40. THE BLOOD QUILT (seen November 24, 2024)

 

Lauren E. Banks, Mirirai, Adrienne C. Moore, Susan Kelechi Watson, Crystal Dickinson. All photos: Julieta Cervantes.

Pulitzer-winning Katori Hall’s The Blood Quilt (which premiered in 2015 at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage) focuses on four cyclonic African American half-sisters, the Jernigans, their varying hues signaling that each is by a different father. In the play, the siblings gather several months after their mother’s death at the rickety family homesite on fictional Kwemera Island (Kwemera means “to withstand, to endure”), off the Georgia coast. As the winds blow and thunder crashes, these Gullah Geechee women—and one’s teen daughter—unite and disunite, their increasingly ferocious squabbles mirroring the roiling storm outside.

Adrienne C. Moore, Crystal Dickinson, Susan Kelechi Watson.

They slice fabric and sew a quilt together, much as they slice each other apart emotionally only to join again in blood-signed ties that bind. Secrets emerge in a cascading shower of increasingly acrimonious recriminations revelations, touching, among other things, on HIV, rape, and, as in so many similar plays, the contents of a will. Finally, the tempest inside and out is resolved through the power of a showery ritual.

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Cast of The Blood Quilt.

While much seems familiar from other plays, interest is sustained by Hall’s richly fashioned, lyrical language—albeit often unclear by its mingling of thick Black and Geechee dialect—and the strikingly intense acting. Director Lileana Blain-Cruz has drawn first-class work from each gifted performer, their costuming by Montana Levi Blanco helping greatly to illuminate their vividly disparate personalities.

Susan Kelechi Watson, Crystal Dickinson, Lauren E. Banks, Adrienne C. Moore.

Crystal Dickinson is the stable, head-on-her-shoulders Clementine, who lived with and cared for the Jernigan family’s late matriarch, a demanding, overwhelming woman. herself almost as much a character as those we see. Cassan, played by Susan Kelechi Watson), is the mother of the precociously wise 15-year-old Zambia (Mirirai). She could have been a nurse but chose work as an army nurse because her military husband, Chad, was always being deployed to distant warzones, forcing her, in essence, to be a single mom.

Mirirai, Adrienne C. Moore.

Adrienne C. Moore plays Gio, the oldest sibling, a profane, bitterly angry, beer-guzzling, Mississippi cop in a toxic relationship with Red, the man she’s divorcing. She’s especially nasty toward her youngest sister, the beautiful, Armani-wearing Amber (Lauren E. Banks), her $500 weave displaying her outward success as a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer. Although she’s the family’s golden girl (and Mama’s favorite)—one reason for Gio’s jealous antagonism—she, too, is in a failing relationship, with a man named Zander.

Lauren E. Banks, Susan Kelechi Watson, Mirirai.

Zambia, whose thick, ungrammatical dialect sometimes disguises comments that sound too mature for a 15-year-old, is the kind of kid who tries on identities like masks: one week a vampire, the next a Goth, then a hijab-wearing Muslim, and now a lesbian. She idolizes Amber but, for all her smarts, is too much of a slacker to match her aunt’s ambition and lifelong determination to succeed. Still, beginning as a complete innocent to the world of quilting, allowing her to serve as a receptacle for cultural exposition, she ultimately proves a worthy successor to a family tradition in danger of vanishing. 

When such plays have plots involving wills, lawyers are rarely far behind. Despite her lack of familiarity with legal issues outside of her specialty, Amber can cut through knots brought up by the will’s disposal of the quilts and the family's financial decline--a huge amount in unpaid taxes—that now face the siblings. The future of the quilts, which have significant financial value, triggers violent disagreements rooted in the family’s fabled historical commitment to their making and possession. Family quilt-making, a craft in which Amber is the least proficient but for which Zambia shows a surprising knack, is the lifeblood, the spiritual sustenance of the Jernigans.

 

Crystal Dickinson, Susan Kelechi Watson. 

Hall combines naturalism with folktale qualities, using the craft of quilting to evoke feelings of mysticism, ritualism, and symbolism that artfully perpetuate the family’s spiritual history.  Several beautiful, borrowed quilts are carefully woven into Adam Rigg’s attractive set design—with its watery frontage—on the Mitzi E. Newhouse stage, including their placement on the house’s upper story where they hang over a balcony railing. Jiyoun Chang creates lovely lighting effects that help us focus on them, and Jeannette Oi-Suk Yew’s projections add an other-worldly dimension to the atmosphere. 

The Blood Quilt, unfortunately, at two and three-quarter hours, is vastly overlong. It seems intent on making sure each sister gets as much acting time as the others, especially when it becomes someone’s turn to reveal some crisis they’re experiencing or to expose a secret, including some that don’t shine nicely on Mama. 

The fierceness and frequency of people blowing their tops makes a mockery of family unity, such that one wonders why, if their mother’s death can trigger such sibling anger, what were things like at previous get-togethers? Each time the group quiets down, something else comes along to detonate emotional fireworks. For all the terrific acting this precipitates, it’s not the post-ritual peace and feeling of reconciliation with which you leave the theatre, but the ringing force of all that shouting.

 

The Blood Quilt

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse

150 W. 65^th Street, NYC

Through December 29