The Blood Quilt Off-Broadway Reviews

“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.

As The Blood Quilt lumbers toward its finish, Hall keeps loading it up with revelations, each one more ostensibly shocking than the last. Except that, inside the formulaic container she’s built, none of them is really a shock at all. The inevitable storm blows in, but by that point, its blows and buffets are too artificial to rattle us. There is, however, an element to the production that transcends that feeling of schematic craftsmanship: the quilts themselves.

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.

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 stitched storylines that gripped me emotionally until the play’s end. While I understood how much of it tied up, I was left hanging with several unanswered questions and loose threads. When Hall took quilting lessons from her grandmother she learned to “hand-piece,” which she feels an essential and remarkable way of putting together quilts. Perhaps, it is also the way for each of us to put together a life.

Strangely, Hall’s play lacks focus, as if it’s juggling too many ideas to go into depth on any one. There are themes of familial discord, buried secrets, deep resentment, historical ownership, selling out, gentrification, lack of parental care, and the tension between tradition and modernity. All these subjects are interesting, but the characters feel like they’re dancing on the surface.

Ms. Hall’s focus in “Quilt” is on four sisters who are reunited after their mother’s death. Clementine, who’s apparently single, is the eldest, and was the closest to their mom. Gio, a police officer, has the biggest mouth; embroiled in what’s clearly a nasty divorce, she self-medicates with marijuana, as Clementine alternately disapproves and shares her supply.

Not a particularly subtle family drama, The Blood Quilt is overstuffed with content and its resolution seems a tad far-fetched in timing, frankly, but the playwright’s fine gift for natural conversation keeps things rolling along agreeably. If The Blood Quilt is not among Hall’s better plays, at least it is a pleasant work that provides good roles for actors. Observed at a preview last weekend, the production staged by Lileana Blain-Cruz had not completely flowered. The performances were all right, quite capable even, but that crucial emotional fusion that transforms actors into an ensemble, particularly when they’re depicting a family, had yet to happen. A climactic scene involving a ritual appeared more chaotic than meaningful.

The program states that Kwemera means “to last, endure, withstand.” The choice of site is Hall’s way of outlining what she hopes, even expects, sisters to do—and the play as well. The good word is that she has succeeded at writing a drama that will last, that will endure.