NBAF THEATER MINIREVIEWS: Casts shine in 'Gee's Bend,' 'Color Purple'

"Gee's Bend"

When playwright Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder set about researching her play about the celebrated Alabama quilters, she traveled to the isolated riverside community near her hometown of Mobile and listened to the women's 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.

First produced by Theatrical Outfit earlier this year, the play is back for the National Black Arts Festival. At Wilder's request, the show has been re-situated as originally intended, as an intermissionless one act.

Nicely acted by Michele McCullough Hazard, Shontelle Thrash, Donna Biscoe and Eric J. Little, "Gee's Bend" ought to be required theatergoing for students of the South's vanishing traditions. It is finely spun and 100 percent true to the human heart.

Through July 27. Theatrical Outfit. 678-528-1500, theatricaloutfit.org

"The Color Purple"

Four years after its Alliance Theatre world premiere, Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray's pop musical has worked out the kinks, struck a groove and settled comfortably into itself.

You can pick Alice Walker's popular Georgia-born tale to pieces if you want to —- and believe me, I have —- but this national tour feels like the musical it was meant to be. It hits all the emotional high notes, moves fluidly and plays like clockwork.

A good deal of the credit belongs to the knockout cast, featuring Jeannette Bayardelle as the shy and retiring Celie; original cast member Felicia P. Fields as the indomitable Sofia; and Atlanta native Stu James as Sofia's husband, Harpo.

Bayardelle calibrates Celie's transformation by flashing glimpses of the character's adorable comic underside, her latent sexual hunger and, since this is a musical, her vocal charisma, which turns sweet lullabies and scorching belts into moments of sublime theater.

Through Aug. 3. Presented by Theater of the Stars at the Fox Theatre. 404-817-8700, ticketmaster.com.