THE BLOOD QUILT Weaves Family Legacy with History — Review

A group of half-sisters return to their family home on a small island off the coast of Georgia in Katori Hall’s The Blood Quilt, which had its New York premiere tonight at Lincoln Center’s Newhouse Theatre. Though they’re there to mourn their recently deceased mother, and the play follows the classic dramatic reunion template (with unique voice and great added nuance), the production is mostly an entertaining look at four sisters, and one of their daughters, figuring out what their dynamics will look like moving forward. With its relentlessly watchable performances, The Blood Quilt is a well-crafted addition to the fruitful genre of the homecoming play.

The eldest, auntie-like Clementine (Crystal Dickinson) and the beer-loving Gio (Adrienne C. Moore), a cop who hits her weed pen to “aid her glaucoma,” are already at Jernigans’ ancestral house when along come Cassan (Susan Kelechi Watson) and her identity-hopping teen daughter, Zambia (Mirirai), who this week is in a hijab; last week was a vampire. Their mother hosted them each year for a quilting bee, a tradition they intend to continue in her memory. Amber (Lauren E. Banks), a California-living lawyer and the least in-touch with the family, is the last to arrive, and the fastest to set off tensions among the women: who’s more successful than the other; who needs to stay out of the other’s business; to whom is mom leaving the best inheritance?

That last question becomes the most salient when it is revealed that their mother’s back taxes might outweigh her top two possessions: her house, and her large, historic collection of family quilts. This sets off a series of escalating arguments between the sisters which Hall interweaves with poignant cultural weight. Amber and Zambia, the youngest and most modern, are quick to adopt a joking African accent when poking fun at the others’ observance of ritual and Black tradition which they see as corny – what Amber calls “pseudo-Black Nationalist” bullshit, like the “fake-ass Yoruba village” just over on the mainland. But they’re the first to offer a solution that would take care of all three bequests, even if the other women are in staunch opposition.

The play probably doesn’t need to last two hours and forty minutes, but Hall, whose television series P-Valley will soon debut its third season, knows how to draw out long threads and keep them engaging: she is alternately soothingly poetic and fiercely funny, and her characters are people we’re more than willing to spend time with. This cast is uniformly terrific, with Banks and Watson particular standouts. They’re also remarkably comfortable with each other, their relationships joyously lived-in under the familial direction of Lileana Blain-Cruz, who brings aboard her delightful usual design suspects, Adam Rigg (scenic) and Montana Levi Blanco (costumes). Blanco’s work deftly displays each woman’s personality and Rigg evokes the harmonious chaos of a quilt in their set, which features mismatched fabrics and wooden tiles on the house’s attractive bones, several gorgeous quilts, and a water feature downstage which, though initially almost an afterthought, hosts the play’s stunningly staged catharsis. (Jiyoun Chang’s light, Palmer Hefferan’s sound, and Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s projections helpfully assist.)

That final purifying rainfall washes away what becomes almost an overloading of trauma, as the sisters cut deeper into each other, from the affecting family drama at this play’s core. Hall has a commanding ability to knit themes of history and legacy with a calibrated, comic touch that’s tight enough to endure the thoroughly introspective, and breathable enough to remain deeply enjoyable.

The Blood Quilt is in performance through December 29, 2024 at Lincoln Center’s Newhouse Theatre on West 65th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.