San Diego Arts

"Intimate Apparel" by Lynn Nottage

The Secret Life of Everyone
By Abbie Padgett
Posted on Mon, Mar 20th, 2006
Last updated Tue, Mar 21st, 2006

In 1902 a plain and deeply religious young African American woman named Ethel Boyce came alone to Manhattan, where she lived in a rooming house and supported herself by sewing fancy undergarments for society belles and prostitutes alike. Ethel Boyce was playwright Lynn Nottage’s great-grandmother, and her story, filtered through time and framed lovingly in the nimbus of stage lights, is Intimate Apparel – the lavishly awarded and most-produced play of the year.

Onstage and under the seasoned direction of Delicia Turner Sonnenberg, Ethel becomes Esther Mills (Lisa Renee Pitts), an icon of quiet, hardworking deference in whom exists a universally recognizable hunger for attachment, for love. But at thirty-five, Esther has no prospects. Her heartily realistic landlady, Mrs. Dickson (Sylvia M’Lafi Thompson) urges her to sacrifice romance to practicality. “When I met the late Mr. Dickson he was near sixty and I forgave his infatuation with the opiates, for he come with this rooming house and look how many good years it’s given me.” But Esther has a dream, perhaps born of the rigidly constrained affection between her and a Jewish fabric merchant, Mr. Marks (Lance Smith.) Whatever might blossom between them is doomed by the era and the strictures of Marks’s religion, however, and remains buried in the charged space between them. But then a letter comes from Panama and the course of Esther’s life changes in ways she cannot predict, although we can, and we long to warn her across the lip of the stage, across time.

The letter is from George Armstrong (Michael A. Shepperd), a West Indian worker on the Panama Canal who has seen Esther’s picture in the room of her cousin. Illiterate, Esther cannot answer George’s letters, but enlists the aid first of white “society” client Mrs. Van Buren (Lisel Gorell-Getz), whose husband ignores her, and later of Esther’s closest friend, the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold who dreams of being a concert pianist, Mayme (Lisa H. Payton) in transcribing her thoughts to George. We see him standing tall and virile behind a scrim on the tiered stage, reciting his words to Esther, and we feel the rush of irrevocable forces that will bring George to New York City and see them married at the beginning of Act II, in which the play’s initial subtlety is supplanted by harsher realities.

But that initial subtlety is perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the play, calling as it does for consummate acting on the parts of Esther and to a lesser extent, Mr. Marks. We already know more than they do about themselves in their roles; they and the others are to some extent embodiments of familiar characters. Esther is a silent Jane Eyre, George a Leadbelly without music, Mrs. Van Buren , an Ibsen’s Nora Helmer frozen forever in the moment before the defiant and doomed decision. I could feel the audience leaning into the flatline containment of, for example, Mr. Marks’s expressionless observation of Esther leaving his building. Trapped in their time, they can show almost nothing of their feelings and so, heads bent toward the stage, we intend their feelings for them. And when one of the unconstrained characters – Mrs. Dickson or Mayme – speak, our intent can relax and the sudden release is palpable. The experience is engaging.

Equally engaging are the set and costumes. Fred Kinney’s tiered scenic design is so masterfully done as almost to become a character in itself, deftly capturing both the flavor of New York City at the turn of the century and the personal tastes of an unhappy white socialite, an orthodox Jewish textile merchant, a black hooker who works out of a saloon, and the tidy, courageous Esther with her treadle sewing machine and quilt stuffed with money saved for eighteen years to fund her dream - a beauty salon where black women can for a little while be treated well. Jennifer Brawn Gittings’s costumes, too, are stunning and evocative of their time, especially Mrs. Dickson’s, Mrs. Van Buren’s and Mayme’s, as Stephanie Robinson’s soft, unobtrusive ragtime riffs remind us that we are watching ghosts in a story lived before we were born.

Yet the yearnings, flaws and necessary compromises of these long-dead people are so completely our yearnings, flaws and compromises that we identify with them, become them. We hope for the innocent Esther’s courageous grab at love despite our uneasy lack of innocence, cringe at Mrs. Van Buren’s misguided desperation because at one time or another we, too, have made humiliating mistakes. Mrs. Dickson’s ebullient savvy comforts us because we’ve all known somebody like her who could make us smile as we face a reality that doesn’t like us. George’s misguided and ultimately ruinous pride, Mayme’s valiant cheer rising above her circumstances and Mr. Marks’s capitulation to the rules of his time and his religion are all options we have entertained for ourselves, internalizing what works and discarding what doesn’t. We know all these people very well because they are us.

The playwright set out to illuminate a lost story, the story of African Americans, one in particular, in a place and time. But most of the faces leaning such close intent from their darkened seats toward the stage were not African American, which is the point. The story lost to the silence of racism, given voice, turns out to be everybody’s story framed for a moment in the nimbus of stage lights. Nice magic.

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Comments

Posted by Theatregoer	Wed, Mar 22nd, 2006
I felt like I was half drunk reading this review, because I couldn't comprehend anything this amateurish reviewer wrote. Such droning, repetitive, uninspired nonsense. "They are us"? "...turns out to be everybody's story"? What sublimely blathering emptyness. Spending half the review describing the plot is another sign of this critic's obvious mediocrity. But the clincher was the description of the audience being so enthralled as to be leaning toward the stage -- what laughable manure!

Posted by Playwatcher	Thu, Mar 23rd, 2006
Theatregoer...maybe you were drunk! Your critique of the reviews sounds like my old writing professors who pounded the table calling out "where's the meaning!" while reviewing student short stories. The only kind of writing that had "meaning" to their standard had to be a gritty, crummy, depressing depiction of life...else it wasn't real or have any "meaning". Methinks you just can't handle the prospect of a presentation that a reviewer found compelling for good reasons. Your objection to "They are us"...might be we loath what of ourselves we see in others?

Posted by Reader	Sun, Mar 26th, 2006
Theatregoer, drunk or sober, you apparently aren't capable of understanding this review! Your critique reminds me of the Talibans' destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. They hated, feared, and didn't understand works of art which had endured for centuries, and therefore they destroyed them. Maybe with your literacy level, you should stick to reading and critiquing the backs of cereal boxes.

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