Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years

Having Our Say: Heroism in a Quiet Living Room

Running Time: 2 hrs

When you hear the term "historical drama," perhaps you think of monarchs in countries long ago and far away, epic struggles for power in courts of intrigue and across vast battlefields, violence and heroism on a grand scale. But just as history is more than politics in thronerooms and the outcomes of wars, so historical drama extends beyond the rises and falls of kings and queens. Having Our Say is, without question, historical drama, focusing as it does on events of the past century, but its subjects are the children of slaves. Theirs is a story of our own land, of the strife between two races, one with white skin and one with brown, and of the latter's fight to prove their worth as professionals, as citizens, as Americans, in the face of profound, even life-threatening prejudice. Listening to the stories of the women in this play, you discover how historical drama can be found in the quiet conversation of two elderly sisters and heroism found in a Harlem dentist's office, in a Bronx high school, in a quiet suburban living room in Mount Vernon, New York.

In Having Our Say, two sisters, both centenarians, recall their lives together, growing up in North Carolina as the 19th century turned to the 20th, pursuing college degrees during World War I, building careers in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, retiring to Mount Vernon in the Fifties, marking their 100th birthdays on the eve of the 21st century. Playwright Emily Mann based her script on the actual memories and words of Bessie and Sadie Delany, as recorded by New York Times writer Amy Hill Hearth for a 1991 newspaper feature and later bestselling book. Wisely following the narrative approach employed by Hill Hearth in the book, Mann just lets the sisters talk. There is no plot, simply the recollections of "Queen" Bess and "Sweet" Sadie told directly to the audience, no action save for the women's preparation of a dinner in honor of their late father's birthday. The play is almost anti-theatrical, and yet it draws us in because the sisters speak directly to us; it's as if we're sitting in the Delanys' home ourselves. Their experiences -- and the history they have lived -- come alive for us in a remarkably personal way.

Certainly, that's the case in this admirable production from Pro Arts Collective. The intimacy of the Santa Cruz Center space and warmth of the actresses playing the Delanys make us feel so close to these women, physically and emotionally. The room is so compact that, despite the lack of light over the audience, Carla Nickerson and Jennifer Cumberbatch can lock eyes with each of us -- and do, which makes the stories they share of the sisters' lives more than anecdotes cast into a void beyond the stage; they are legacies passed from heart to heart, theirs to ours. And these stories truly seem to belong to Nickerson and Cumberbatch; they appear to have absorbed them, come to own them. They speak of Sadie and Bessie's parents, of the glory years of Harlem, of besting the "Rebby Boys" -- the sisters' name for redneck bigots -- with the conviction and pride of personal experience. Watching and listening to them both -- Cumberbatch as the older, serene Sadie, her voice soft and head inclined in reverent, almost prayerful reflection, Nickerson as the younger, more feisty Bessie, rising from her armchair with the righteous indignation of a revival preacher -- is a constant pleasure, and director Boyd Vance is to be commended for his work in shaping these rich and charming performances.

These are days in which tragedy has brought us closer together as a people, made us re-examine what it means to be American, why that is important. Having Our Say speaks to this, reminding us of our past, of divisions that have existed between us, of oppression and a terrorism committed on these shores by some of our countrymen against other countrymen. It recalls the pain of this and, in clear, soft voices, sings triumphantly of rising up against it, of finding freedom and achieving success with perseverance, intelligence, dignity, and love.