Oldie but goodie

The Delany sisters hold court at Trinity

by Carolyn Clay

HAVING OUR SAY. Adapted by Emily Mann from the book by Sarah L. Delany and A. Elizabeth Delany with Amy Hill Hearth. Directed by Neal Baron. Set designed by Harry Matheu. Costumes by William Lane. Lighting by Dan Kotlowitz. Sound by Christopher Walker. With Delores Mitchell and Barbara Meek. At Trinity Repertory Company, through November 23.

The celebrated Delany sisters are finally having their say at Trinity Rep, which has been promising a production of Having Our Say for several seasons. Well worth the wait, the experience is like watching Julia Child with the sound turned down. Instead of regaling us as to what they're doing as they whip up an elaborate feast to celebrate the birthday of their late father -- everything from a pineapple-decorated ham and stuffed chicken to a from-scratch pound cake and ambrosia -- the play's centenarian sibs tell us, a couple hundred visitors to their Mount Vernon (New York) home, about what they've been doing -- and had done to them -- for the past hundred years.

Emily Mann's stage adaptation, like the bestseller written by Sarah L. and A. Elizabeth Delany with journalist Amy Hill Hearth, tells an inspirational yet feisty story. As for the sisters, soft-spoken Sadie and more grinchlike Bessie, they could not be more cordial hosts. "Stay as long as you like; we won't charge you rent," barks Bessie, later going so far as to offer tea and cookies to a few front-row sitters.

Longevity is, of course, the key to the fame of the Delany sisters; they were pretty damned impressive before they turned 100 and the media took them up -- but who knew? Sadie and Bessie were the second and third of 10 children of a born slave, Henry Beard Delany, and his mixed-race wife, Nanny Logan. The girls grew up on the campus of a North Carolina Episcopal college where their father, the first African-American Episcopal bishop, was a teacher and their mother was the matron. They earned the money to finance their educations teaching in rural Southern schools.

Eventually Sadie and Bessie, along with all the Delany brood but one, moved from the Jim Crow South (of which they have a few tales to tell) to New York, where Sadie earned a master's degree in education at Columbia and Bessie graduated from Columbia's dental school. Sadie went on to become the first African-American domestic-science teacher in New York City's high schools; "Dr. Bessie" practiced in Harlem for 25 years without raising her prices. The two "Negro maiden ladies" lived together until Bessie's death (in 1995), attributing their shared durability to not having had a man "to worry us to death."

The morally upright sisters stayed clear of the Cotton Club corner of the Harlem Renaissance, though they rubbed shoulders with such important figures as Booker T. Washington (Sadie prefers his "water-smoothing" ways) and W.E.B. DuBois (perennial protester Bessie's choice) and with such prominent arts figures as Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson. But their story is important, as Brown University dean Lydia L. English points out in a short program essay, because "it demonstrates in a real lived way the agency, aspiration, and accomplishment of many black people despite the devastating encumbrances of white America."

Retired since 1960 and 1950 respectively, Sadie and Bessie are happily "giving our opinion" -- and it, along with their history, is a gift to grab. Proponents of what might be called family values, the ladies are by no means -- as The Little Foxes' Regina says of daughter Alexandra -- "all sugar water." Rather, as Bessie puts it, the two are "molasses and vinegar." And speaking of family values, here's nail-spitting Bessie on one of that concept's foremost proponents. Opining that "if Negroes are average, they fail," she goes on to observe that "if Dan Quayle were colored, he'd be washing dishes somewhere."

Needless to report, the Delanys themselves are the stars of this show, which was a Broadway hit in 1995. Mann's adaptation is certainly serviceable -- though rather too convenient in the way it has the sisters, armed with shoeboxes of memorabilia, turning up just the right anecdote-triggering photos (at Trinity these are projected on either side of the set) as they entertain their "visitors." And that device is itself a tad stagy, though it gets the job done.

But the Trinity production is more than serviceable. One could comfortably move into the living-room-dining-room-kitchen set by Harry Matheu, as indeed the two actresses, under the direction of Neal Baron, do, sharing their food-preparation tasks as authentically and casually as they do a conspiratorial laugh or a tender moment. Artfully, the actresses establish that these are women accustomed to living in each other's space. Trinity stalwart Barbara Meek is the funnier, flintier Bessie, and she makes the most of the old woman's stubborn strength and comic piques. But she plays both age and attitude a tad too broadly when contrasted with newcomer Delores Mitchell's softer-contoured Sadie. Whether weeping quietly over a 30-year-old death, showing off the crystal, or letting a bit of Bessie's vinegar seep into her molasses, she gives the ambrosia a run for its money.