 |
| Image pulled from Walden Theatre's Facebook page. |
Quilters
By Barbara Damashek and Molly Newman, Directed by Hallie Dizdarevic
Reviewed
by Craig Nolan Highley
Entire
contents are copyright © 2013, Craig Nolan
Highley. All rights reserved.
Walden’s latest production, Quilters, is a celebration of womanhood as told through the experiences of 19th century pioneer women. Told in a series of monologues, vignettes and musical
numbers, the show ties many stories of love, loss and hardship to the art of
making quilts as it is passed from generation to generation.
Co-author and composer/lyricist Barbara Damashek once stated in an
interview that Quilters was “a theatrical event of
the early 1980s, a piece of oral history and feminist musical theater. ... It
was one of the earlier explorations in the '80s of the use of oral history and
monology as the source for plays.”
Inspired by a project organized by the Smithsonian Institution, Quilters
premiered on Broadway in 1984. Despite a run of only 24 performances and mixed
reviews, it was nominated for six Tony Awards, including best musical, best
book and best score.
It tells the story of Sarah, elderly matriarch of a
frontier clan who just wants to finish one last quilt while her failing body still
allows it. She completes the legacy quilt with the help of her six daughters,
with each block of the quilt telling another part of the story: tales of school
days, courtship, marriage, childbirth, home building, bitter cold, fires and
other natural disasters, and death.
Frontier women usually married very young, in their early
teens most often, and typically had more than a dozen children. In those harsh
times, quilting was often their only means to socialize while at the same time
creating something necessary to survive the brutal winters. The facets in the
quilts often served to record major events in their lives, and this mechanism
of recording history piece by piece is cleverly adopted by the show’s composers
as a means to drive the plot.
The result is often quite moving. Some truly harrowing
stories of family members freezing to death in winter or burning up in brush
fires are balanced by humorous tales of first love and courtships or entire
families piling into one bed when a child has a bad dream. Particularly
stirring are stories of women who realize they just cannot cope with having
another child after passing the dozen mark; one woman faces losing the love of
her husband when she starts refusing his advances, and another makes a horrible
choice when the local doctor refuses to help her end her pregnancy.
But there are also drawbacks to the format. I believe this
would have been better served in a more narrative format, and possibly as a
play rather than a musical. The episodic format occasionally makes you lose
track of just which character is which, and most of the songs are instantly
forgettable.
The shortcomings, though, are inherent in the source material
and can’t be blamed on Walden’s solid production. Director Hallie Dizdarevic
has done an amazing job of staging the show on Alec Volz’s simple but effective
set. She keeps the action flowing smoothly from scene to scene and has created
some truly lovely visuals with her blocking. The all-student cast are mostly
spot-on with their performances; the individual performers are either better
actors than singers or better singers than actors, but each of them gets at
least a moment to shine.
Overall it is a dramatically sound production that
succeeds despite its flaws. Definitely worth a look!
Starring Chandler Dalton, Theo Edwards-Butler, Lucy Fitzgerald, Katie Horn, Bailey Lomax, Andrea Lowry, Hallie Riddick, Julia Smith, Serena Stoddard, and Taylor Thomas.
February 28 – March 9, 2013
Walden Theatre
1123 Payne Street
Louisville, KY 40204
(502) 589-0084
No comments:
Post a Comment