If ever a play needs a prequel, it is Katori Hall’s “The Blood Quilt,” which opened Thursday at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse after its premiere at D.C.’s Arena Stage. Who is this dead woman her four daughters talk about for two hours and 45 minutes?
These immediate survivors have gathered to observe their mother’s death and finish a quilt that she designed. The mother and her ancestors created over a hundred of these quilts that are works of art charting the family’s history since a slave ship brought them to the United States. A granddaughter, Zambia (Mirirai), also works on the new quilt, and because she had met her grandmother only a few times, this young character is the vehicle in the play that asks questions. Through Zambia’s inquiries, we learn that each of the four adult women has a different father. We learn that opinions of their mother run the gamut: Clementine (Crystal Dickinson) was her mother’s caretaker and is now the keeper of the flame, as well as all the quilts that decorate the stage in Adam Rigg’s breathtaking recreation of a cabin on an island off the coast of Georgia.
Most colorful of the four sisters is Gio (Adrienne C. Moore), a cussing, beer-guzzling and marijuana-smoking cop who hates her mother. Last to arrive on the scene is Gio’s polar opposite, the youngest sister, Amber (Lauren E. Banks), who is a Hollywood entertainment lawyer who wears designer clothes (costumes by Montana Levi Bianco). Meanwhile, Zambia’s mother recedes into the background for much of Act 1. She is Cassan (Susan Kelechi Watson), a nurse who hasn’t taken off her scrubs. One of Zambia’s many questions is how all the women got their respective name. Only Cassan doesn’t know, which is maybe a question Zambia might have asked a year or two ago since Cassan is her mother.
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.
Hall has clearly studied ”The Piano Lesson.” In the August Wilson play, it’s the piano. In “The Blood Quilt,” it’s the quilt. Amber wants to sell them for big bucks, Clementine wants to keep them. The other characters emphasize this power play by having a wide range of opinions on the topic. As with the Wilson classic, Hall ends her play with a big supernatural surprise. What this playwright hasn’t been able to duplicate is Wilson’s poetry.
But back to Mom. In Act 2, Gio finally reveals why she hates her mother, something only Clementine knows, and Cassan makes a big discovery about her long-lost father when the mother’s will is read by Amber. Nothing gives a play needed focus like the reading of a will, but it’s here, with disclosure of some old letters, that Hall borrows not from Wilson but Nicholas Sparks and his sudsy novel “The Notebook.” Gio’s confession and Cassan’s discovery are so damning of the mother that Hall gives Clementine a speech that turns this woman into a miracle-working midwife. It’s meant to give the unseen character some semblance of humanity. Instead, it turns the dead person into nothing more than a writer’s conceit.
