There are considerably more trying and less pleasant ways to spend a couple of hours than in the company of two kindhearted little old ladies.
Emily Mann's play "Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years," based on the remarkable true story of black siblings Sadie and Bessie Delany, takes place circa 1992, when Sadie was 103 and Bessie 101. After a comparatively "privileged" and "protected" upbringing in Jim Crow-era North Carolina, the sisters eventually relocated in the 1920s to New York, where Sadie became a dedicated teacher and Bessie a successful dentist.
Welcoming us into their Mount Vernon home for a visit, they proceed to rummage through boxes of photographs, and to regale the audience with anecdotes about their expansive family history. “The reason we’ve lived this long is because we never married. We never had husbands to worry us to death,” Bessie quips at one point. “We wouldn’t still be here without each other. We give each other a reason to keep living.”
Georgia Ensemble Theatre’s “Having Our Say,” directed with a leisurely pace by the veteran actress Andrea Frye, co-stars Donna Biscoe as the sensitive Sadie and Brenda Porter as the outspoken Bessie. The former is described as the “molasses” and “sugar” to the latter’s “vinegar” and “spice,” but as played here, the sisters don’t seem to “balance” as much as complement each other, which isn’t quite the same thing.
Needless to say, and possibly befitting the advanced age of the characters, the play is mostly all talk and not a lot of action. Like so many bullet points, they name-drop everyone from Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois to Paul Robeson and Clarence Thomas, or make passing references to everything from horrific lynchings to the empowering march on Selma. The effect essentially reduces a century of momentous events to casual conversation, as if the two women were emotionally removed from history rather than having been directly impacted by it.
Based on her otherwise solid opening-night performance, on occasion Porter still appeared to be struggling with the show’s imposing amount of dialogue. For her part, conversely, Biscoe’s finest individual moment was unspoken: With her back to the audience as she’s cooking dinner (on scenic designer Stephanie Polhemus’ functional stove), watch her body language as her sister recounts the death of their mother. A shared highlight between the co-stars involves an amusing recollection about the only whipping the young girls ever got from their father.
There’s an unassuming quality to the characters, as written, and a kind of quaint nostalgia in the way they reflect on all they’ve lived through. While the bigger picture could have felt more historically important or personally relevant to an audience at large, in the end, these two women prove no less worthy of having their own say.
THEATER REVIEW
“Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years”
Grade: B
Through March 5. 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays; 8 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays; 4 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Sundays. $28.50-$37.50. Roswell Cultural Arts Center, 950 Forrest St., Roswell. 770-641-1260, www.get.org.
Bottom line: A sweet, if relatively slow-moving, sister act.
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