[NEohioPAL] Review of "Quilters" at Porthouse Theatre

[Bob Abelman]

Porthouse vitalizes the weary Americana in ‘Quilters’




Bob Abelman

Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal



Life, it’s been said, is but a dream and like a box of chocolates.  But according to lyricist/composer Barbara Damashek and playwright Molly Newman, life is also comparable to a quilt – a patchwork of experiences that tells our stories and is stitched together with hard work and many loving hands.



Their musical “Quilters,” adapted from a slender book of oral history by Patricia Cooper and Norma Bradley Allen, is currently on stage at Porthouse Theatre as the first of three live, full-capacity summer productions. 

                                                                                                       

The script shares the American frontier reminiscences of hearty, resilient pioneer women.  It is divided into 16 vignettes, each reflecting some small moment or hard-earned truth experienced by these women as they attempt to survive on the rustic Plains and lone prairies of the American West in the 1870s.  Each vignette results in a single pieced together square of material that, at play’s end, will dramatically take its rightful place in a legacy quilt – a piece of autobiographical art.



The score is neither hummable nor particularly memorable.  But it nicely complements the content by providing the simple sounds and folk rhythms of the period and capturing the range of emotions of the characters.  The music is beautifully performed by six off-stage musicians on string instruments, with music director Jennifer Korecki on keyboard.



The show’s greatest strength is its unassuming and engagingly understated depiction of the often banal and sometimes tragic aspects of these women’s existence.  “Quilters” itself had humble beginnings, starting life as an audition piece monologue, evolving into sewed together stories from quilters and their descendants, and becoming a patchwork play with music first performed in 1982 at The Denver Center Theater Company, where  now-playwright Newman was an actor.



The risk of staging this humble material – with its biblical homilies, arcane folklore and homespun humor – is potentially static or sedate moments, cheap sentimentality, and hokey stage business. The 1984 Broadway production of this show, which lasted less than a month and won none of its six Tony Award nominations, is evidence of this.  



Such is not the case with this Porthouse production.  



For more of this review, go to:   https://www.news-herald.com/things-to-do/porthouse-vitalizes-the-weary-americana-in-quilters-theater-review/article_14448d20-d294-11eb-bcee-6fa2ea19c604.html
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