Playwright Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder was commissioned by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival to compose a theatrical rhapsody to the magical stitching of quilters from a small Alabama community called Gee's Bend. The resulting 90-minute pageant is a canny piece of lump-in-the-throat tale-telling. It pleasantly evokes a plethora of long-ago reveries in a fashion akin to other ethnicities.

For instance, a Jewish equivalent would employ that Hadassah high-school pageant, the one about the founding of Israel, where earnest archetypes picturesquely suffer, chant some Hebraic folk songs, and ultimately dance a triumphant hora in final celebration. Here we substitute hominy grits for chicken schmaltz and desegregation instead of anti-Semitism, add the pull of social history with offstage snatches of Martin Luther King, replace "Hava Nagila" with spirituals, and for the culmination, rather than the founding of Israel, we have the much-lauded Gee's Bend quilts being snatched up by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The play is ostensibly based on the author's conversations with Gee's Bend residents. But to anyone with a library card, we see the structure of female epics ranging back a century all the way from Edna Ferber to Alice Walker's The Color Purple. As in these works, we have the oppressed heroine brimming with vigor, foolishly giving herself to that bountifully male male, who immediately turns into that oh-so-brutal husband. Then come the kids, the beatings, and the invariable demise of said tyrant. All ending with the heroine, withered in a gray wig, but oh-so-enlightened, revered by the town folks for her fortitude and, in the case of Gee's Bend, for her quilts.

As with the quilts, the playwright cleverly stitches together old scraps from various sources, including Antiques Road Show, The Color Purple and numerous sociological tracts, rendering them in broad strokes and fable-like platitudes. Director Shirley Jo Finney keeps the show spinning, using spirituals at critical moments to provide atmosphere and color, and educing a comparable musical quality from her cast's performances.

As the heroine, Erika LaVonn is earthy, touching and manages to age decades with an inner reality that eschews cliché to achieve humor and poignancy. Wendell B. Franklin has the difficult task of being oppressor and victim at the same time, as the husband turns from hero to villain to suit the playwright's whims rather than any psychological truth. It's a tribute to the sensitive actor that he never becomes absurd. In the dual roles of family matriarch and granddaughter, Wandachristine triumphs by rising above both these antiquated stereotypes. And as the sister who can't sew, Shanesia Davis is salty and winning.

In this presidential campaign season, anyone who fails to get with a work that so doggedly celebrates African-American female solidarity risks being officially branded a Republican.

Gee's Bend: Through Feb. 24 at Cleveland Play House, 8500 Euclid Ave., 216.795.7000.