Tamu Gray: Having Her Say -- Actress Has A Talent For Older Characters

----------------------------------------------------------------- Theater Preview

"Having Our Say" previews tomorrow through Tuesday, opens Wednesday and runs through Dec. 29 at Intiman Theatre, Seattle Center. 269-1900. -----------------------------------------------------------------

A few years ago, Tamu Gray played a 90-year old matriarch in "Jar the Floor" at Empty Space Theatre. A few years later, in the Group Theatre's "A Raisin in the Sun," Gray was equally convincing as another grandmother of mature vintage.

Now Gray is portraying a woman of 101 in the Intiman Theatre version of the Tony Award-nominated Broadway docudrama "Having Our Say." Emily Mann's play, drawn from the inspiring, bestselling 1993 memoir of the same title imparts a century of African-American history through the recollections of two vital centenarians, Bessie Delany (Gray) and her 103-year old sister, Sadie Delany (played by Amentha Dymally), North Carolina natives who spent most of their adult lives in New York.

Yet as persuasive as Gray may be as the outspoken Bessie, offstage she's a woman in her mid-40's - with an uncanny knack for impersonating feisty ladies decades older.

Over coffee recently, the robust, thoughtful Gray noted, "there are certain assumptions in Seattle about what kinds of parts actors should do or not do. It's not only about race, but gender, age, aesthetics. But I never wanted to just be plugged into someone else's idea of what a woman actor is, or a black actor, or an actor of a particular age."

Gray moved from California to Seattle in the 1970s, and has worked steadily on local stages ever since. A restless artist on an ongoing philosophical quest, she happily spent the past two years in Ashland, Ore., performing with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

But Gray's own assumptions about casting were rattled in the 1980s, when the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre gave her the role of an aged auntie in "Hedda Gabler." She recalls, "I'd always played near my own age, so it was weird. But it gave me the room and permission to rearrange my notions of what old was, and what acting old was."

Gray got more practice later, alternating between elderly characters and such forceful middle-aged figures as Paulina in Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale" at OSF.

For "Having Our Say" at Intiman, director Jacqueline Moscou immediately thought of using Gray as Bessie, a pioneering black woman dentist. Says Moscou, "I've known Tamu for 20 years, we've acted together often, and I just felt she'd be right."

But Moscou hired the sixty-ish Dymally as Bessie's sweet-natured sister Sadie, and checked out some older performers for Bessie, too. Ultimately she came back to Gray, because "I see a lot of Bessie in her - the same intensity, and wicked sense of humor."

Though Gray only saw the real Bessie Delany (who died this year, at age 103) in TV interviews, she has a firm grasp of her persona: "This is not a cute little lady. The stories she tells about herself, and what Sadie says about her, reveal a lot of rage. This very smart, beautiful woman came up during segregation, and encountered so many obstacles she became cynical."

At first Gray tried "to soften her anger, but I put that aside. I had to remember when I was a kid, and my family lived for a few years in the South. When I realized people disliked me just because of my skin color, I got angry, too."

Gray has found other connections with Bessie: They both hail from large, loving Southern clans. They both were close to fathers who were educators.

To suggest Bessie's far more advanced physical age, Gray prefers a subtle approach to exaggerated doddering. The greater challenge is conveying a sense of witnessing an entire century of major social upheavals and shifts.

"A hundred years is an amazing thing to wrap your brain around," Gray says. "What the Delanys saw - slavery ending, the Depression, women getting the vote - is not new information to us. But I think the play gets this knowledge past our intellects, and into our hearts. And that's why I'm an actor."