"I really like shows that have happy endings, feel-good endings," says Chris Starkey. "Shows where nobody dies, where nothing horrific happens. That's one reason I like 'Last Night of Ballyhoo.' "

Director Starkey isn't alone in his feelings about Alfred Uhry's 1997 Tony Award-winning play, which opens Thursday at Ann Arbor Civic Theatre. The audience-pleasing "Last Night of Ballyhoo" is set in 1939 Atlanta - a city of pre-Christmas bustle heightened by the world premiere of "Gone With The Wind." As one character breathlessly puts it, "Clark Gable is less than five miles from this house right this very second!"

For the Freitags, a wealthy German-Jewish family, neither the yuletide season nor the world's most famous movie carry the weight of Ballyhoo, an annual social gala which drew prominent Jews from all over the South to Atlanta during the first half of the 20th century.

Although comfortable in their Atlanta milieu, the Freitag clan has deep divisions: Adolph (played by David Keren), a mid-40s bachelor who runs the family mattress business, is a live-and-let-live optimist at peace with himself and others. Widowed older sister Boo (Christie Oberg) is an acid-tongued pessimist hell-bent to get daughter Lala (Dayna Woodhams) - a University of Michigan dropout (!) - wed to an eligible son of the aristocratic Weils of Louisiana.

But Lala is obsessing less about whether rich Peachy Weil (Michael Roehrig) will invite her to Ballyhoo than she is about the "GWTW" craze sweeping Atlanta. She imagines herself "Scarlet O'Goldberg," and thus for once an equal to her cousin Sunny (Melissa Henderson), who's a bright and beautiful all-A student at Wellesley.

What unites this often divisive family is a shared denial of its own Jewish heritage. A Christmas tree is on prominent display in the living-room window. Foreigners to synagogues, the family knows no Yiddish or even Hebrew as elemental as the Friday-night blessing "Shabbat Shalom."

By playing up Boo's obsession with marrying Lala to the "right kind" of Jew, playwright Uhry ("Driving Miss Daisy") underscores the almost anti-Semitic disdain long-established German-American Jews used to heap upon the "wrong kind" of Jew - turn-of-the-century immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe, and their descendants.

It takes one of the "wrong kind," young Brooklyn native and new employee Joe Farkas (Sam Zwetchkenbaum), to instill not just a sense of religious-ethnic pride in the Freitags but a basic awareness of a world in peril: Hitler is on the march in Europe, a fact triggering Boo's unintentionally ironic retort, "Don't think so much about Poland and think a little about your own flesh and blood."

"I like the (show's) theme of struggling with who you really are, of not realizing how far you've removed yourself from where you came," Starkey says. "And Joe comes in and challenges that.

"I think at one point or another we all struggle with being the 'wrong kind.' Whether it's being too heavy, too tall, too effeminate, too poor, at some time in our lives we've all felt like outcasts. I think Uhry extends a nice message in reminding audiences that we've all been there, and we're not compelled to feel bad or self-hating about it. That's something I've embraced in this show."

Ann Arbor Civic Theatre presents "Last Night of Ballyhoo" Thursday-Sunday May 3-6 and May 10-13. Curtain is 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $16 general, $14 students/seniors. NOTE: All Thursday tickets are $8. AACT is located at 408 W. Washington St. For tickets and information call (734) 971-2228.