Conventionalwisdom in late 20th-century America says that white directors need to treadcarefully, if they dare to tread at all, when it comes to doing material aboutblack people.
Emily Mann, thewriter-director who adapted "Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100Years" for the stage, is familiar with the issue. The play is based on thememoir of Sarah L. (Sadie) and A. Elizabeth (Bessie) Delany, two centenariansisters whose father was born into slavery - a situation that skeptics mightsay can only be fully appreciated by a black writer-director.
"I know allabout it, believe me," Miss Mann, 44, says with a wry laugh. "I knowwhat I'm up against - that white people are exploiting black people's stories.I know the whole scene. And at a certain point I thought, `I could not do this,or I will do it - and if other people have a problem with it, they have aproblem with it.' "
Not many peoplehave had a problem with "Having Our Say." The play, adapted from the1991 book, is a charming portrait of two fascinating women (in the face ofearly 20th-century racism, Sadie became a high school teacher, Bessie became adentist). The Delanys' story is also a journey across a large, rocky patch ofAmerican history.
As adapted anddirected by Miss Mann and acted by Mary Alice and Gloria Foster, "HavingOur Say" became one of the surprise hits of the 1994-95 Broadway season.The national touring company, starring Lizan Mitchell and Micki Grant, begins amonthlong run at the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater on Tuesday. And thesingle-set, two-character drama will be the fifth most-produced show in thecountry's regional theaters this year.
Stylistically,"Having Our Say" is right up Miss Mann's alley, Testimonies" isthe apt title of a soon to be published collection of Miss Mann's plays; hermethod is to bring dramatic shape and theatrical energy to real-life materialthat she pulls from archives or gathers in interviews. The first thing she doesduring an interview in her office at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J.(where she is the artistic director), is admire the reporter's microcassetterecorder.
"Greatsize," she says with a professional's curiosity. "Wow."
And the firstquestion she asks, watching the machine's little red light flicker unsteadily,is, "Are you picking me up, do you think?"
"Annulla, AnAutobiography" was Miss Mann's first play. It came out of an interviewthat she did with a friend's aunt, a Jewish woman who had managed to survive inEurope during World War II. "Still Life," also culled from first-handinterviews, followed; it features straightforward testimony from afrighteningly violent Vietnam War veteran, his terrorized wife and his lover,who seems to view the vet's dark side with an assassin's calm.
"Execution ofJustice" deals with the murder of George Moscone (then mayor of SanFrancisco) and Harvey Milk (a city supervisor) at the hands of former citycouncilman Dan White. And Miss Mann's most recent work, "Greensboro: ARequiem," revisits the 1979 incident in which members of the Ku Klux Klanand the American Nazis shot 13 people at an anti-Klan rally, killing five.
Not surprisingly,Miss Mann has worked with another of the American theater's greatdocumentarians, Anna Deveare Smith, having directed her in "Twilight: LosAngeles 1992" at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.
All of Miss Mann'splays are rigorously topical and range from the fragmented courtroom drama of"Execution" to the kitchen-chat style of "Annulla." Thereal Annulla Allen chopped carrots as she plundered her own history - asituation that Miss Mann says is typical.
"I learnedabout the Holocaust in my grandmother's kitchen," she says. "And howmost of us learn about great wisdom in the world and what happens to people isliterally in our aunts' or our mothers' or our grandmothers' kitchens. That's avery secure, safe, warm, familiar place."
All of whichexplains why Emily Mann can say of "Having Our Say," a kind oflandscape of America told in intimate terms, "It's totally what I do. It'sdocumentary. It's in their own words."
* * *
Emily Mann grew upwith a solid understanding of what the civil rights movement was about. Herfather was a historian, and one of his good friends was fellow historian JohnHope Franklin. The two men can be seen briefly in "Having Our Say,"which uses a picture of the two of them - a white man and a black man -marching side by side from Selma to Montgomery.
Her father'soccupation helped push Miss Mann's theatrical career in its unique direction.As a literature major at Harvard, she was interested in writing fiction anddirecting plays. But one day, home on break from school, she ran across aninterview that her father had gathered as part of a project on Holocaustsurvivors. An adult woman had interviewed her mother, who had survived theTreblinka camp. The poignancy of the survivor's tale, coupled with themother-daughter dynamic of the conversation, fired Miss Mann's imagination.That encounter, she felt, would be powerful stuff in the theater.
After Harvard,Miss Mann was the first female director accepted into a training program run bythe University of Minnesota and the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. It wasthere that she turned the Annulla Allen transcript into a play. Since then, hercareer has taken her to theaters across the country as she has earned Obieawards, Tony nominations and even an NAACP award (from the L.A. chapter as bestdirector, for "Twilight").
Miss Mann isbeginning her seventh season at the helm of the McCarter, an old-fashioned1,078-seat auditorium. The theater is part of a performing-arts complex inwhich plays share the auditorium with dance and music programs. Twyla Tharp,Mark Morris and Kathleen Battle are all on the schedule this season.
The McCarter is a1929 stone building that looks like a grand old church. But the $12 millionrenovation that took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s left the McCarterwith some intriguing modern marks, such as the skylights that flood naturallight into the whitewashed hallways of the administrative offices and thegreenish glass walls tucked into the sides of the building.
That new-old lookreflects the spirit of the programming, which includes classics andcontemporary stuff on hot topics. Miss Mann says that the McCarter has becomethe American base of South African playwright Athol Fugard, whose "ValleySong" received its American premiere there recently. (Mr. Fugard wrote theaffectionate introduction to Miss Mann's "Testimonies.")
It's a place whereMiss Mann can do her pot-stirring "Greensboro" as well as Irishplaywright Marina Carr's "The Mai" (her current project), which,according to the director, has no burning social issues in mind. And directorStephen Wadsworth has had great success at the McCarter with the 18th-centurycomedies of Marivaux, which would seem to have nothing in common with somethinglike "Greensboro."
"But ofcourse it does, to me," Miss Mann says. "I mean, I think theater isabout all these things. It's basically about the human heart, the human soul,and what it is to be alive. And that has to do sometimes with the times inwhich you live."
Indeed, Marivauxwas a class-conscious writer. Still, the rhetoric automatically heats up whenMiss Mann talks about what's in her own plays:
"This isabout human beings and what we do to each other. Sometimes it is brutal andit's disgusting and it should be stopped."
That statementapplies to all her works. So does this one:
"There's aterrorist element in our society. I'm just saying, `Look at it.'
"
* * *
The McCarter won aTony Award as the country's outstanding regional theater two years ago, just as"Having Our Say" was coming around. Miss Mann was actually working on"Greensboro" at the time, but excitement over "Having Our Say"(primarily from her producers, Camille O. Cosby - wife of Bill - and JudithRutherford James) took over. In fact, enthusiasm ran so high that "HavingOur Say" was put into the McCarter's 1994-95 season before Miss Mann hadeven written the adaptation.
Miss Mann talksabout the Delany sisters, whom she met in their home in Mount Vernon, N.Y.,with bubbly fondness. She recalls that at the end of their session together,Sadie told her, "Child, I feel like I've known you all my life" - aline that worked itself into the play.
The warmth andcharisma of the Delanys has a lot to do with their story's popularity. But thesocial angle obviously matters, too; Miss Mann calls the play "covertlypolitical."
"Of course itdeals with the history of the African-American struggle in this country, and ofwomen's struggle in this country," Miss Mann says. "But at base ittalks about survival through family and love and education, and for them, faithin God and spirituality."
Miss Mann thinksthere is more political writing happening in the theater than many peoplerealize, but she says she dislikes agit-prop and tries to avoid it in her ownwork.
"I think I'mtalking about plays that have something to say. Is there enough of that?There's never enough of that, you know? In any society."
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