By Carol Davis
SOLANA BEACH, California — It takes more than lynching, water hoses, police batons or stampeding horses to stop a movement and keep a people down. The story of such a people caught in the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement is documented, to some degree, in Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder’s Gee’s Bend now receiving a fine airing at the North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach under the direction of Yvette Freeman.
Gees Bend, (now known as Boykin) while a place on the map at the edge of the Black Belt in Wilcox County about thirty miles southwest of Selma Alabama, it is but a small peninsula surrounded by the Alabama River and the closest town is Camden, the seat of Wilcox County.
The land, once owned and supported by the Gee family and worked on by their slaves, is now renowned for the beautiful quilts created by the women as a means of keeping both themselves and their living quarters warm by using them as insulation and later as a means of earning some extra money.
Wilder’s story (she received the 2008 Elizabeth Osborn New Play Award for an emerging playwright based on Gee’s Bend) traces three generations of African-American Pettway women, Sadie (Monique Gaffney), Alice, her mother (Charmen Jackson) and Nella, her sister (Licia Shearer) from 1909 through the civil rights battles in Selma in 1965 into the 21st century. It begins when the two sisters are teenagers and ends with them well into their seventies.
Along the way Sadie marries Macon (Laurence Brown) and they move into a house he built for her in the hopes of their raising a large family and staying out of trouble. For him that translated into keeping a low profile and not doing anything that might draw attention to the powers that be.
Sadie, on the other hand, was a feisty and curious activist who supported the word of Martin Luther King. Paying no mind to the wishes of her husband, she followed her own intuition and put herself into the middle of the civil rights fray thinking somehow that everything would work out for them.
Much to the chagrin of her husband, sister and mother, she headed off in her own direction deciding to become part of the famous march on Selma. On another occasion and in a chilling moment she decided to drink from the ‘White Only’ water fountain in the nearby town of Camden while the others looked on in horror for fear of retribution.
The all-star cast proves to fare better than the play itself. Ms. Gaffney whose presence on the San Diego theatre scene has always proven to be a strong one doesn’t disappoint as Sadie. Her growth from a serious teenager, one of the very few in her situation who could read, to an avowed civil rights activist to a philosophically strong and pensive seventy-year-old woman is simply wonderful to watch.
Gaffney, whose smile can brighten a room, has little time for fun and games in Gee’s Bend. Her main focus is straightforward as she grows from teenager to wife to activist. Seeing her as she becomes three different women all with the same goal becomes the focal point of Gee’s Bend.
Licia Shearer is sweet and slowly convincing as Sadie’s quiet and non-confrontational sister who hums and sings her way through her maturing and aging years. The two are about as close as sisters can be. The girls’ mother Alice (Jackson) is the main force behind the quilting craze, one she instills into both her daughters. It eventually pays off for them in the end.
Laurence Brown’s Macon is a big strapping man whom we meet early on courting Sadie and being just about everything one could hope for in a husband. He is attentive and loving promising her anything just to have her for his wife. And he is very convincing.
Later on when she defies him and goes off to march with King, he turns on her and becomes physically abusive. One wonders the motive of the playwright in this abrupt turnabout. For a man so devoted and loving in Act I to become so brutal in Act II almost defies logic.
That said, the overall look of the play, while informative and celebratory, is sketchy and needs filling in especially in giving us more character development and much more information about the quilts.
Marty Burnett’s set is made up of a few platforms, chests with lots and lots of quilts (in those chests) along with the house Macon built firmly planted on the stage. Along one side of the stage are projections (Chris Luessmann) tracing the history of Gee’s Bens and the civil rights movement.
Adding to the overall celebration of Gee’s Bend is a wonderful quilts exhibit on display in one of the suites a few doors down from the theatre. Especially fascinating is Gee’s Bend Quilt from the Gee’s Bend Quilters Collective, which is ‘destined to become part of black cultural history’.
It’s worth a trip to Solana Beach to catch both exhibit and play.
See you at the theatre.
Dates: October 16th-November 7th
Organization: North Coast Repertory Theatre
Phone: 858-481-1055
Production Type: Drama
Where: 987 Lomas Santa Fe Drive, Solana Beach, CA 92057
Ticket Prices: $30.00-$47.00
Web: northcoastrep.org