Copious Notes

Asia (Samantha Johnson), Sadie (Sylvia Howard) and Nella (Cathy Rawlings) are overjoyed to see their quilts hung in a major museum in "Gee's Bend." Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.

Deb Shoss was excited about Gee’s Bend, a play about the legendary quilters of rural Alabama. But Cathy Rawlings was skeptical to the point of indifference.

“I thought, ‘I don’t want to do a play about a bunch of little old ladies quilting,’” says Rawlings, a Lexington actress and founder of Agape Theatre Troupe.

Shoss, who had previously directed Rawlings in plays for Agape Theatre Troupe and Actors Guild of Lexington, agrees. “I wouldn’t have come out of my house for that,” she says.

But “little old ladies quilting” is far from a fair description of Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder’s Gee’s Bend, as Rawlings soon found out.

Young Sadie (Sylvia Howard) is about to be baptized by the preacher (Rev. Willis G. Polk) at the beginning of "Gee's Bend."

The group’s quilts, now considered masterpieces of modern art, frame a struggle for survival and perseverance by the women of the town of Gee’s Bend, who, like African-American people everywhere in early and mid-20th-century America, had to endure pervasive and institutional racism.

The story of the 2007 play, which has one performance by Agape Theatre Troupe at the Lexington Opera House on Sunday, focuses on some of the women of Gee’s Bend, from their childhoods to realizing dreams too wild for their imaginations.

“They made these quilts to keep them warm,” Shoss says. “And then, when they got too raggedy, they’d use them as mops, and when they were too raggedy for mops, they’d burn them to smoke out mosquitoes.”

Rawlings says what ultimately drew her into the story were the women and their struggles to overcome society and, in some cases, their own husbands.

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