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‘Gee’s Bend’ @ Theatrical Outfit
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. Grade: A -
Before the quilts of Gee’s Bend became celebrated by the art world, they were mere objects of necessity and love, stitched by a group of Alabama women who were trying to live off the land and care for their families the only way they knew how: through hard work and nimble spirits.
When playwright Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder set about researching her Alabama Shakespeare Festival commission “Gee’s Bend,” she traveled to the isolated riverside community near her hometown of Mobile and listened to the ladies’ stories. Employing the quilter’s composite technique, she created a piercingly original play that is loosely based on the scraps of lore, memory and anecdote she collected.
“Gee’s Bend,” as Wilder points out in her notes for Theatrical Outfit’s new production, is not about quilts, but about the rips and tears in the lives of their creators, who struggled with issues of family and marriage, even as the Civil Rights movement raged around them.
Though envisioned as an intimate, intermissionless 90-minute play, “Gee’s Bend” has been re-situated here by director Gary Yates as a two-act saga, so that the tale of sisters Sadie and Nella gets an airing that feels richly textured and timeswept — more like a flowing symphony than a tightly knit chamber piece.
It’s a smart programming choice from a theater that uses Southern storytelling to frame its mission and operates out of a former restaurant that made history by voluntarily desegregating during the turbulent ’60s.
Remarkably acted and handsomely designed, “Gee’s Bend” ought to be required theater-going for students of the South’s vanishing traditions. It’s a moving testament to the human impulse to find safety, warmth and strength in the cold, dark corners of the night.
Sadie (Michele McCullough) gets pregnant and marries young, and her husband, Macon (Eric J. Little), makes it hard for her to balance her homemaking duties with her political conscience. After Sadie ventures out to hear Martin Luther King Jr., march across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge and drink water from a whites-only fountain, Macon slams the door in her face.
Cheeky, irreverent Nella (Shontelle Thrash) takes a different approach, never cottoning to quilt-making and never finding a man. Eventually, time takes a toll on Nella that is heartbreaking, and Thrash nearly stops the show with her portrayal of the shuffling old woman. Donna Biscoe gets to play the bookended roles of the mother, Alice, and Sadie’s daughter, Asia, a character who is losing touch with the old ways.
One of my few quibbles with the show was that Biscoe at first seemed to invest granddaughter Asia with a few too many of grandma Alice’s old-lady mannerisms. If the very first scene felt a little chirpy and self-conscious on opening night, the actresses soon settled comfortably into themselves, and the arrival of Little’s Macon was a welcome shot of adrenalin.
Set designer R. Paul Thomason uses little more than wood to sketch the elegant austerity of an Alabama country house. Joanna Schmink’s costumes are lovely to look at, but perhaps a tad too pretty for the characters’ humble circumstances.
In “Gee’s Bend,” Wilder embroiders a gloriously textured account of a little known swatch of Americana. She listened to what the real-life women of Gee’s Bend had to say, then wove it into an imaginatively crafted piece of literary handiwork — finely spun and 100 percent true to the human heart.
THE 411: 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays. 2:30 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays. $25. Theatrical Outfit, Balzer Theater at Herren’s, 84 Luckie St., Downtown. 678-528-1500, theatricaloutfit.org
BOTTOM LINE: A play that’s as emotionally arresting as the famous Alabama quilts.
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