Katori Hall is one of American theater’s most gifted voices, and her decade-old drama The Blood Quilt, now playing at Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, showcases her ability to craft well-rounded characters whose occasional dips into poetic language feels natural. The setting is a cabin on a fictional island off the coast of Georgia, where the four Jernigan sisters have gathered for an annual summer meet-up to assemble a quilt, a tradition that the family’s women have kept alive for decades, back to the days when their ancestors were enslaved people.
But the four women, joined by the teenage daughter (Mirirai) of middle sister Cassan (Susan Kelechi Watson), spend as much time sowing seeds of resentment as they do sewing blocks for the quilt they’re putting together — an elaborate design concocted by their mother, who died just three weeks before the action begins. All of the rancor among the sisters — or, technically, half-sisters since they each have different fathers — will explode to the surface before the curtain call.
Crystal Dickinson, speaking with a thick Gullah-Geechee accent that can sometimes make her lines difficult to understand, plays the peace-making eldest, Clementine, who still lives on the island and cared for mama in her final days — and who was apparently in the dark about the six-figure debt that mama had built up on the house through years of unpaid taxes. (Adam Rigg’s simply designed set, hauntingly lit by Jiyoun Chang to spotlight the multitude of beautiful quilts, evocatively reinforces the sense of place that’s central to the drama.)
Adrienne C. Moore shines as Gio, a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, sharp-elbowed Mississippi cop who bristles at every potential slight while also wallowing in her perpetual outsider status. Watson brings a grounded practicality to Cassan, a nurse who’s so devoted her life to raising her feisty 15-year-old that she barely registers the absence of her long-absent Army husband. (Mirirai performs admirably as her daughter, who’s somewhat confusingly written to sound more childish and improbably mature, from scene to scene.) And then there’s Amber (Lauren E. Banks), at 28 the youngest of the group. Everyone agrees that she was mama’s favorite, and as a Harvard-educated entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, she’s both the object of envy (her $500 weave is immediately clocked) as well as the go-to call for emergency funds.
Hall’s play covers familiar ground, with a debt to fractious family sagas like Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County as well as inheritance dramas like August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson. In this case, the sisters are divided over how to pay off that huge tax debt on the house — and the family’s collection of 100 quilts, some dating back more than a century, is an obvious asset to be liquidated. (Indeed, traditional quilts from the Gullah/Geechee people descended from enslaved West and Central Africans can be worth thousands of dollars.)
Mama’s physical estate takes a back seat to the emotional legacy that she left behind, and it’s clear that this was a difficult, complicated woman who passed down a suitcases full of emotional baggage that still need to be unpacked. After a languid first act that sets up the backstory and the conflicts among the sisters, the second act erupts with a series of onstage firework displays as deep-buried family secrets and long-nursed grudges are exposed. A high-volume blame game ensues, and just about everyone gets to shout her own truth about how she was let down by mama as well as the rest of them. It’s a lot.
But Lileana Blain-Cruz directs her tight-knit ensemble with a steady hand so that even the most volatile moments never dip into histrionics or melodrama. She also manages to pace the play so that only occasionally drags during its two-hour, 45-minute running time. Moore shows astonishing range and nuance as the most combustible Gio, whose propensity to act out grows directly out of her feelings as the one who’s perpetually overlooked or discounted. Watson, too, stands out in creating a woman who has subsumed her own life and ambitions into others’ for so long that she’s forgotten to carve out a space for herself.
And if Hall overworks the metaphorical language, particularly toward the end, that’s perhaps to be expected. We yearn for these women, cut from the same cloth but in wildly different patterns, to stitch themselves back together. The Blood Quilt suggests that it’s the will to reconcile that matters, to make peace out of pieces.
THE BLOOD QUILT
Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in Lincoln Center Theater, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes (with intermission)
Tickets on sale through Dec. 29
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