STAGE REVIEWS : ‘Quilters’: Lovely but Just a Sew-Sew Tapestry

Next to Mom, country and apple pie, the hardships endured and valor shown by pioneer women are an unassailable part of American iconography. So when Barbara Damashek and Molly Newman got the idea to write a musical about those women that would be keyed to their most vulnerable but most explicit legacy--the quilts they made, assiduously inscribed with pieces of their lives--it had to be a winner.

At least on some levels. “Quilters,” a sturdy revival of which opened last week at the Las Palmas Theatre in Hollywood, is a graceful tribute to those women.

The danger has always been making that tribute too fond or too pretty. Based on a book by Patricia Cooper and Norma Bradley Allen (“The Quilters: Women and Domestic Art”) as well as numerous interviews with modern-day quilters conducted by Newman, “Quilters” is cleverly designed as a patchwork of scenes, modeled along the different “blocks” and patterns that go into making a quilt or a life. The downside of this abstraction is its schematic denial of a chance for sustained identification with any one character.

The ensemble is anchored in the presence of the mother, Sarah McKendree Bonham (played with a blithe and evenhanded benevolence by Karen McBride), but it is the daughters’ vignettes that have the larger, if infrequent, ability to touch us. Done without gilding the romance, some can be moving.

Good examples are scenes where a sister tries to revive her sibling, dead from the cold in a frozen winter on the plain (Lisa Picotte in “Little Babes That Sleep All Night”) or an adopted daughter comes upon a square of quilting done by the natural mother she never knew (Laura Pryzgoda in “The Butterfly”).

It even has its moment of political advocacy in a scene that shows the despair of women who bore too many children too fast. They were denied any help from the medical profession and had to rely on chancy home remedies spread through the earliest form of networking: letters and whispers. And it has its quotient of humor when the daughters feel cursed if they get “the curse” or they don’t.

But darker tones better serve and reflect the harsh pioneer experience. The 1983 production of “Quilters” at the Mark Taper Forum was entirely too rosy and rhapsodic. A 1985 version out of the Denver Center Theatre Company (where “Quilters” originated) toured an extensive circuit of small Western towns whose populations related keenly to the material and flocked to see it.

Observed in Ft. Collins, Colo., this no-nonsense staging had a rugged simplicity and deep autumnal tones that made it come alive for the people whose great-grandmothers had lived the hardships that inspired it. They were its natural audience.

The Las Palmas “Quilters,” which comes to us via the Laguna Playhouse (where it enjoyed success last December), falls somewhere in between. Director Teri Ralston was in the original Denver production as well as the Taper one and has made some clear choices.

She has simplified the staging, relying on a few props and Doug Williamson’s and Jacquie Moffett’s Spartan set (a gently raked platform backed by a facsimile of a quilt, with a windmill to one side and the able contingent of four musicians to the other).

Her women are dressed in hardy pioneer gowns (credit designer Marthella Randall with the muted, twilight colors). She has kept the choreography uncomplicated and focused on the ensemble’s strong harmonizing and choral abilities.

The attractive cast--McBride, Picotte, Pryzgoda, Karen Angela, Colleen Dunn, Tricia Griffin and Carolyn Miller--delivers Damashek’s mix of seductive ballads and traditional hymns with a pliant affability that masks a fine assortment of talent. But the problems inherent in “Quilters” do not go away. It remains a friendly tapestry of scenes that have no distinctive dramatic build and therefore are more decorative than affecting.

The very affability of the piece works against it. Like the quilts that line the walls of the Las Palmas (including two AIDS pieces our great-grandmothers could not have imagined), it is beautiful and rich embroidery designed to be admired. At a proper distance.

‘Quilters’

Karen McBride: Sarah McKendree Bonham

Karen Angela: Jody

Colleen Dunn: Margaret

Tricia Griffin: Lisa

Carolyn Miller: Jenny

Lisa Picotte: Janie

Laura Pryzgoda: Dana

Bob Hawkins, Miriam Mayer, Cynthia Merrill, Mark Turnbull: Musicians

A Quiltin’ & Dreamin’ Productions revival of the musical by Molly Newman and Barbara Damashek. Director Teri Ralston. Music and Lyrics Barbara Damashek. Set Doug Williamson, Jacquie Moffett. Lights Steven Wolff Graig. Costumes Marthella Randall. Musical director Mark Turnbull. Production Stage manager Nancy Staiger.