The walk from one side of the stage to the other at the intimate North Coast Repertory Theatre is a short one. But when Sadie Pettway (Monique Gaffney) crosses the stage to drink from the water fountain boldly marked “Whites Only,” it is a journey long on courage, a journey bearing the weight of generations of oppression. It is Sadie’s first taste of freedom, the most poignant and powerful moment in Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder’s 2007 play, Gee’s Bend.

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Directed at North Coast Rep by Yvette Freeman, “Gee’s Bend” is receiving its San Diego premiere at the Solana Beach venue. Thoughtful and profoundly moving, Miller’s play is a reminder of the durability of faith, family and belief in a dream.

In late-'30s Gee’s Bend, Alabama, a mother and two daughters, descendents of the slavery era, survive on what they make sewing quilts transformed from worn shirts and workaday fabrics. Mother Alice (Charmen Jackson) and daughters Sadie (Gaffney) and Nella (Licia Shearer) have their God, their reverential singing and, most of all, each other. But Sadie’s life is about to change: She’s courted by Macon (Laurence Brown), who with his own plot of land to work, plans to build a home for himself, for Sadie and for the dozen or so children he imagines they’ll bring up. He even presents Sadie with a key to their yet-unbuilt house. The young girl, who demurs at the notion of locks and wants a home open to whomever calls, is reluctant to accept Macon’s key. She does accept the life together he has charted for them.

What Macon does not count on is Sadie’s abiding passion to be true to herself and to be free. The story shifts to 1965, to a divided America’s crisis of conscience and turmoil. When Sadie sees and hears Dr. Martin Luther King, who’s passing through with his messages of nonviolent change and equality, she joins the cause body and soul. It proves to be the irrevocable wedge between herself and Macon, who fears that his wife’s activism will lead to the burning of their house and endangerment of the family.

By the time Gee’s Bend reaches its third period in time – 2002 – Sadie’s mother and husband have died, her children are grown, and she and sister Nella continue to survive on their faith, their songs and the quilts that have sustained them throughout their lives. The quilts have become admired museum works, but more important to the sisters, threads of their family’s perseverance and love. To say they have given Sadie immortality would be redundant – she has never doubted that bequeathment, just as she never surrenders her embrace of Martin Luther King’s dream.

Gaffney’s performance through three generations is remarkably genuine and affecting, with never a misstep. She is complemented by Shearer’s tender and frequently wry Nella. (Shearer’s musical solos on stage, particularly of “Amazing Grace,” are chilling in their beauty.)

Jackson, in dual roles, achieves maternal wisdom as Mother Alice in the play’s first two time periods and as Sadie’s independent but doting daughter Asia in the 2002 segment, while Brown brings the requisite complexity of strength and doubt to the role of Macon.

The live singing onstage as well as recurring recorded snippets throughout the performance deepen the emotional impact of the production, and black-and-white images projected on a screen stage-right remind us in pictures of the images of struggle and persecution, and of the legacy of a nation wrestling with a shameful past. But they also remind us – as do the quilts of Gee’s Bend (and those that are on view in an exhibit next door to the theater) – of the spirit and resolve of those who lived, and still live, their lives in dignity and in hope.