Lileana Blain-Cruz will direct The Blood Quilt by Katori Hall. Gathering at their childhood island home off the coast of Georgia, four disconnected sisters meet to create a family quilt to honor their recently deceased mother. When their reunion turns into a reading of their mother’s will, everyone must grapple with a troubling inheritance. Stitched with history, ritual, laughter and tears, will their “blood quilt” bind the family together or tear them apart forever? The Blood Quilt had its premiere at Arena Stage in Washington, DC.
On the page, these female characters could not be more different. On stage in the vivid performances delivered under Lileana Blain-Cruz’s very showy direction, they sometimes border on caricatures from vastly different melodramas. When one of them makes a major pronouncement, and there are a flood of them, Blain-Cruz lets go with storm effects (lighting by Jiyoun Chang, sound by Palmer Hefferan) in case anyone is dozing off.
“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.
2024 | Off-Broadway |
LCT Off-Broadway Premiere Off-Broadway |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
---|---|---|---|
2025 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Featured Performance in a Play | Adrienne C. Moore |
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