Intimate Apparel (play)
| Intimate Apparel | |
|---|---|
| Written by | Lynn Nottage |
| Characters | Esther Mrs. Dixon Mrs. Van Buren Mr. Marks Mayme George |
| Date premiered | February 21, 2003 |
| Place premiered | Center Stage, Baltimore |
| Original language | English |
| Setting | Lower Manhattan |
Intimate Apparel is a play written by Lynn Nottage. The play is a co-production and co-commission between Center Stage, Baltimore, Maryland, and South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa, California. The play is set in New York City in 1905 and concerns a young African-American woman who travels to New York to pursue her dreams, becoming an independent woman as a seamstress.
The play had its world premiere at Center Stage (Baltimore, Maryland) running from February 21, 2003 to March 30. Directed by Kate Whoriskey, the cast featured Shane Williams (Esther), Brenda Pressley (Mrs. Dickson), Kevin Jackson (George Armstrong) and Sue Cremin (Mrs. VanBuren). It next ran at the South Coast Repertory from April 11, 2003 through May 18, 2003 directed by Whoriskey and with the same Center Stage cast.
The play opened Off-Broadway at the Roundabout Theatre, running from March 17, 2004 to June 6, 2004. Directed by Daniel J. Sullivan, it featured Viola Davis (Esther), Lynda Gravatt (Mrs. Dickson), and Corey Stoll (Mr. Marks).
It has been produced at regional theaters, including the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles from July to September 2004, the Southern Repertory Theatre in New Orleans, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago (January 2005), the City Theatre in Pittsburgh (May 2007), the Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland, Oregon in September/October 2014, and the New Jewish Theater in St. Louis, Missouri in January 2017.
The time is 1905, the place New York City, where Esther, a black seamstress, lives in a boarding house for women and sews intimate apparel for clients who range from wealthy white patrons to black prostitutes. Her skills and discretion are much in demand, and she has managed to stuff a good sum of money into her quilt over the years. One by one, the other denizens of the boarding house marry and move away, but Esther remains, lonely and longing for a husband and a future. Her plan is to find the right man and use the money she's saved to open a beauty parlor where black women will be treated as royally as the white women she sews for. By way of a mutual acquaintance, she begins to receive beautiful letters from a lonesome Caribbean man named George Armstrong who is working on the Panama Canal. Being illiterate, Esther has one of her patrons respond to the letters, and over time the correspondence becomes increasingly intimate until George persuades her that they should marry, sight unseen. Meanwhile, Esther's heart seems to lie with the Hasidic shopkeeper from whom she buys fabric, and his heart with her, but the impossibility of the match is obvious to them both, and Esther consents to marry George. When George arrives in New York, however, he turns out not to be the man his letters painted him to be, and he absconds with Esther's savings, frittering it away on whores, liquor, and gambling. Deeply wounded by the betrayal, but somehow unbroken, Esther returns to the boarding house determined to use her gifted hands and her sewing machine to refashion her dreams and make them anew from the whole cloth of her life's experiences.
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