know that one.

Ivey: No.

Uhry: The Olympics commissioned me to write a play through the Alliance Theatre. It occurred to me the day they asked me that I could write about the last time Atlanta was in the spotlight which, to me, was when Gone with the Wind opened. I realized it was 1939 and I had Scarlett and I had Hitler, and it would be a good way to get at this thing I wanted to do.

I wrote a draft of a play that was sort of like Pete Gurney's The Dining Room, about the Standard Club. A different family appeared in each scene of the play, and this family from Ballyhoo was just one of them. Ultimately, I decided to focus on just one family.

Uhry: I realized as I was writing the play that I was creating a character that was in her range. I think I hear Dana in my ears a lot.

Ivey: I haunt him.

Uhry: Ballyhoo was real. In the years between the wars and even up to the '50s -- I went to one of the last Ballyhoos there was, when I was 16 -- it was like a German-Jewish debutante ball. I found out later, they had two or three of those kind of things during the year. They had one called Falcon in Montgomery over Labor Day, and they had Jubilee in Macon over Fourth of July. then Ballyhoo at Christmas. The same set of young people would go to all these parties.

Uhry: Yes, the big dance for Ballyhoo was held at the Standard Club. And the Venetian Club pool is real. All the names are real.

Ivey: I'd never heard about it in my life. Growing up in Atlanta, I went to a high school that was almost 50 per cent Jewish attendance. I grew up in a very comfortable situation with Jews. To me they presented a united front to the world. I didn't know anything about any kind of internecine tensions or ....

Uhry: Jewish anti-Semitism.

Ivey: In town they called it Hebrew High. I remember when I was 13 years old in the 8th grade, I was sitting in homemaking class at a table with three Jewish girls, and they asked me if I was Jewish. I said, "I don't know, I may be." (We all laugh.) I knew that Christians came from Jews, and that's all I knew. I wasn't really sure. That's how liberal and innocent an upbringing I had in this respect.

Ivey: Not particularly. I came from a very liberal family. I went to the Presbyterian Church on my own when I was 7 years old. I got a ride with neighbors. My family eventually became Unitarian.

Ivey: I don't think about it. I'm not . . . people seem to think I just love playing unlikable people. I don't like playing unlikable people at all. It doesn't thrill me. I don't get a lot of joy out of it. But I don't even think of them as unlikable. I just do what's necessary for the scene, for the character, for the role, for the play. To me these characters are all people who I completely believe in. I have to see them positively. They're people who have goals and want to accomplish things, and they do what they have to do to get 'em. That's the way an actor has to think.

Quite frankly, I think people's perceptions are very narrow when they perceive characters to be awful or unlikable in that sense, because people do this kind of stuff all the time. We seem to like to pretend that they don't. So if you see something that's simply realistic, why should you pretend like it's suddenly horrible? I mean, people right-left-and-center are filled with prejudice. All you have to do is scratch 'em. And yet they act like if you express it onstage, you've suddenly done something horrible that's broken some taboo. I think that's a kind of hypocrisy on the audience's part.

Ivey: Yeah.

Ivey: I'm not sure about the one you're talking about in Sex and Longing, but the line in Alfred's play was obviously meant to be a shock line. Just because I mention the word "kike" -- it might as well be the word "nigger," it might as well be the word "wop," it might as well be any word that people attach emotional value to. Those words are interchangeable. You could put any of those words in and the audience would react the same. He knows what he's doing when he writes it.

Ivey: No. It's just that every interviewer always asks me why do I play mean people. It kind of hurts my feelings that whatever I'm doing to be so truthful to these people comes across as mean. If you think the character I played in Chris Durang's play is just mean, then you haven't seen the whole character.

Uhry: You played that mean queen of Denmark, what was her name?

Ivey: Yeah, the mean queen of Denmark. They're good characters! Strong characters! That's why I like to play them.

Uhry: That's why people like to work with her. Dana's vanity is in the craft.

Ivey: Thank you, Alfred. That's true. That's where I'm vain. I want it to be right. I want it to be true.

Ivey: There were the proms. There was a Driving Club that had debutantes.

Uhry: The Piedmont Driving Club.

Ivey: Piedmont Driving Club -- it used to be for carriages and horses.

Uhry: It was the most elite place in Atlanta.

Ivey: It was the WASP equivalent of the Standard Club. But I was not a part of that world. People who went to my school were. I always felt a little bit like a country cousin. We didn't even belong to the Ainsley Park Club, which was just around the corner from us. My parents were intellectuals. My father was a college professor. Anyway, I wasn't part of that world. There were school proms, but I didn't go to any until I was a senior. It's all unusual for me.

Uhry: Very much. They were German-Jewish. In fact, there was a country club that was more elite than the Standard Club called Inter-something -- Interlachen? -- and they were so elite they wouldn't let anybody else join. They went out of business because they couldn't afford to stay going. There were only 10 or 20 families they would let in. Idlewild -- I think that was the name of it.

Uhry: Ours was one of the families. It is my family I'm writing about, with little changes here and there. The house on Habersham Road is a real house, and I really did have a bachelor uncle who lived there with two married sisters with children.

Ivey: In many ways, particularly back then, a lot of Southern Jews were much more Southern than Jewish. Alfred always used to tell the story that he didn't know what a bagel was.

Uhry: The boy from Brooklyn in my play is consciously a Jewish person. All these other people are just Southern people.

Uhry: Absolutely.

Uhry: "Klutz" may have been one of them.

Ivey: "Klutz" or "tush."

American Theatre, April 1997