The fabric of life

The compelling drama of Quilters

by Bill Rodriguez

QUILTERS. By Molly Newman and Barbara Damashek. Music by Barbara Damashek. Directed by Kate Lohman. Musical direction by Mark Conley. With Patricia Hawkridge, Kathleen Moore Ambrosini, Casey Seymour Krim, Kate Lohman, Barbara McElRoy, Margaret Melozzi, Sandy Winters. By First Stage Providence, at Brown University's Leeds Theater through August 26.

You might think that quilting would make a flimsy metaphor for the unfolding of pioneer life. But Quilters, by Molly Newman and Barbara Damashek, is made of surprisingly sturdy stuff. The reprise of a production staged early last year at the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre is powerful testimony to strong-willed women of any era or situation.

Quilters was the most popular production of the 19999-2000 season at SFGT, and it's not hard to see why word of mouth made it a hit. It doesn't tell a story as much as it assembles a piecework collage of hard times and hard-bought humor, but the final picture is a panorama of fortitude. Music infuses the action with the sweet voices of the performers, and the banjo to bass heartbeat of an onstage band (Char Getty on fiddle, Zachary Chagnon on bass and Joseph L. Auger on several instruments).

The story opens with matriarch Sarah McKendree Bonham (Patricia Hawkridge) declaring that the quilt she is working on will be the last one she will leave behind, the final evidence of her life's experiences. And such experiences they were. An early image is of Papa (the all-female cast play the male roles as well) skinning cattle freshly fallen in a 30-below blizzard and throwing the hides atop the roof to block a howling wind. So we know right off that quilts were no mere homecraft to idle away the time, but were as vital as food stores. We learn that quilting parties were not just social occasions but provided warmth for the poor to whom the blankets were given. There was room for taking personal pride in the work, though, since skill was measured by how small your stitches were -- 11 to the inch, if you mastered the craft.

Vignettes of hardships are numerous, from tornado to drought. A prairie fire is vividly staged with swirling red cloth. Lisa (Kathleen Moore Ambrosini) sings about being trapped indoors during a prairie sandstorm, able to keep her sanity only by completing a butterfly-pattern quilt. Even when the weather was not trying to kill them, childbirth was threatening to do so. "Our ninth died of the cholera. The tenth and eleventh were the twins," one character lists along with other prairie wives. Jody (Sandy Winters) wants to end her pregnancy because the last one laid her up for two months afterwards and her husband and children couldn't afford that again, but a doctor refuses to help. An herbal solution to the problem, sent by a well-meaning friend, ends up being torture.

While the wry gospel ditty "The Lord Don't Rain Down Manna In My Yard" may strike the most representative chord among the songs, there is plenty of less subtle humor to offset the hardships. A mother snaps to a mischievous child, "If you break that, there's a lickin' lyin' in the salt for you when your daddy gets home!" In one anecdote evidently taken from a journal or oral history, a mother tells her daughter in a fabric shop that they can get only a bit of the bright red calico she likes. "You know your father," she says. But the Baptist preacher patriarch astounds them, and reveals his devil-may-care side, by buying the entire bolt for them.

There's even outright hilarity, when the scrappy Dana (Kate Lohman) talks about her sister's disgustingly sweet Sunbonnet Sue quilts, which show the sunny character in wholesome variations of a watering can pose. She describes with devilish glee her own version that she presented to her sibling, with Sue bitten by a snake, struck by lightning, stabbed through the heart, and so on.

Director Lohman puts together a spirited and moving story from the snapshots of 19th-century lives. The play has special meaning for the former SFGT co-artistic-director, since she and fellow Trinity Conservatory grad Peg Melozzi were in the play's second production, directed by co-author Damashek at the Pittsburgh Public Theater in 1982. As Lohman explains in the program notes, Quilters began as an audition piece for Molly Newman, who was then encouraged by the Denver Center Theatre Company to research oral histories and develop a play. The initial inspiration was the book The Quilters: Women and Domestic Art, by Patricia Cooper and Norma Bradley Allen.

With one quilt pattern underfoot and as a backdrop and specific outline blocks -- The Log Cabin, The Tree of Life -- introducing vignettes, we're always aware of the fascinating visual aspect of Quilters. Thanks to this fine cast and its skillful director, what lies beneath the pattern of these depicted lives is even more compelling.