Wyoming granted women the right to vote and to serve as court officers more than 50 years before the 19th Amendment was ratified, so it's appropriate that Patchwork Drifter,Jennifer L. Mickelson's Sergio Leone-tinged yarn of how the west was won should highlight the historical contributions of enterprising females during the years before the opening of travel routes across the Rocky Mountains brought with them the "civilizing" influences of sexism, bigotry and social injustice.
The widow Harriet Cooper and two daughters she guards closely are storekeepers in a remote border outpost, where the business left them by Harriett's late husband serves the needs of settlers bound for California, rendering his surviving kin comfortable as they await opportunities for expansion presented by the coming of the Union Pacific railroad. When a lone vagabond appears at the door one day, Harriet senses a kindred spirit in the orphaned Emma Fox and offers her a job for the winter. Soon Emma becomes privy to elder daughter Martha's covert liaison with the son of a Mexican rancher—a match disapproved by her mother—but it takes the arrival of a bounty hunter in pursuit of a murderer to expose secrets that threaten the peace of the Cooper household. This latest production from the Babes with Blades (BWB) Theatre Company—a troupe better known for martial spectacle—features two shootouts, brandishing of Bowie knives and scenes of frontier surgery, but the play's dominant focus is a plot generating suspense through exploration of the crimes that spurred Harriet and Emma to venture forth on their own, discoveries leading to conflicting loyalties and to sacrifices engendered thereby. In a rugged and untamed wilderness, the decisions faced by rootless pioneers fleeing the law are portrayed as no less critical or the solutions no less morally ambiguous by virtue of the gender attached to those who must grapple with them.
Wide open spaces usually mandate likewise sweeping dramatic narrative, but brevity necessitated by modern theater practice force Mickelson to combine two nemeses into one character and compress much of the explanatory information into tightly worded revelations delivered amid potentially distracting physical action. The intimacy of City Lit's auditorium, however, ensures an environment sufficient to keep playgoers alert to, not only the textual intricacies of a show marking BWB's transition from stunt-squad to full-fledged theater company and Jeff eligibility, but also the uncommonly complex performances of an ensemble long experienced at conveying the strength of sisterly bonds.
