San Diego director Delicia Turner Sonnenberg focused on ‘Black joy’ in new holiday play at New Village Arts
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It started in the church. Delicia Turner Sonnenberg found her love for theater through her grandfather’s Georgia Church and the sense of community that came from people coming together to hear stories, share a similar perspective and purpose, and a deeper understanding of the world around them to search.
“I don’t go to church anymore, but all the things I loved about it, I now love about the theater. I believe theater is the intersection of art, intellect and entertainment, ”she says. “Theater has a way of revealing our humanity in all its flaws and beauties. It’s light, split breath, darkness, and magic. I took my first theater course in eighth grade and have never looked back. “
As co-founder of Moxie Theater, the professional non-profit theater founded in 2005 with an emphasis on producing works by female dramatists and undermining female stereotypes to expand the diversity of the feminine, she was also Artistic Director for 12 years. During this time, she has received numerous awards for her work, including Director of the Year from the San Diego Theater Critics Circle, the NAACP Theater Awards, and the Des McAnuff New Visions Award.
Turner Sonnenberg, 51, lives in the Bay Park neighborhood of San Diego with husband Jerry Sonnenberg and has two children, August and Zoë. She now focuses on freelance directing, resident artist work at the Old Globe Theater’s new two-year residency for color artists, and directing playwright and longtime art patron Dea Hurston’s new “1222 Oceanfront: A Black Family Christmas” at New Village Arts until December 26th.
Q: What lessons did you learn while at Moxie that helped you navigate this newest chapter in your career?
A: Moxie is where I found my artistic voice, where I learned to be a better collaborator and a better director, a better director and a better sister to my fellow theater colleagues. One of the biggest lessons I learned there was flexibility. That served me well as a freelance director, as I work with theaters of different sizes and cultures, different playwrights and designers.
Q: What made you choose to say “yes” to directing “1222 Oceanfront”?
A: I liked the ambition of New Village Arts’ desire to include a black family show in the Christmas theater canon. I had the honor of working on Dea Hurston’s first fully produced piece. If you know her, you will also know that it is hard to say no to Dea.
Q: What did you notice when you first read the script?
A: What caught my eye the first time reading it was the humor, the relationships, and the love.
What I love about Bay Park …
I love driving down the hill on Clairemont, on some random assignment, and seeing these spectacular views of the bay. It never gets old for me. I always think, “Wow, I’m not on vacation. I live here!”
Q: Were there any scenes that you could see right away that you knew you wanted to bring to life?
A: I don’t really “see” pieces. I am a director who is moved by words. The scenes that immediately struck me were the scenes between the elderly couple. The main love story takes place between 60-year-olds. For the actress in particular, I found it great that she can play a main character who is lively and sexy with her own love interest and she is not just “the mother”. There are many stories about young people falling in love, but I was drawn to the love story of these older people.
Q: What was your approach to directing this piece? What did you want to convey and convey to the audience?
A: As I approached the piece, I wanted to make sure that the creator’s vision of what the project meant to them was present. I wanted to add my voice, as well as the actors and artistic staff, to celebrate the story we were telling. Above all, I wanted to convey black joy to the audience.
Q: Are there any plays that you’ve either seen or staged that really appealed to you?
A: I recently did a play for La Jolla Playhouse, “The Garden,” which is a mother-daughter play. I am in a real mother-daughter moment in my life. My daughter spent the first year of college during the pandemic at home, online, but was ready to go away so she could spread her own wings. After they got their vaccinations, I went to Texas to visit my parents, stayed six weeks, and reconnected with my own mother. It was the first time I had spent so much time at home working on this piece since I was 18, after these experiences really touched me – the deep connection, the conflict, the disappointments, misunderstandings, the reconciliation and the passionate love and admiration for one another.
Q: How did the upheavals caused by the COVID-19 pandemic – and the work for racial justice that came with it – affect your own work and perspective as an artist?
A: Because of my parents, and because I grew up so close to the civil rights movement and leaders in Atlanta, I grew up with a strong sense of self and love for my blackness. In fact, I thought everyone wanted to be a dark skinned black girl. I never thought that I couldn’t be exactly who I am. I never believed that other people’s prejudices were my problem. I believed it was my responsibility to seize opportunities that people had died to secure them for me. It was during this time that I realized that the real problem is other people’s prejudices. I am a mother who sends two black young adults into a world full of danger and violence against black bodies. The dilemma of letting them live without fear but being aware of it keeps me awake at night. In my work, the most important thing to me is that my work has an impact and says something about my belief system. I am in a place where it is important to me to raise the voices of black women in the theater, but for black women to stop saying “How can I help?” And start saying “You’re welcome”.
Q: What was a challenge in your job in general?
A: The biggest challenge for me is that sometimes it doesn’t work. Nobody says let me do a bad production at first, but sometimes the pieces don’t fit together properly.
Q: What was it worth about this work?
A: The best things for me are the stories I share, the people I work with, and the lifelong friends I have made.
Q: What did this work teach you about yourself?
A: Many years ago I directed a play for the Playwrights Project. It was written about a Palestinian couple by an 18-year-old Jewish teenager. My assistant director was a young Muslim woman whom I would turn to for cultural questions. It turned out that she had to go home and ask her mother about it because growing up in Jordan all she saw was American films and read American novels. She couldn’t wait to become an American. On the opening night, she wrote me a card that said, “Thank you for showing me what’s beautiful in my own culture.” I still have it. It reminds me that when I’m not the expert, even if I’m in a position of power, it’s better to listen more than dictate my own beliefs to me. I am always careful about how I handle other people’s culture and always hope that others will be careful about the way they treat mine.
Q: What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
A: A mentor in New York once told me that you can’t start a theater with people unless you have a similar taste. It seems so easy now, but I met a lot of cool people in New York and we always talked about starting a company, but nothing ever happened. Then I moved to San Diego and started working with a group of women who all had similar tastes in the type of theater we found compelling, and Moxie was born.
Q: What would be one thing people would learn about you?
A: I knit. I can knit socks that are wearable! I knitted my first full pair during the shutdown.
Q: Please describe your ideal weekend in San Diego.
A: I rarely work Monday through Friday and now my two kids are in college but when we are all together it is my ideal weekend to get home from work on Friday and spend time with my husband while the children are out with friends. A family picnic or a day at the beach ends with a family game evening on Saturday. Uno is our usual. On Sunday I like to spend the whole day in front of the TV, watching NFL RedZone, then soccer on Sunday night and then dinner. If it’s not football season, then basketball and cinema on Sundays.
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