By Ken Sakamoto , Star-Bulletin
Linda Yara, shop manager for Kennedy Theatre, has been
sewing quilts for the production of "The Grapes of Wrath."
The Quilts of ‘Wrath’
These handmade pieces
By John Berger
are key to the UH set
Special to the Star-BulletinKENNEDY Theatre costume shop manager Linda Yara calls quilting her "sanity saver." "I can go home after a hard day or a long day, and if I spend an hour or so working on a quilt project -- whether I'm looking at pictures and patterns, or cutting out pieces, or putting them together -- I enter into another space and all the cares of the day go away. You sit there and your mind can work out problems, or you just find peaceful time. It's a great activity if you want to get lost in your thoughts."
Yara is feeling particularly sane these days. She's finishing work on more than a half-dozen colorful quilts as costuming and cultural embellishments for the theater's production of "The Grapes of Wrath," an adaptation John Steinbeck's tale of the tough lives and hard times of dispossessed Americans in the 1930s.
"Steinbeck didn't describe the quilts that belonged to individual family members, but he mentions them as part of the tapestry of their lives, and these are people who would have had strong ties to fabrics. What we call 'recycling' they would probably have thought of as 'thrift,' and patchwork quilts were a thrifty way to use scraps of cloth or salvageable pieces of worn out garments."
Yara's quilts faithfully recreate folk designs popular in the '30s and earlier. One of her creations, a pattern called "The Road to California," will be on display in the theater lobby and sold by silent auction to benefit the Friends of Kennedy Theatre scholarship program. Quilts in two other folk patterns, "Rob Peter to Pay Paul" and "Straight Furrows," also will be displayed.
"One of the reasons I wanted quilts on stage was to represent the household. When they fold the quilts it signifies they're packing up the household. It also gives (the actors) something to lie on on stage."
An admitted "quilt-aholic," Yara became interested in the craft as a child, and has been quilting "seriously" for about 20 years. She is working toward a Master Craftsman Certificate in Quilting, a nationally adjudicated program that is part of a nationwide resurgence of interest in this traditional American folk art.
Yara notes that although the American patchwork tradition began with English and Scots immigrants in colonial times, their "piecing style" has been adopted and adapted by almost every culture that came in contact with it -- African Americans, native Hawaiians and Asians.
"A whole style of quilting comes out of African-American traditions and the story quilts of the plantations. A lot of the patchwork quilts made in Hawaii by Japanese plantation women show the patterns and styles of American patchwork, but the stitching style is Japanese."
Although missionary women brought to Hawaii the tradition of working with scraps of cloth, Hawaiian quilting is more reminiscent of the designs used in making kapa, she says.
"Quilting can be a bridge between women of different cultures. What we share is the ability to ply the needle and the (traditions of) working with fabric. What we exchange is our cultural mind sets on how the designs are done."
The Grapes of Wrath
When: 8 p.m. April 25-26, May 1-3; 2 p.m. May 4
