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Show 1 Musical history of pioneer women, 'Quilters' to play BYU, Capitol Theatre The 1985 Tony Award nominee "Quilters" will come to Brigham Young University for one performance perfor-mance June 4 at 8 p.m. in the de Jong Concert Hall of the Harris Fine Arts Center. The musical also will be seen June 6 and 7 at the Capitol Theatre in Salt lake City with the Ririe Woodbury Dance Company as sponsor. In the production, song, dance and story-telling is used to tell the story of America's pioneer women whose lives emerge in the traditional patterns of their beautifully handcrafted hand-crafted quilts patterns with names like "Double Wedding Ring," "The Rocky Road to Kansas" and "Windmill Blades." The play is a sort of patchwork quilt itself. Not only does the audience hear the music, legends, dreams and histories that were collected from quilters, but through a series of scenic devices, it also sees the quilt visually recreated by members of the cast. The evolution of "Quilters" began in 1981 when Denver actress Molly Newman auditioned for a part at the . Denver Center Theatre Company by reading a selection from "The Quilters: Women and Domestic Art," a book by Patricia Cooper and Norma Bradley Allen. Her reading was so inspiring, several people who heard it encouraged her to expand the piece into a full-length play. She embarked on the project and asked composer and playwright Barbara Damashek to join in the creative process. Newman spent three months in several Western states interviewing quilters and piecing together a tale of pioneers for whom quilting was both a practical chore and a way to express their feelings about their lives. Newman and Damashek used a circle of women to represent pioneer women and put the womens perspective in the words of matriarch Sarah McKendree Bonham, who says, "Most all of women's work is the kind that perishes with the user. All I have to leave behind is my quilt." Nine months after they began the project "Quilters" premiered in the Denver Center Theatre Company's experimental space, the Lab Theatre. The Tony nominations will be announced June 2 at the Shubert Theatre in New York City. "Quilters" "Quil-ters" is nominated for best musical, best book for a musical, best original score, best direction and best featured actress (two nominations.) Both Provo and Salt Lake City performances are subsidized in part by a grant from Mountain Bell. -- 11 """ 11 11 " " i |