The Cast of “The Blood Quilt” Learn Their Stitches

Lileana Blain-Cruz, who is forty years old and a Taurus, took a short break from rehearsals for “The Blood Quilt,” a new play that she’s directing at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre, which opened last month. She sat at a table in a room that was empty except for a piano and a ballet barre. Her spirits were high. “I rode my bike to work,” she said. “It’s great, except when people try to run you over.”

“The Blood Quilt,” which was written by Katori Hall, is set on a fictional Gullah Geechee island off the coast of Georgia, where the Jernigans, four adult half sisters, meet to sew together, as they have since they were children. “They’re ocean people,” Blain-Cruz said. “I come from islands.” She was raised between New York City and South Florida, and her family is from Haiti and Puerto Rico. She went on, “They’re forced to reckon with a culture that is adjacent to their own, but that culture wants to diminish their power.” She related it to the Haitian experience: “Haitians were the first group that essentially kicked out their enslavers—and yet there’s this constant kind of diminishing.”

In a room nearby, the cast was gathering for a quilting lesson from the Brooklyn Quilters Guild. Walking over, Blain-Cruz said, “One of the things my grandmother did in Puerto Rico was make quilts from all these little pieces.” She recalled bright-fuchsia squares: “She quilted with her hands, and I think about the preservation of power, love, and people through art, when everything else can be taken away from you so easily.”

For the lesson, five actors sat around a wooden table strewn with fabric scraps and large spools of thread. Blain-Cruz broke the ice: “We should go around. Everyone say their name and astrological sign.”

“I am, of course, a Leo,” Adrienne C. Moore, who plays a character named Gio, said.

“I’m playing Cassan, and I’m a Scorpio,” Susan Kelechi Watson said.

“My character is Clementine, and I’m a Leo,” Crystal Dickinson said.

“I’ll play Amber, and I’m a Capricorn,” Lauren E. Banks said.

“I’m a Virgo,” Mirirai, the actor who plays Zambia, said.

The master quilter Thadine Wormly chimed in: “My astrological sign? I don’t even deal with that.”

Wormly was dressed in autumnal browns and leather pants. “I’m going to show you a couple of quilts to inspire you,” she said. “I’ve been quilting for over thirty years.” She was accompanied by Jacqueline Colson, also a member of the Quilters Guild. The pair opened a quilt that Wormly had made, revealing a mosaic of small textiles stitched together into concentric rectangles. (Some of Wormly’s quilts hang onstage, in the Jernigan house.)

“My creative DNA unconsciously directed me to cut and stitch a West African design,” Wormly said.

“What’s the secret to getting those lines even and straight?” Moore asked.

“I take a ruler, then mark the back of the fabric, and you’re following that line, just stitching,” Wormly said. “People are so anxious to get finished, they make these big stitches to rush, and big stitches will come apart like that.”

“That is the interesting scenario in this play, because we are trying to get this quilt done in three days,” Moore said. Wormly looked dismayed.

“Suspend your disbelief,” Banks said.

In the play, the Jernigan sisters construct a quilt with an elaborate pattern that features eight-point stars which they’ve named “The Blazing Star Quilt.” Wormly showed the women how to arrange and slice fabric with a rotary cutter. “Some people call it a pizza cutter, but it’s a very good weapon,” she said. Moore grabbed one and brandished it in the air.

As Wormly demonstrated how to knot a thread, she asked if anyone had family who quilted. “My great-grandmother,” Banks said.

“You have one of her quilts?” Wormly asked. “Don’t throw ’em away.”

“We haven’t,” Banks said. “They are cute and raggedy and coveted.”

Wanting to get in on the action, Blain-Cruz asked someone to help her cut a diamond out of a blue cotton rectangle. She was curious about how Gullah Geechee quilting rituals compared with those of Gee’s Bend, a Black community on the Alabama River which became famous for its quilting tradition.

“They were isolated,” Wormly, whose family is from Savannah, Georgia, said, of Gee’s Bend. She mentioned that Martin Luther King, Jr., had visited the community before the Selma-to-Montgomery march, in 1965: “When the white sheriff heard about it, he cut the ferry off.” The service wasn’t restored until 2006.

“Starved, literally,” Banks said. “Like Haiti.”

“But, even isolated and poor, it just shows the creative spirit they had,” Wormly said. “I asked my grandmother, ‘Did you quilt?’ She said, ‘We didn’t have to do that.’ I guess my grandmother was uppity.” ♦