The subtitle of the best-selling book and its 1995 Broadway adaptation — The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years — is no exaggeration. Both the memoir and the play cover more than a century of African-American history, seen from the centenary vantage point of two miraculous old ladies, Bessie and Sadie Delany, then aged 101 and 103.
A thoroughly delightful revival, featuring a pair of radiant performances, is now playing at Hartford Stage. The main title is Having Our Say, from which you might assume this is a long-awaited occasion to speak out, but apparently the sisters never had any problems in that department. During a two-hour visit with the dauntless pair, we get the clear message that from the moment of their 19th-century birth, these women always had plenty to say.
Where Bessie is nothing if not outspoken, quick to anger and slow to forget a slight, Sadie is soft-spoken, having her say, and often getting her way, with “molasses” instead of “vinegar.” But their differences are complementary, and having lived together for 100 years, they not only finish each other’s sentences, they do it in unison.
The play’s conceit is that we, the audience, are visiting the sisters in their rambling Mount Vernon, N.Y., home, where they’ve lived without a phone for 50 years, preceded by decades in Harlem after growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Before preparing a three-course dinner onstage, they share with us their family album, the photos projected on panels above Alexis Distler’s elaborately detailed set, and regale us with a century’s worth of anecdotes, from hilarious to harrowing.
Their father, we learn, was born a slave, but rose to become the first African-American bishop of the Episcopal Church, and their mother was “even smarter.” Education was the prime goal instilled in all 10 Delany children, and their parents “brought us up to reach high.” Bessie became a dentist and Sadie a high-school teacher. They and their family were fixtures in the black middle class, friends with Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois and their stories paint a compelling first-person portrait of the Jim Crow era and the Civil Rights Movement.
Brenda Pressley is Bessie, with her character’s solid stance and fierce countenance, while Olivia Cole’s Sadie is almost birdlike, thin and a little shy. From their portraits, the real-life Delanys were just the opposite: Bessie frail-looking beside her taller, heftier sister. In Jade King Carroll’s finely tuned production, the sisters are also distinguished by the rhythms of their speech. Bessie’s is fast and energetic to Sadie’s more hesitant pace — a counterpoint that nicely balances both the performances and the flow of the play.
The primarily white audience at Hartford Stage clearly admired the sisters and delighted in their story, but the elderly black couple sitting behind me had lived some of it. When Sadie described the segregated drinking fountains in her childhood, I heard the woman say, “I remember that,” and during intermission she told me that on the Virginia farm where she’d grown up, “the hanging post was still there.”
Lucy Stone has a lot in common with the Delany sisters, and not only because she lived to nearly 100. Born in 1818 in Brookfield, she’s been called “the morning star” of the early women’s rights movement and, with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the “triumvirate” of suffrage heroines. But unlike her sisters in arms, she has largely been lost to history.
That’s partly to do with her temperament — a Sadie Delany to her colleagues’ Bessies. A powerful and influential speaker on women’s suffrage and abolition, she was no firebrand, seeking inclusion over confrontation. And because she broke with Stanton and others over issues of principle and tactics, she was sidelined in the early histories of the women’s movement and virtually ignored for 100 years.
Actor and storyteller Judith Black aims to rectify that omission in her hour-long one-woman play Meet Lucy Stone, which she has toured internationally and presents in a free performance, at 2 p.m. on Sunday, at the Springfield Armory National Historic Site. “The issues that her life and activism addressed are still present today,” she says, “making the presentation as timely as ever.”
Black describes Stone’s style as “emotional aikido” — making her point without doing violence to her adversary. She cites an incident in which the (male) leader of the New England Anti-Slavery Society chided her for speaking out for women’s rights from the society’s platform. Instead of arguing, she negotiated: “She would speak for woman’s rights on the weekdays, on her own penny, and abolition on the weekend.”•
Chris Rohmann is at StageStruck@crocker.com and valleyadvocate.com/author/chris-rohmann.
