Simple elegance defines real-life tale of quilters

By Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Friday, March 28, 2008

Terry Shapiro

Nikki E. Walker, left, and Daphne Gaines portray Sadie and Nella Pettway in "Gee's Bend."

There is so much beauty in Gee's Bend.

A setting that evokes thick Southern summer nights, with the heady call of crickets and a river slicing through the quilted wood floor like a scar.

The elegant, spare beginnings of Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder's script, which moves like skipped stones through the lives of a Gee's Bend, Ala. family from 1939 to 2000.

And, most of all, the beautiful, human performances given by the three women and one male who take us into the lives Wilder based on the real women of Gee's Bend.

That economy and grace gets bruised, though, in a production (directed by Kent Gash) that too often uses unnecessary scenic showiness, such as a mechanical table and onstage rainstorm. More significantly, Wilder's script burdens its last 20 minutes with plot twists and multiple endings.

Nikki E. Walker provides the play's graceful soul as Sadie Pettway, who enters our consciousness as a 1939 teenager learning how to quilt from her mother and finding herself guiltily drawn to the handsome man courting her, Macon (Eric Ware, who can go from charming to cruel). Walker is adorable and sweetly sexy in youth, only to find herself pregnant and a little trapped. Her education in quilting is part gift from her mother, part punishment - she won't be finishing school now.

Walker serves as our stand-in through the turning points in the life of Gee's Bend, beginning with the Depression, when the outside world took notice of their poverty and the New Deal made way for a community of black farmers who owned their own property.

By 1965, though, agriculture was not a viable living. The women began to sell their quilts while the men lost their economic power. Sadie finds a steel core in herself when she joins the Civil Rights movement and gets her voter-registration card.

Walker and Daphne Gaines create a lasting portrait of sisterhood on the stage. From girlhood through old age, they bicker as only blood can, but they never leave. Stephanie Berry plays their mother with the mores of an earlier generation, but she's wasted in a later role as Sadie's grown daughter.

The role itself is a waste, and much of what belabors the play's end. The year 2000 arrives with the women's work enshrined in a museum, but what seems like a perfect ending, with the two sisters by the river, is extended as Wilder crams in a last-minute crisis and tries to include the latter-day history. The quilts of Gee's Bend are now famous; we don't need the play to tell us that.

Wilder also faces the problem almost every playwright and screenwriter has: how to dramatize the creation of visual art. Quilting seems to come out of sentiment and poverty, but what about the artistry? There is a reason these quilts are elevated, with their intense colors and geometry. We never know why these women's quilts evolved in such a distinctive, communal style.

Gee's Bend

* Grade: B

* When and where: 6:30 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 1:30 p.m. Saturdays, through April 19, Space Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex

* Cost: $31 to $48

* Information: 303-893-4100