LOVE AND LEGACY
DIRECTOR DELICIA TURNER SONNENBERG DISCUSSES WHAT DREW HER TO ‘MUD ROW’
Delicia Turner Sonnenberg feels privileged to direct her third local production of a play by Tony-nominated playwright and MacArthur “genius” grant recipient Dominique Morisseau. In 2017, Turner Sonnenberg made her Old Globe directing debut with Morisseau’s “Skeleton Crew,” which this month earned a 2022 Tony nomination for Best Play in its Broadway premiere. In March of last year, she directed a filmed performance of Morisseau’s “Detroit ’67” at the University of San Diego. And this month, the Old Globe resident artist is directing Cygnet Theatre’s production of Morisseau’s “Mud Row,” the story of two generations of Black sisters in the same family navigating issues of class, racism, love, family and gentrification in the Mud Row community of east-end West Chester, Pa.
The play takes place in two time periods: the ’60s, where one sister is a striver and the other is a civil rights activist, and today, when the sisters’ granddaughters — one a successful woman, the other a recovering drug addict — are at odds over what to do with their late grandmother’s now-abandoned house on Mud Row.
Turner Sonnenberg spoke last week about her passion for Morisseau’s writing, her thoughts on “Mud Row” and what else she’s got coming up this summer.
Q:
What do you love about Morisseau’s
plays?
A:
Dominique is probably one of my favorite American
playwrights. Her voice is so strong and poetic and relevant. I love her use of language and rhythm. And you can feel how much she loves the characters she creates. They are capable of good or bad, but are fully human. Her work continually speaks to the intimate human story told against a broad backdrop of a neighborhood’s history, American history and racial and social change.
Q:What attracted you to “Mud Row”?
A: It’s about sisterhood and
feminism and censoring Blackness, and it’s funny and it’s hip. I love all the characters — they’re very different and very honest in their humanity. And the play is deeply rooted in community — where we come from and how we can break free from the past. It’s that age-old question of embracing your legacy or turning away from it. I find the more specific something is, the more universal it is. This play is geographically and culturally specific, but the themes of the play still resonate for everyone.
Q:
The characters in the play
are fictional, but Mud Row is a real place. How did Morisseau come to write this play?
A:
People’s Light theater in
Michigan commissioned this play, and she spent lots of time in West Chester doing research in the neighborhoods there. The other thing in the play that’s subtle is the theme of gentrification. It’s about the sisters’ struggle to maintain wealth. Black people weren’t allowed to own houses, but owning property is about building wealth. It’s about wanting to hang on to the one thing that has been left to you by your family that helps determine wealth.
Q:
How are rehearsals
going?
A:
They’re going great. It’s a
fantastic cast. It’s hard work, though. The rhythms of the language are so specific, but theater is always the art of making the extremely hard look easy. We’re living in the play now, and that’s kind of great.
Q:
What’s coming up next for
you after “Mud Row”?
A:
I’m going to TheatreSquared in Arkansas to do “Flex,” a new play by an Arkansas playwright about women’s basketball that’s set in Arkansas. Then I will direct another production of “One in Two” (which she first staged last summer at Diversionary Theatre) in Florida at Island City Stage. And then in August I go to the Utah Shakespeare Festival to direct actor Derek Charles Livingston in George Stevens Jr.’s “Thurgood.” Plus I’m a resident artist at the Old Globe and on the board for La Jolla Playhouse. It’s a busy time, but I’m grateful to be busy.