Lileana Blain-Cruz, the director of Katori Hall’s The Blood Quilt, began the first day of rehearsal by sprinting around the circle of everyone gathered for the production. Along the way she high-fived each person in the room, creating a connective thread as she went. Purveying joy is characteristic of Blain-Cruz, an LCT Resident Director. In a recent conversation I asked her why such gestures are essential, especially for a family drama as intense as The Blood Quilt.
“When we experience joy in the rehearsal room, it gives us the energy to truly engage with the intensity of the work,” Blain-Cruz said. “As a director, I try to model that energy. I run around the room slapping hands. I get silly! It’s a way of showing my collaborators that we can be playful in this particular space, and have the freedom to do insane things.”
I asked Blain-Cruz if creating an atmosphere of joy was a prerequisite for allowing an atmosphere of sorrow. “Absolutely,” she replied. “I think laughter is a kind of opening, a warming up of the emotions in the room. Laughing and crying are both releases. If you can get somebody to belly-laugh – your audience or your actors – they're more open to release, to breathe through the suffering that sometimes underlies the comedy.” She added: “We, the audience, go around in daily life trying to shield ourselves from the noise and the brutality of the world. When we come into a play, and laugh, we open ourselves…and are therefore a little more vulnerable…more ready to receive all the sorrow that may exist under the surface.” Blain-Cruz said that the pleasure of working with skilled playwrights like Hall is that they know how to position the humor in relationship to the pathos.
Blain-Cruz notes that “Katori’s narrative trusts the way our families know us better, or differently, than our friends and colleagues do.” As an example, Blain-Cruz mentioned her brother, Xavier Blain-Cruz. “While directing The Blood Quilt I’ve been thinking about him a lot. He’s able to call me out in ways the world wouldn’t be able to call me out. And I’m able to tease him in ways nobody else would understand.”
Such needling is possible because of the safety that blood relations can offer . “It’s very specific on Katori’s part,” Blain-Cruz said, “to place this story within the family home. It’s a place of safety and harm simultaneously. You get to see the characters isolated on this island, forced to really confront themselves and their past in the midst of a hurricane. That privacy, that isolation, that pressure to stay inside and stay still because of the storm are all the factors that allow those deep dark truths to be revealed.” Everyone, Blain-Cruz continued, has had some version of truth-telling moments. “It’s particularly likely to happen now,” she said, “around the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. Family time can be amazing and joyful and hilarious but in a split second can turn jagged and painful.”
That combination of highs and lows is especially acute in The Blood Quilt, in which four sisters have gathered to mourn their recently deceased mother. “The passing of a matriarch is massive,” Blain-Cruz commented, “because it brings up questions of our identity. Who are we without the family anchor? And who becomes the next family anchor?”
In Hall’s play, the relationships to the matriarchal figure are especially complex because each of the four sisters has a different father. “The mother was different with every man,” Blain-Cruz said. “We sometimes think: Mom is Mom, and she’s been like that from the beginning of time. And Katori is saying: "Moms have histories, too.” When the sisters share stories about their mother Blain-Cruz says, “it becomes a narrative metaphor of a quilt: different pieces coming together as a whole.”
The nuance of these characters and these narratives as a kind of living quilt is possible only because the cast of the The Blood Quilt is so committed to the truth of our human complexity. “This show requires a tremendous amount of emotional and spiritual strength,” Blain-Cruz said. “These actors have been doing phenomenal work and their skill and stamina deserve to be recognized.”
Brendan Lemon is a freelance journalist in New York.
