Contemporary, non-traditional performances are more the norm for the Luther College Theatre/Dance department, but this spring’s play breaks the mold.

“The Last Night of Ballyhoo,” the Tony Award-winning play by Alfred Uhry, opened April 11 at 7:30 p.m. in Jewel Theatre, Center for the Arts and will continue to run this weekend, April 17-18 at 7:30 p.m. and April 19 at 1:30 p.m.

The play focuses on a Jewish family living in Atlanta, Ga; in 1939. It highlights their efforts to assimilate to southern-American culture and gives perspectives on what it means to be Jewish.

“A naturalistic, realistic play is probably not our norm,” said Bob Larson, professor of theatre and the play’s director.

The Luther community may remember what Larson calls more “devised” performances like “Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical” and “Big Love,” produced last year. Over the past 10 years or so, Luther directors have taken even highly scripted pieces in a creative direction.

“And we’re not doing it to try and be different,” said Larson. “We’re doing it because we want to expand everyone’s experience with theater — away from the predictable and popular stuff that people have seen, the things that are a little more challenging.”

As a traditional and realistic play, “Ballyhoo” has a different set of demands for the cast, director and production staff.

To become a believable southern Jewish family from the late 1930s, the seven student actors worked on thorough character development, an understanding of the Jewish and historical context and authentic dialects.

Even the three senior cast members with more experience in Luther’s Theatre/Dance Department faced a challenge with having to authenticate characters so different from themselves.

Ashley Hirschboeck (‘08) plays Boo Levy, an angry, persistently yelling widow preoccupied with her daughter’s social welfare and finding a nice Jewish boy for her to marry. The first step in the latter goal is finding a date to the dance on the last night of Ballyhoo, the south’s premiere Jewish celebration for young people.

“It’s been really fun to get to know who she is,” said Hirschboeck. “I mean, she has a reason for being mean, and you don’t think that when you first read the script — you think she’s a monster. But then you notice that she really doesn’t want to be Jewish and she really, really just hates herself.”

The underclass students, who all portray characters closer to their own ages, had to overcome dialect and contextual challenges, as well as adjust to a new, more open-ended style of directing.

“Ballyhoo” is Jake Wessels’ (‘11) acting debut at Luther College. His character, Joe Farkas, enters the play and the Freitag household as an employee of Adolph Freitag, the family patriarch. Wessels’ character is from Brooklyn, N.Y., making him the only cast member who has to master a Brooklyn accent while constantly hearing a southern one.

“They can play off of each other, and I can’t,” said Wessels.

Lissa Skitolsky, assistant professor of philosophy, helped the cast better understand Jewish culture and therefore, their characters. Having grown up in a Jewish home, Skitolsky provided a firsthand look at Jewish traditions and the question of identity that American Jews often face.

Many audience members may not catch on to the telling Jewish details in the play, but it still raises questions surrounding Jewish culture, especially in this country.

Although this play is set nearly 60 years ago, Skitolsky points out that these issues are still relevant today.

“And yet the question of what it means to be Jewish in a predominantly Christian nation still confronts every American Jew and often underlies the work of Jewish artists, such as Woody Allen or in this case, Alfred Uhry,” writes Skitolsky in the play’s program notes.

Kristin Underwood, the play’s vocal coach, provided instruction in dialect. She investigated the southern speech of 1939 Atlanta by calling the Department of Commerce and other businesses in Atlanta and listening to the way people spoke.

She provided sheets of the International Phonetic Alphabet and the southern pronunciation of some common words found in the play, as well as consistent coaching.

With this help from Underwood, the cast spent much time in and out of rehearsal getting comfortable with their southern speech.

“Bob had us talking in our dialect all the time,” said Hirschboeck. “Even when we were just talking to each other, asking questions or talking about what our days were like, he had us talking in our dialects.”

“The Last Night of Ballyhoo” deviates from the department’s typically atypical take on plays, bringing different challenges, in technical aspects and subject matter, to those involved in the production and audience members alike.