Quilting is about more than just fabric and stitches; it’s about blood, love, memory and trauma. That’s the premise at the center of Katori Hall’s “The Blood Quilt” at Lincoln Center, about four sisters gathering to complete a quilt three weeks after their mother’s death. The play itself a beautiful patchwork of themes and ideas that feel packed to the seams.
It’s the first weekend of May, which means it’s time for the Jernigan sisters to convene at their family home at Kwemera, an island off the coast of Georgia where the Jernigan clan have lived for generations. But Kwemera isn’t what it used to be, and more change is imminent; there are plans for a bridge that will connect the mainland to the island, which means locals are being bought out by developers. Still, Clementine (Crystal Dickinson, with perfect gravitas), the eldest sister, remains staunchly a Kwemera woman, having lived her whole life there, where she nursed their mother in the last years of her illness.
Clementine is the fierce guardian of family traditions, including the annual quilting ritual, so Gio (a riotous Adrienne C. Moore), the heavy drinking second oldest, has reported for duty, as has Cassan (Susan Kelechi Watson, perfectly demure), who has brought her teenage daughter Zambia (Mirirai) for her first quilting circle. And there’s an unexpected guest — Amber (Lauren E. Banks), the youngest, who’s a successful entertainment lawyer in California and has been absent for the last few years.
Quilting is a days long project, with each sister assigned her own separate duties. But the quilt isn’t the only reason for this reunion: there’s the matter of their inheritance, if any, and the financial loose ends remaining after their mother’s death. The money issues stir up the women, but it’s their contrary, complicated and self-contradictory ways of grieving, along with their long-held grudges against one another, that truly unleashes the storm of drama inside the home.
The world of “The Blood Quilt,” which opened Thursday, is inviting: Hall’s characters are fully formed and clearly motivated, the family’s history is rich and Kwemera feels alive, in part thanks to the eclectic homespun set design by Adam Rigg. Quilts are draped everywhere in this tiny cabin, which is so close to the water that the front of the stage drops off into a grassy basin.
Hall, who won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play “The Hot Wing King,” uses the same level of artistry and meticulousness in crafting a metaphor that the sisters do in crafting their quilts. Their roles and quilting preferences mirror their places within the family. Zambia, caught in the messy adolescent process of defining her identity, takes the role of stitching the centerpiece — an apt, if heavy-handed, representation of a younger generation taking the baton in a family tradition. And the quilts themselves embody memories and even a bit of magic. A Jernigan story about a family matriarch who gave a quilt square away to each of her children sold off to slavery isn’t just emotionally resonant; it proves that these quilts are literal scraps of history.
That said, Hall’s script takes so much time easing into the family’s traditions and lore that the drama in “The Blood Quilt” is slow to get any traction. The direction, by Lileana Blain-Cruz, also lacks a sense of dramatic urgency so the production’s two-hour-and-forty-minute running time often feels like an unnecessary drag.
Despite its length, the play still feels overstuffed with themes, and teeters uneasily between two different sized spheres of conflict. Hall’s most confident writing comes when she explores the family dynamics, with the squabbles and tensions among the sisters and their generational divide. Less successful is unpacking the sociopolitical issues, which extend beyond the Jernigans and even Kwemera to a broader exploration of gentrification, assimilation and the value of a cultural history. Hall’s writing here regarding community and Blackness are more novel and urgent, the real engine behind the material, but they lack a sense of resolution.
“The Blood Quilt,” like another show now playing Off Broadway, Dominique Morisseau’s “Bad Kreyòl,” similarly buckles under the weight of an attempt to capture the totality of a cultural experience. Gullah Geechee sea island Blackness, Caribbean-American Blackness — these are experiences that deserve representation, but not necessarily in one fell swoop. And yet in an art form that already lacks for marginalized stories, theater is also a space where Blackness has historically been — and to some extent still is — flattened into a singular African-American experience. So is there space for more? Perhaps a series of Kwemera plays that are given adequate space to sprawl out. Or a more focused, finely drawn sketch of Kwemera life that, like Clementine’s stitches, are “so tight even wind can’t whisper its way through.” Either way, I welcome more quilts to the collection.
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