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. To complicate matters even further, their mother neglected to pay property taxes for the last seven years and owed, at the time of her death, a quarter-million dollars ($256,527.04, to be exact) in back taxes. Will the sisters sell their mother’s quilts to settle her debts? Will their family survive if they do? The set, designed by Adam Rigg, is adorned with dozens of eye-popping quilts, many of which were loaned by members of the Brooklyn Quilting Guild.
Just as a quilt has a “right side,” with toothsome patterns and vibrant colors, and a “wrong side,” families, too, have their carefully curated exterior and messier reverse. The Blood Quilt—a thousand-thread-count show if there ever was one—concerns itself mostly with the “wrong side.” With its fast-twitch wit, astringent dialogue, and lyrical dialogue, Hall’s absorbing play is reminiscent of works by August Wilson, Tennessee Williams, Tracy Letts, and Jez Butterworth, whose The Hills of California similarly focuses on a group of siblings reunited by a mother’s illness. Yet Hall’s take on the volatile family drama is entirely her own. The Blood Quilt, which premiered at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., in 2015, is a tribute to the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s Southern roots—Hall hails from Memphis, and is now based in Atlanta—and “an homage to the women in my life.”
I spoke with Hall on the opening day of her play at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. The below interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Vogue: How did the idea for The Blood Quilt arise?
Katori Hall: I come from a group of sisters and the dynamic of sisters has always been a central exploration of my artistic work, whether it’s true sisters or sisters by choice. I got really interested in the Gullah Geechee culture more than 10 years ago, because I felt that this culture—spanning the Georgia islands and South Carolina—had such a direct link to African culture and African history, in terms of the language, foodways, and cultural practices. As an African American who grew up in the South, though not on the Georgia islands, I have always felt the Africanness in my tongue and in the way my family operated. So that culture was of deep interest to me. But what was most important to me was the process of quilting. I grew up sleeping under my grandmother’s quilts—Big Mama’s quilts. There came a time when I wanted to learn how to quilt, and I did, before she passed away. She could thread a needle with one hand—that’s how good she was. I think this play, in particular, is an homage to the women in my life—my sisters, my mother, and my Big Mama.
Kwemera Island, where the play is set, doesn’t exist on any map, but you get a sense of it as a very real place, a place that’s very connected to its Afro-creole history. In the play, Gio tells us that “Kwemera used to be owned by a rice planter who brought over hundreds of slaves.”
Kwemera is inspired by Sapelo Island, where I went to do my initial research [for the play]. “Kwemera” means to withstand, to endure, to last. I went back three times over the course of a few years, around 2013, 2014, and 2015.
The show premiered at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. Did you make any changes to the current production of the play?
The directorial choices are different because Lileana Blain-Cruz [who directs the LCT production] and Kamilah Forbes [who directed the Arena Stage production in 2015] are two completely different artists. But I think the thing that has remained central is how the quilts are embedded into the set, the process of putting together something onstage—which I think has been beautifully recreated in both productions—and the fact you kind of feel like you re in a museum of cloth.
Did you have any family rituals growing up? And do you participate in any pre-show theater rituals?
In terms of family rituals, the idea of circling up, of gathering, was really central. You know, Black people love a family reunion! I do think this play, in particular, really stems from the sense of needing to gather—whether it’s a daily gathering around the kitchen table, which is something I grew up with. In fact, I ended up calling my company Katori’s Kitchen because some of my work has been created in the kitchen, whether it’s cooking or a play.
In terms of theater rituals, unfortunately, because I’ve been in Atlanta working on P-Valley, Season 3, I haven’t been able to be as much a part of the daily rehearsal process for The Blood Quilt. But because of the power of Zoom and digital advances, I still was able to gather with the team every other week, we would talk, and I would answer questions. To me, the idea of just being in the room with each other, as much as you can be in the room with each other, is the most beautiful ritual. It is the human experience to be in the room together, breathing the same air. In a weird way, I think COVID made us understand the importance of storytelling—that is, stories need to be witnessed, need to be seen in front of your very eyes.
It’s interesting that you bring up the state of American theater post-COVID. In an interview with American Theatre magazine, during the early days of the pandemic, you said: “I fear the theatres that will be left standing are the ones who have not taken an interest in our community and in writers that are diverse because, for the longest time, they have chased the dollar instead of building community.”
I think people had an awakening. You can’t live through what we saw during COVID—the protests, George Floyd—and not be impacted. Some people may try to keep their heads in the sand, but I do believe I have seen some forward movement when it comes to being more inclusive in the theater space. We’re seeing changes, like new artistic directors being appointed—it’s even happening at places like Lincoln Center; now there will be a woman at the helm. Of course, it’s never as much change as we would want, but it does feel like progress is happening. I’m very happy to see that playwrights of color continue to get produced in our “post-pandemic” world. There are communities that are still dealing with the pandemic, whether it is the virus or the fact that racism is a virus. We’re witnessing the rise of the extreme right before our very eyes.
What is it like working with director Lileana Blain-Cruz on Blood Quilt?
Right before the pandemic, I had emailed Lileana and said, “Hey, I want to meet with you.” People had been telling me that we felt like kinfolk in terms of our aesthetics. So we ended up having a coffee and we connected. I had seen so much of her work and really loved what she was doing. I appreciate the diversity of her theatrical approach—she can do naturalistic plays, she can do something that’s more surreal, she can do things in a black box, she can do things in a proscenium. She’s just really dope as an artist and a great human being.
During the strikes last summer, I came up to Lincoln Center and we did a reading together. I really loved her curiosity. She’s an elevated artist—very precise, great with actors—and she’s really the whole package. She’s the resident director at Lincoln Center Theater, and it was like one of those things where we had been kind of dating for a while, and then finally, we were like, “Okay, let’s do it.” Because I was so busy with P-Valley, I really wasn’t a part of the rehearsal process, but I’m so grateful we had an artist-to-artist connection. And because we did that reading together, she really knew what I was interested in and how I wanted things to be seen. She is such a grown-up—she can take the baby and not drop it. The production is truly stunning. I got a chance to go up during previews, and there were some notes I shared with her, in terms of rhythm. Her blocking is brilliant. She more than took care of the baby. The baby is now in college.
I also don’t want to undersell the fantastic acting. The script describes the four sisters as “four elements…swirling in the center of the house” and I think that really comes through in the performances.
It was perfect casting; everyone pulled their weight. I was talking with Susan [Kelechi Watson], and she was like, “This is a play where you gave every actress some meat, even the daughter, Zambia,” and I’m really proud of that. I do think that my mission statement as an artist is to continue to hold space for the voices and stories of Black women and to help cultivate Black female artists and theater makers. I’m very proud of these amazing women—they’re all stellar performers.
As I was watching the play, I couldn’t help but think of other plays about fractious families, like August: Osage County. The lyricism of your plays also reminds me of August Wilson. Can you talk about some of the artistic influences for the play?
I remember one day I went to the Schomburg [Center for Research in Black Culture], where August Wilson was talking. I got up to ask a question and said, “I just want to say that when I grow up, I want to be just like you.” Obviously, the whole auditorium burst into laughter, and I remember him saying, “I think you should be yourself.” While August Wilson has been a guiding light for many of us Black playwrights, I really took his advice to heart. I think I’m truly myself in terms of what my lens focuses on, who I center, and the fact that my Southernness comes through so loud and true. I think there is a kind of linguistic link to August Wilson’s plays and we’re both writing about Black folks who were enslaved. It’s not a Southernness that we’re memorializing, it’s the Africanness on our tongues.
You’re the showrunner of the TV show P-Valley, which was adapted from your stage play Pussy Valley. Has your work on the TV show informed your work as a playwright?
How much time you got? It’s hard, because TV is a completely different medium. However, what’s beautiful about TV and theater is that they’re both writers’ mediums. In both cases, the writer is king and queen. In TV, they’re called the showrunner or the creator. Some showrunners don’t write a lot, but I had to learn so much in terms of how a story needs to have an engine that runs past a particular parenthesis of time. In TV, there are many mini “intermissions,” many episodes. Learning how to look at world and character first for TV shows is very different from how I think about plays, where I begin with a particular story that I have to write with a character within worlds. And I’ll say this: Pussy Valley, the play that the TV show is based on, was a failed play, in that when I saw it at Mixed Blood [the theater in Minneapolis where Pussy Valley premiered in 2015], I realized this doesn’t work as a play, it works as a TV show. I sensed the episodic nature of the play, and the fact that these were just characters that needed to be developed over a much longer span of time. I also knew that audiences would love to be in the living room with Uncle Clifford, Mercedes, and Miss Mississippi—they’re stories that you didn’t want to end. So I had to kind of learn which stories are built for which mediums when I was starting to go into TV.
Do you have any interest in adapting The Blood Quilt for TV or making it into a movie?
I think it could be a beautiful movie. I’m very much inspired by Daughters of the Dust [the 1991 movie by Julie Dash and the first nationally distributed feature film by an African American woman to be released in the United States]. It’s one of my favorite movies. I watch it over and over again.
What do you hope audiences come away with after seeing the play?
That grief is a process, feeling is a process. If you don’t open up the wound and clean out the wound, it definitely festers. I think this play teaches women and our community the need to face things, to name things, to lay out all the pieces. Sometimes you got to lay everything out in order to put yourself back together.
Without revealing too much, there is a surreal sequence in the play.
I’ve often been criticized for being a bit hokey as a playwright, because I believe in spirit and I include the exploration of spirit in my work. I know not everybody believes in ghosts or the other side, but I do. I don’t have any shame about that; it’s a true reflection of my Africanness, my African American identity. There is an honoring of our ancestors and our spirit and there’s nothing wrong with that.
It goes back to an African proverb that says, “All stories are true.”
Yeah, all stories are true.
The Blood Quilt is at Lincoln Center Theater through December 29.