Dinner, not drama

>> Having Our Say is tragically under-rehearsed

by AMY BARRATT

If ever a play had "hit" written all over it, it's Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years, which recently opened at the Saidye Bronfman Centre.

Sadie and Bessie Delany, born in 1889 and 1891 respectively, were both over 100 when Amy Hill Hearth interviewed them for a New York Times article which would grow into a book, and then came this stage adaptation by Emily Mann. The sisters, children of a middle-class black family, were born in North Carolina a short generation after slavery abolition and before the introduction of racist Jim Crow laws in the South. Even though they were small girls at the time, the sisters can remember the shock and humiliation of suddenly being sent to the back of the bus and finding water fountains separated into "white" and "coloured."

The sisters' story tells of 20th Century America and embodies two of that century's greatest struggles, Civil Rights and Women's Emancipation. So how could we fail to be moved by these amazing characters and their stories? It's no easy feat, but the Saidye production manages to leave us cold.

First of all it should be noted that Having Our Say is barely a play; it's a memoir brought to the stage. A monologue for two voices, if you will, that would make a lovely radio play. The text has plenty of material but no plot. The sisters address the audience as a guest in their home, a stand-in for the journalist who originally interviewed them. Before intermission, they mostly sit in their chairs and talk, getting up to pull out photo albums or put on a record. In the second half the elaborate livingroom set opens up to reveal an elaborate kitchen set and it's at this point that the show goes to stage-business hell. It is their late father's birthday, the sisters tell us, and as they do every year on this date, they are preparing a special feast to celebrate his life. Out come the pots and pans and Sadie and Bessie go to work chopping vegetables, stuffing birds and icing cakes. All of this proves too much for actresses Ranee Lee and Patricia Idlette.

This production is a victim, like so many others, of a too-short rehearsal period. These performers are barely comfortable with their lines. All that business to remember on top of the words destroys any chance they had of whipping up some chemistry on stage. The second half becomes a chore for everyone, actors and audience alike.

Given the time constraints in mounting this production, director Alison Sealy-Smith should have gone in a different direction and compensated for the lack of drama in the text not with excessive realism, but with theatricality. John Dinning's set is lavish, meticulously detailed as usual, but instead of creating a sense of intimacy, it threatens to overwhelm the performers. The worst example of obsessive realism is when the sisters produce photographs and proceed to "show" them to the "visitor" using an overhead projector they just happen to have in their living room. Theatrical convention would have allowed the projection to just appear without the use of a prop.

Over and over, because of awkward timing and the distraction of sweet potatoes, the actors miss chances to break our hearts. If material like this fails to even choke you up, something is terribly wrong with the production.

Having our say plays through May 24 at the Saidye Bronfman Centre, 739-2301