`Having Our Say' Through April 7
And then there's the screenplay for "Having Our Say," which she is developing with Camille Cosby and Judy James (co-producer of "Mr. Holland's Opus"), who were also involved in producing the play.
It's easy to see that Mann, who has spent many hours over the past few years ensconced in the lives of the Delany sisters, isn't quite ready to give them up.
Now in her sixth season as artistic director at the McCarter Theatre, Mann first heard of the Delanys' book, Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years, from her sister and was encouraged to adapt it by her good friend James.
A history of creating works based in social and oral history made this book a natural for Mann's creative talents. Puzzled at first about how to adapt the work, Mann decided "not to put the miniseries or movie onstage" but rather "to make this a real, live event in the way I've been making plays for the last 20 years, through documentary and oral history."
"We get to meet the sisters the way we meet them in the book. It's that simple," she explained. "They sit and talk to the audience just the way they talked to Amy Hill Hearth for the book."
And talk they do, ; speaking; with humor and grace about their early years in a family of 10 children, about their love for the eccentric characters of their childhood, about life in New York during the Harlem Renaissance, about their experiences during the blossoming of the Civil Rights movement and about their amazement at how old they have gotten but how young they feel.
As the sisters share these stories, the play is punctuated with music and photo images of Delany family members and historical events. In the movie, audiences will get to see all the scenarios played out, but onstage the audience's imagination comes into play.
An extensive outreach program was kept in place even after the show's move from the McCarter Theatre to Broadway. Matinee performances for children and an extensive study guide (both are also planned for the Chicago run) were created in order to give children "a history lesson without them knowing it's really a history lesson."
Spending her high school years in Hyde Park, where her father was a professor of American history at the University of Chicago, helped Mann plant her roots in social history. From 1966-70, when Mann was in high school, Hyde Park was an integrated neighborhood, and many people dedicated to social change and civil rights lived there.
And Mann was a teenager "right in the middle of it all, learning a lot and being politicized." Counted among the family friends was noted African-American historian John Hope Franklin, with whom her father marched from Selma to Montgomery.
"I was very lucky that I was surrounded by a lot of very smart and dedicated people," said Mann. "From a very early age, I was instilled with an incredible sense of social responsibility and history. In a lot of ways, Hyde Park in those early years formed the themes for what I have written and for what I continue to write."
Mann, who began her career at Minneapolis' Guthrie Theatre, is very optimistic about what she calls the "national theater movement," the smaller theaters around the country that have a national impact. As artistic director at the McCarter, she is involved in this movement on a grass-roots level.
(The playwright's latest work, "Greensboro," is a docudrama about the murder of five anti-Ku Klux Klan demonstrators more than 15 years ago. The protesters, both black and white, died during an altercation Nov. 3, 1979, in the North Carolina city. Nine others were wounded. Police did not intervene. As is Mann's way, the material is culled from interviews with participants, eyewitnesses and from court records.)
"I have great hopes for the national theater movement. These theaters play to their communities and go beyond their communities," Mann said. "There are great examples of this right here in Chicago with its vast array of theater, from big to small.
"Chicago is a great model for the rest of the country. It proves you need the little guys to feed the big guys. And it's a constant breeding ground for new talent and makes for an exciting atmosphere to create in."
Mann loves theater as entertainment, but she also is drawn to the theater of ideas, of new and inventive works that push the boundaries of traditional theater. "Great entertainment is when the heart and the mind and the spirit and the funnybone are engaged all at once. Just one is not enough. I'm not fully satisfied or entertained with just one."
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