Ars longa, vita brevis

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 9, 1996 | by Nelson Pressley

Conventional wisdom in late 20th-century America holds that white directors need to tread carefully, if they dare to tread at all, on material that deals with the lives of African-Americans.

Emily Mann, the writer-director who adapted the 1991 book, Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years for the stage, is familiar with the issue. The play is based on the memoir of Sarah L. (Sadie) and A. Elizabeth (Bessie) Delany, two centenarian sisters whose father was born into slavery - a situation skeptics might say can be fully appreciated only by a black writer-director.

"I know all about it, believe me," says the 44-year-old Mann with a wry laugh. "I know what I'm up against - that white people are exploiting black people's stories. 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 a problem with it.'"

Not many people have a problem with Having Our Say. The play is a charming portrait of two fascinating women who, in the face of early 20th-century racism, become a high-school teacher and a dentist. The Delanys' story also is a journey across a large, rocky patch of American history.

As adapted and directed by Mann and performed by Mary Alice and Gloria Foster, Having Our Say became one of the surprise hits of the 1994-95 Broadway season. The national touring company, starring Lizan Mitchell and Micki Grant, has taken the show on the road, and the single-set, two-character drama will be the fifth most-produced play in the country's regional theaters this year.

Stylistically, Having Our Say is right up Mann's alley. Her method is to bring dramatic shape and theatrical energy to real-life material she pulls from archives or gathers in interviews. Her first play was Annulla, An Autobiography, based on an interview she conducted with a friends aunt, a Jewish woman who survived World War II. Still Life, also culled from interviews, features straightforward testimony from a frighteningly 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 of Justice deals with the murder of George Moscone (then mayor of San Francisco) and Harvey Milk (a city supervisor) at the hands of former City Councilman Dan White. And Mann's most recent work, Greensboro: A Requiem, revisits the 1979 incident in which members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazis shot 13 people at an anti-Klan rally, killing five.

"I learned about the Holocaust in my grandmother's kitchen," recalls Mann. "And how most of is learn about great wisdom in the world and what happens to people is literally in our aunts' or our mothers' or our grandmothers' kitchens. That's a very secure, safe, warm, familiar place." All of which explains why Emily Mann can say of Having Our Say, a kind of landscape of America told in intimate terms, "Its totally what I do. Its documentary. Its in their own words."

Mann grew up with a solid understanding of the civil-rights movement. Her father, a historian, was good friends with John Hope Franklin. They make a cameo appearance in Having Our Say, which uses a photograph of the two men, a white man and a black man, marching side by side through Alabama from Selma to Montgomery.

Her father's occupation helped push Mann's theatrical career in its unique direction. As a literature major at Harvard, she was interested in writing fiction and directing plays. Home on break from school, she came across an interview that her father had gathered in which a daughter talked with her mother about her experience in the Treblinka camp. The poignancy of the survivor's tale, coupled with the mother-daughter dynamic of the conversation, fired Mann's imagination. That encounter, she believed, would be powerful stuff in the theater.

After Harvard, Mann was the first female director accepted into a training program run by the University of Minnesota and the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. It was there that she turned the Annulla Allen transcript into a play. Since then, her career has taken her to theaters across the country as she has earned Obies and even an award from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Mann is beginning her seventh season at the helm of the Kennedy Center's McCarter Theater in Washington, which won a Tony Award as the country's outstanding regional theater two years ago.

Mann talks about 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" - a line that worked itself into the play. The warmth and charisma of the Delanys has a lot to do with their story's popularity. But the social angle matters, too; Mann calls the play "covertly political."

According to Mann, there is more political writing in the theater than many people realize, but she dislikes agitprop and tries to avoid it in her own work: "I think I'm talking about plays that have something to say. Is there enough of that? There's never enough of that, you know? In any society."