Article Title: Lost Nation's Play Having Our Say Exposes Racism, Courage, Heroism

Edition: January 2001
Category: Arts/Music/Theater
Author: Nat Frothingham
Article:

Relaxing at the City Hall auditorium after a day's rehearsal, Debrah Waller and Lisa Gaye Dixon, two African-American actors, sat down and talked about themselves, their careers, and the play they will perform beginning Friday, January 19 at Montpelier's Lost Nation Theater.

Debrah Waller, who plays Sadie Delany in Emily Mann's play Having Our Say, described what it means to be black in America today. She looked at the color of the skin on the back of her hand. "This is the color we wear everyday," she said softly. "We can't escape it. We can't escape the judgment of it. I'm going to have to deal with it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's permanent for us."

Having Our Say is a play based on a book of the same title by Sadie and Bessie Delany, two "colored women" who became successful professionals, one a school teacher and another a dentist, by bucking the prevailing conventions.

In the play, both women "tell it like it is." And the story of their lives, as the theater magazine Variety observed, embraces Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, the Harlem Renaissance, the civil rights and women's movements, up to the present.

"I love my role in the play," said Debrah Waller who plays Sadie Delany. Waller saw the Broadway production that opened in April 1994 at New York City's Booth Theatre. At the time Waller had no idea that one day she would star in the play itself.

When Sadie Delany died in 1999, Waller read her obituary and was powerfully affected by what Sadie had to say about hardship. Sadie had said, "Life is too short. It's up to you to make it sweet." Waller cut this out of the paper and pasted it on the wall of her bedroom. "It was something I wanted to use as my mantra," she explained.

Waller is struck by the heroic lives of the Delany sisters and by the stubborn durability of racial bigotry. Waller said the Delany sisters were contending with the stuff she contends with herself every day.

In her real life, Waller is tired of being seen as a woman who, because she's black, "is a loose moral object." She's equally weary of the stereotype still prevalent in both black and white communities that light skin is better and dark skin is worse.

Dixon, who plays Bessie, struck a note of protest in talking about the play. Dixon feels that standard histories of the United States barely scratch the surface of the African-American experience. In American schools, "we get history from the point of view of white men who got to the top of the heap," she said. "We are given a few brief paragraphs about the Holocaust and the Middle Passage."

Then she noted how little is taught in the schools about the learning and cultural sophistication of black Africa. "Don't get me started," she warned.

Turning to Having Our Say, Dixon drew attention to a scene that shows the raw courage of Bessie Delany.

Bessie is on her way to take a new teaching position in Brunswick, Ga., and she's waiting to change trains at a railway station in Waycross, Georgia. As the scene develops, she's sitting in a colored-only waiting room in the station. And because she's going to a new job, she has taken her hair down and is combing it. Just then a drunken white man sticks his head in the door of the segregated waiting area and leers and mumbles at her, in a threatening way.

In the play, Bessie says: "Oh, why don't you shut up and go wait with your own kind in the white waiting room?"

The man slams the door and shouts at the top of his lungs: "The nigger bitch insulted me! The nigger bitch insulted me!" An angry crowd of whites begins to gather and Bessie fears she will be lynched.

As the scene ends, her train arrives, and she's saved. "But I wasn't afraid to die!" Bessie says. "I know you ain't got to die but once, but it seemed as good a reason to die as any."

The play is directed by Lisa Tromovitch.

Debrah Waller as Sadie Delany
Born and Raised: Cleveland, Ohio.

Start in Theater:
"I started taking tap at 5 years old, modern dance and jazz and tap. It was something I did that I loved. I was always doing skits and plays with my friends and we would charge the other kids a nickel to come and see us."

Theater Training:
HB Studio in NYC; dance study with Alvin Ailey.

Theater Credits:
Waller has performed on Broadway and Off Broadway, Lincoln Center, the nation and European tours of Showboat. She also played in the opening season of the TV series The Sopranos and worked with the matriarch, Olivia Soprano who was played by the late Nancy Marchand.

Hometown Today:
New York City

Lisa Gaye Dixon as Bessie Delany
Born and Raised:
Champaign, Illinois

Start in Theater:
"I was living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I was in a new town and I thought I'd reinvent myself. In my very first community theater role I got nominated for a regional theater award. I was playing Ruby in Marsha Norman's play Getting Out."

Theater training:
Masters of Fine Arts in Acting at Illinois State University at Normal, Illinois

Theater Credits:
Dixon has appeared with Shakespeare & Company, Steppenwolf Theater, The Globe, and the Royal Shakespeare Company in the U.K. Dixons favorite roles include the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, and Ruby in Getting Out and Roach in Slaughter City by playwright Naomi Wallace.

Hometown today:
Chicago, Illinois

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