Quilters


 

Synopsis Quilters is a musical with a book by Molly Newman and Barbara Damashek, and lyrics and music by Barbara Damashek. It is about the lives of American pioneer women based on the book The Quilters:Women and Domestic Art by Patricia Cooper and Norma Bradley Allen. The show was originally developed and produced by the Denver Center Theater Company, Brockman Seawell, executive producer.

In the American West, a pioneer woman, Sarah, and six women, who are called her daughters, face frontier life. Rather than a straightforward storyline, the musical is presented as a series of short tales and tableaux matched with musical numbers, each presenting an aspect of frontier life or womanhood. The patches or blocks show "girlhood, marriage, childbirth, spinsterhood, twisters, fire, illness and death." The patches are ultimately put together to form one dramatic tableau.