Turns out “that quilting play” isn’t so much about quilting.
Thank goodness.
“Gee’s Bend,” now making its regional premiere at the Denver Center Theatre Company, is a moving look at the civil rights movement from the unique point of view of two Alabama sisters in one of the most impoverished and isolated yet important dots on the American map.
In Denver native Kent Gash’s passionately performed if a bit too-reverent staging, you don’t see much of the now-famous quilts that made the women of Gee’s Bend self-reliant and, eventually, the darlings of the art-museum circuit.
In the final scene, five blank projection screens descend in a museum where the now aging women comically marvel at how “white folks is paying a lot of money to look at our trash.” You might naturally assume it’s a technical glitch when no images come up on those screens, but it’s intentional. First: The quilts are copyright protected. More important, Gash is saying this story is about the women, not the quilts “of bold design and humble materials.” (But this climactic confusion could have been easily averted if they ditched the screens altogether).
Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder’s fascinating, interstitial story takes us to a cranny of land that time forgot: 10,000 acres isolated by a three-sided bend in the Alabama River, where the all-black populace remained largely isolated from the outside world for 190 years. These slave descendents were allowed to buy land in 100-acre increments in the 1930s as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, creating a historic co-op of land-owning blacks.
Through Wilder’s earnest writing, a voracious cast led by newcomers Nikki E. Walker and Daphne Gaines and a continually compelling set by Lisa M. Orzolek, “Gee’s Bend,” at its best, opens for us a historically accurate and little-known window into Martin Luther King’s ability to call even the most remote Alabama heart to action.
Perhaps too big a window.
“Gee’s Bend” follows Sadie and Nella Pettway from adolescence through old age. That’s 63 years in just 100 minutes, and that’s too much terrain to cover in too little time. The harrowing middle chapter on civil rights is clearly the juice of this piece, when protagonist Sadie (Walker) defies her husband and joins in on the famous march, leaving her bloody in Selma and coldly locked out of her house back home. Just because Sadie has a vote out there, sadly, doesn’t yet mean she has one in her own house.
When the fearful white leaders of Camden, Ala., severed ferry service to Gee’s Bend in 1962 (and for the next 44 years) to make it more difficult for blacks to vote, they were probably doing these decent, hard-working and God-fearing people a favor — banishing them to a modest, communal and spiritual life (though not one without its own oppressors).
The 1965 segment, which includes both Sadie’s radical and economic enlightenment, could be an entire play; the 1939 and 2002 chapters need only be brief bookends. More, too, could be made of the irony that these women made their quilts for function, not art. You make a quilt to warm the cold, comfort the sick, adorn a marriage bed — not to hang on walls.
Orzolek’s set is a character unto itself in the round Space Theatre. A narrow channel of winding water replicates the river’s three sides. Hanging above are flowing strips of burlap and newspapers that recorded the historic events of the era. The stage floor is made in part by the same aluminum siding used to build the co-op homes in the 1930s.
“Crossing Over” is a recurring ideological and spiritual theme. The play intentionally opens with the line, “God has blessed us in Gee’s Bend,” and a brilliantly staged opening baptism emphasizes their profound faith.
The idea of crossing dominates — over to God, over this three-sided river. The most devasating scene is complemented by a soul-stirring spiritual, but too often the staging relies on spirituals rather than words to make its most powerful narrative points.
There is also overreliance on the too-obvious metaphor of a key, and the play also has trouble settling on its ending.
But like the Gee’s Bend quilts, there is great artfulness within this story’s many patchwork parts. It’s ultimately a moving tale of female empowerment and actualization. It has an enormous heart that wraps around its audiences’ hearts like a river — on all four sides.
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
“Gee’s Bend”
Patchwork play. Presented by the Denver Center Theatre Company at the Space Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex. Written by Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder. Directed by Kent Gash. 1 hour, 40 minutes with no intermission. Through April 19. 6:30 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays; 7:30 p.m. Fridays; 1:30 and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays. $36-$46. 303-893-4100, all King Soopers or .
