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Old Patterns and Bold Stitches: The Blood Quilt
Katori Hall’s family-inheritance drama stays within a familiar grid.
Cassan’s army husband might as well be a ghost, and not too far beneath her reserve lie her own sharp tongue and the bitter weight of, as Hall describes it, “being a married single parent.” Then—arriving, just as in The Hills of California, from that dreamy place of bigger, brighter lives and their sordid flip side—there’s the baby, Amber (Lauren E. Banks). Part of what’s discouraging about The Blood Quilt ’s long crescendo of trauma excavation is that you can feel the whole show reaching for something vaster and more otherworldly, something beyond the veil of simple human wrangling, but no one, neither playwright nor director, ever really braves the leap. Despite the sisters’ talk about haints and shadows, despite the stories they share of their ancestors—brought to Kwemera on slave ships and traditionally buried at sea ever since one of their mythic foremothers leapt to her death in the waves rather than come aground enslaved—a stale realism still pervades the production.
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