Leading a parade

Atlanta-born playwright Alfred Uhry explores another aspect of the Southern Jewish experience with a musical based on the Leo Frank case

By Suzanne Van Atten

Brent Carver, as Leo Frank, rests his head on the lap of Carolee Carmello, who portrays Lucille Frank, during a scene in Parade. [Photo: Joan Marcus]

A MUSICAL? ABOUT LEO FRANK? If anything seems less likely to lend itself to musical treatment, it's the 1913 murder of a 12-year-old factory girl in Atlanta and the lynching of her Jewish employer two years later in Marietta. The events were so polarizing that they're credited with solidifying the then newly formed Anti-Defamation League and contributing to the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. It's a story that incites heated debate even today.

But if anyone can successfully transform the Leo Frank story into a theatrical event, it's Atlanta native Alfred Uhry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Driving Miss Daisy and Last Night of Ballyhoo, who has made a career of exploring the nuances of the Southern Jewish experience. His musical, Parade, co-created with director Hal Prince and composer/lyricist Jason Robert Brown, premiered this week on Broadway at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater. It proves to be a sensitive, engrossing interpretation of one of the more tragic chapters in Atlanta history.

The facts of the case have been duly reported, thanks to a newspaper war going on at the time (portrayed in the musical by a trench-coat-and-fedora-wearing chorus encouraging their news sources with the refrain, "Go on! Go on!"). Two days after her death on April 26, 1913, Mary Phagan's partially clothed body was found in the basement of the National Pencil Factory on Forsyth Street. Her supervisor, Frank, was tried, found guilty and sentenced to hang, based primarily on the testimony of Jim Conley, the factory janitor. But two years later, Gov. John T. Slaton commuted Frank's sentence to life, and on Aug. 16, 1915, Frank was abducted from the State Prison Farm in Milledgeville and hanged from an oak tree in Marietta. He was pardoned in 1986, and the consensus today is that Conley murdered Mary Phagan.

Parade is driven by the horror of a man wrongly accused of a despicable crime in a hostile environment. But Uhry, who spent his formative years growing up in Druid Hills with one foot firmly planted in Southern culture and the other in Jewish heritage, shows his sensitivity to the Southern point of view by placing that hostility in the context of the region's social and economic upheaval. That context is eloquently conveyed in the musical's first scene by a young, idealistic Confederate soldier who's preparing to go to war. Moments later he returns to the stage, an old, embittered veteran who's lost his leg in battle.

"If you believe in a cause that much," Uhry says, seated in the Beaumont's lobby for an interview with Creative Loafing, "and you lose and you go back home, find your brothers and a lot of people dead -- you've lost a leg and eventually you lose your land to a mortgage that the Yankees have run up the taxes on, and you're forced to move to town and put your children to work, and a little girl is working six days a week, 10 cents an hour, and she's killed ... It's a horrible, horrible thing. You can understand the outrage. I do, completely.

"The one thing I did not want to do was write this story about this righteous Jew that was torn apart by stupid rednecks, because I don't feel that way," Uhry says. "I'm torn. My heart breaks equally for everybody. I mean, the murder of that little girl was a horrifying tragedy. And I think what's equally sad for Leo Frank is that he would have been such a good candidate to [have committed the murder]. The trouble is, he just didn't do it. He was an unpleasant man, he was a Jew, he was a Yankee. I think the Yankee part was worse than the Jew part in those days. I think the anti-Semitism flared up during the [trial]. And I think a big, huge part of why it was so wrenching for the Jews of Atlanta, those German Jews, was that they had been so assimilated and all of a sudden they were outcasts. That was heartbreaking."

Another significant aspect of Parade is the portrayal of the relationship between Frank and his wife, Lucille, which Uhry believes blossomed during their ordeal.

"I realized that probably Leo and Lucille ... had a chilly sort of an arranged marriage in which, you can tell from the tone of their letters, their love deepened after this happened. I find that incredibly moving," Uhry says. "And I think that she certainly did become his voice. She was 23 when it happened, 25 when he died. She was a proper Southern girl. The other thing I found moving was that after it was all over, she wrote an open letter to the public, and in the first sentence -- I put it in the show -- she said, 'I am a Georgia girl.' There's so much heartbreak and pride in that. If you love the South, you don't get over it."

Parade isn't the first time the Mary Phagan/Leo Frank story has been given artistic treatment -- both by those who believed Frank was guilty and by those who believed he was innocent. Soon after the girl's murder, Fiddlin' John Carson wrote "The Ballad of Mary Phagan," a little ditty that implicates Frank; Uhry's mother remembers jumping rope to it as a child. Three weeks before Frank was lynched, a documentary film featuring footage of Frank and his wife debuted at the Loew's Lincoln Square Theater in New York. In 1936, Lana Turner starred as the doomed factory girl in a movie called They Won't Forget. In 1967 Atlanta's now-defunct Academy Theatre staged Night Witch, a play about the case by local playwright Frank Wittow and Barbara Halpern, and currently there is a play running at the O'Rourke Center for the Performing Arts in Chicago called The Lynching of Leo Frank. Countless books have been written about the murder and the lynching, as well. A resume like that begs the question: What is the fascination with this case?

"It's a riveting story," Uhry says. "It draws you into it, the combination of horror and curiosity. It's got this sweep to it, and it's very unsettling. I've been haunted by it all my life."

Part of Uhry's intrigue stems from the taboo treatment the topic got in his family. Uhry's great-uncle owned the National Pencil Factory, where Phagan and Frank worked. His great-aunt used to take dinners to Frank while he was jailed. But the message the inquisitive young Alfred got was that the Frank case was a part of history best forgotten.

"The subject was avoided, which probably is what made me so interested in it. I couldn't get much out of anybody about it, and I didn't know why," he says. "I knew it had been devastating. I think what really got to me the most -- except for Tom Watson [the race-baiting publisher and politician] and Hugh Dorsey [the politically driven prosecuting attorney who later became governor], everybody was a victim. Everybody. And that moves me ... a lot. I think I wanted to write about this all my life," Uhry says, then pauses and adds, "I didn't know it was going to be a musical."

The concept for Parade grew out of a conversation about four years ago between Uhry and director/producer Hal Prince, a name synonymous with Broadway musicals. Prince's credits include The Phantom of the Opera, Show Boat, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, West Side Story and Damn Yankees, among many others.

"Hal was looking for something for us to do together, and I mentioned Ballyhoo, and he said, 'Why do you think the Atlanta Jews you write about were so big on rushing into assimilation and ashamed of being Jewish?' And I said, 'I guess because of the Leo Frank case.'" Prince asked Uhry to tell him the story. When he finished, Uhry recalls, Prince "jumped up out of his chair and said, 'That's the musical we're going to do.'"

Parade originally was set to premiere at Atlanta's Alliance Theatre, where Driving Miss Daisy and Ballyhoo debuted, but negotiations broke down when the production company, the now-financially shaky Livent Inc., demanded a bigger investment from the Alliance than the theater was willing to make, says Stephanie Lee, communications director of the Alliance.

Despite his affection for the Alliance and its artistic director, Kenny Leon, Uhry was relieved Parade didn't debut here. "It's not that I'm afraid of it going to Atlanta, I just didn't think that was the right place to test it out. It's fine if it goes [to Atlanta] after it's [opened]. But it's going to start up stuff again."

Start up stuff, indeed. Inflammatory subject matter aside, Parade may strike a nerve among some local theater patrons with its occasional jabs at the South. Asked how he thinks Atlanta audiences would respond, Uhry predicts, "Not so well. You get boos on things like that, but I wouldn't change. What I tried to do was write everybody's points of view and where my heart is, is with everyone but Tom Watson and Hugh Dorsey."

Uhry is a playwright uniquely qualified to represent those different perspectives because of his dual heritage as a Jew and a Southerner, and his plays have all examined that clash of cultures to some degree. In Parade, Frank's character has a particularly telling line that reveals his frustration with life among assimilated Southern Jews. "For the life of me," he says, "I can't understand how God created people both Jewish and Southern." That statement could sum up a concept with which Uhry has wrangled as well -- in his life and his plays.

"I think there is a dichotomy that's always bothered me," he says. "I was brought up to be a Southern boy with a Jewish face. I went to school that didn't have very many Jewish kids. There were three in my class, and we were different. But I didn't feel different. If I could have turned into a Baptist, I would have, because I wasn't brought up with much Jewish identity. I married a girl who was Episcopalian, my children are nothing. And I have grandchildren who are one-quarter Jewish who are Christians. So I feel at cross purposes, so that's where that comes from.

"The thing about the South," he continues, "is that there's such a strong heri-tage in being Southern. And I was just as Southern as anybody else ... but not quite. And that's probably what's rankled me all these years. It didn't seem hard at the time, but in thinking about it, it was a little tricky. Because what you were, and what you felt like, were slightly different."

Now Uhry lives in New York, his home since graduating from Brown University and a place rich in Jewish heritage. Is he finally home, philosophically speaking?

"Noooo! I'm an Atlanta boy who lives here," he says.

"Well," he hedges, "I'm sort of a New Yorker. I'm betwixt and between again. I always was."

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Copyright 1998 by Creative Loafing | Published December 19, 1998 | webmaster@creativeloafing.com