BY RHODA FENG
November 25, 2024
Katori Hall has described her play The Blood Quilt, which opened recently at Lincoln Center Theater, as a neo-folk tale. Set in a country cabin off the Georgia coast, the play revolves around four half-sisters who have reunited to honor their late mother. There’s Clementine (Crystal Dickinson), the even-keeled eldest, who took it upon herself to become their mother’s caretaker (the script calls her the “piece keeper”); there’s Gio (Adrienne C. Moore, in a knives-out performance), the second-eldest child and a highly temperamental cop who is going through a divorce; Cassan (Susan Kelechi Watson), an army nurse and mother to Zambia (Mirirai), a 15-year-old perennially affixed to her phone; and Amber (Lauren E. Banks), the overachieving youngest child who is now working as an entertainment lawyer in California.
The Jernigan sisters spend the better part of the play’s two and a half hours attempting to piece together a quilt—an annual tradition soon interrupted by the discovery of a nest of family secrets. One early discovery involves the contents of their mother’s will: to one daughter, she leaves her entire collection of priceless quilts; to another daughter, she leaves nothing...
Katori Hall. Credit to Getty Images.
