Bob Brown

THEY’RE back, and they’re better than ever. In celebration of Emily Mann’s 20 years as McCarter Theatre Center’s artistic director, Bessie and Sadie Delany return in a new production of Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years, at McCarter’s Berlind Theatre stage. If you missed them the first time around (as, I must confess, I did), you have to see them now. Of course, Mann’s original McCarter production, based on the sisters’ best-selling book, went on to Broadway, where it received more than 300 performances and garnered Tony Award nominations.

   Directed by the playwright herself, this production is more than a two-person dialogue about the centenarians’ fulsome life. You are their guest in the sisters’ Mount Vernon, N.Y., home, as they haul out family scrapbooks, reminisce about their forebearers and their own struggles and triumphs, and gently bicker over the kitchen table.

   As Sadie says, being inseparable for over a century, the two know each other better than any two people in the world. (The sisters are included in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s oldest authors.) They finish each other’s sentences and tell stories almost in unison. But they are very different personalities, despite their shared values (among them, the disdain for marriage — to which Sadie attributes their longevity). In a way, their approach to life reflects two ways of dealing with prejudice.

   After Jim Crow laws were passed in the South, Sadie (Lizan Mitchell) adopted a peaceful, but sly, way of bypassing them — a Booker T. Washington approach. Bessie (Yvette Freeman), on the other hand, was always outspoken in the W.E.B. DuBois mold, sometimes landing her in trouble.

   The two carry on an ambling conversation in their living room over tea, progressing to the dining room, and then to the kitchen, where they prepare a dinner to celebrate their father’s birthday. He was born into slavery and married a woman, their mother, of mixed white and black parentage. As they roll out the memories, large projections of family photos cover the walls of the stage. And as their tales cover the civil rights struggles of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and the rise and assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the projected images are in multimedia, with film clips and sound.

   They’ve seen more than most people how race can matter so much and yet signify so little in the larger scheme of life. Their history covers race relations in the U.S.,[agr: Would saying “a portion of race relations” be more accurate? ] on a national and personal level. They loved their mother’s white father, who shot squirrels for dinner. They stood up to white bullies, “the Rebby boys,” as they call them.

   And despite rampant prejudice, against not only their race but also their gender, they made a way for themselves — Bessie as one of the first women dentists of color in New York City and Sadie as the first to teach domestic science in the city’s public schools. (They dislike the then newly fashionable terms “black” and “African-American,” preferring to be called “colored.”)

   Some of the dialogue seems to have been freshened up to reflect contemporary events. Bessie notes that to go far, people of color must be better than whites; she points to the “average and white” Congress as a comparison (the original version referred to Dan Quayle). This drew laughs and a smattering of applause on opening night. There was also a reference to their surmise that a woman might be president before a black man.

   Mitchell and Freeman’s uncanny realization of the sisters is such a frank, compelling and intimate dual performance, you become caught up in their mesmerizing narrative. Mitchell, who had played the feisty Bessie in earlier productions, here shifts gears as the gentler Sadie. Freeman has what I think must be the more challenging job as Bessie, whose portrayal skirts just on the edge of an ageist caricature. Like the quaint and “cute” cantankerous oldsters who are often humorously depicted in the media — it’s a type familiar in movies and commercials.

   This McCarter production, a feast for the eye and the soul, earned an extended ovation on opening night. And deservedly so. The Delanys stand as a model of all that is good in America and its people in the face of ignorance and evil. That such a heartwarming story of courage and resilience can also be a potent learning opportunity is a testament to the relevance and power of contemporary theater at its very best.

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  Having Our Say continues at McCarter Theater, 91 University Place, Princeton, through Oct. 18. Performances: Tues.-Thurs. 7:30 p.m., Fri. 8 p.m., Sat. 3, 8 p.m., Sun. 2:30 p.m. Tickets cost $25-$60; 609-258-2787; www.mccarter.org