Advertisement
Stay in the Loop
BSR publishes on a weekly schedule, with an email newsletter every Wednesday and Thursday morning. There’s no paywall, and subscribing is always free.
PTC's 'Intimate Apparel'
Dan Rottenberg
Beyond 'Ragtime'
In a squalid rooming house in lower Manhattan, 1905, Esther, a shy and unmarried black seamstress of 35 (Rosalyn Coleman), stitches lacy unergarments for wealthy women clients, squirrels away her savings and waits for something good to befall her. Her assets include her eye for fabric, her talent for sewing and her unpretentious reliability, which draws people to her like a magnet; what she lacks is loving support and the confidence to recognize and capitalize on her advantages. The people in Esther’s life include two antithetical customers, a wealthy but depressed Fifth Avenue matron named Mrs. Van Buren (Anne Louise Zachry) and a free-spirited black prostitute (Eisa Davis); her Orthodox Jewish fabric supplier Mr. Marks (Maury Ginsberg); her maternally-inclined landlady (Stephanie Berry); and George (Stephen Conrad Moore), a laborer in Panama she has never met but with whom she exchanges love letters twice a month. The letters are Esther’s equivalent of the sexy corsets she makes for her clients— that is, the stuff of fantasy that renders real life bearable.
At first, Lynn Nottage’s finely drawn character study evokes echoes of Fiddler On the Roof (“Even a poor tailor has a right to some happiness!”) and E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, with its kaleidoscopic class struggle set in New York of 1904. But Ragtime (the film even moreso than the novel) contended that in repressive societies, the people on the bottom— be they women, blacks, Jews, immigrants, the poor, whatever— are not merely more interesting than those on top; they are also the only people who make things happen. The ostensibly powerful male WASPs in Ragtime are so busy trying to keep a lid on things that they spend all of their energy reacting to events initiated by others; far from being masters of their destinies, they are slaves to the actions of their subordinates.
Nottage has something else in mind for Intimate Apparel. Her world of 1905 contains no male WASP characters at all, and indeed it alludes to only one: Mrs. Van Buren’s husband, who is never home and whom she yearns to leave (“If I were brave” she tells Esther, “I’d collect myself right now and find a small clean room,” presumably just like Esther’s). Instead, this compelling but also wrenching drama introduces us to people who’ve been rendered largely anonymous by history, enabling us to grasp why desperate people make bad choices. (George dreams of owning a stable with 12 fine horses, unaware that automobiles are about to render horses obsolete.) Tim Vasen’s direction and staging— in which the characters and their props meander in and out of each other’s spaces— reinforce the notion that although these people may be separated by barriers of class, race, gender and religion, ultimately they’re all in the same boat.
What’s remarkable about Intimate Apparel is the depth and empathy Nottage manages to plumb within all her characters (with the possible exception of Esther’s landlady, Mrs. Dixon, who functions mostly as background support). I was especially struck by the relationship between Esther and her fabric supplier, Mr. Marks. Although she is black and he is Jewish, they share a great deal in common: an appreciation for fabric, mutual gentlenesss, a day-to-day connection to God, and a prospective marriage to a stranger (Marks awaits the arrival of his arranged bride from Rumania). Were it not for such social constraints as race and religion, Esther and Marks would make a loving and compatible couple. The subtlety of their unrequited affection is a wonder to behold; I haven’t seen anything like it since the unspoken love between Alan Ladd and Jean Arthur 53 years ago in Shane.
What’s lacking in Intimate Apparel is any sense of the support groups that enable most people to survive. Sooner or later even society’s loneliest and most despised creatures find a church, a ladies’ club, or a music group or a bowling league, not to mention a marriage or a family, to provide the strength to soldier on. These don’t seem to exist here (and the play’s marriages appear to be disasters). But this is a small quibble for a well-performed work that amply succeeds at doing what theater should do: Enable the audience to enter the skin of other human beings.— Dan Rottenberg.
To view a response to this review, click here.
In a squalid rooming house in lower Manhattan, 1905, Esther, a shy and unmarried black seamstress of 35 (Rosalyn Coleman), stitches lacy unergarments for wealthy women clients, squirrels away her savings and waits for something good to befall her. Her assets include her eye for fabric, her talent for sewing and her unpretentious reliability, which draws people to her like a magnet; what she lacks is loving support and the confidence to recognize and capitalize on her advantages. The people in Esther’s life include two antithetical customers, a wealthy but depressed Fifth Avenue matron named Mrs. Van Buren (Anne Louise Zachry) and a free-spirited black prostitute (Eisa Davis); her Orthodox Jewish fabric supplier Mr. Marks (Maury Ginsberg); her maternally-inclined landlady (Stephanie Berry); and George (Stephen Conrad Moore), a laborer in Panama she has never met but with whom she exchanges love letters twice a month. The letters are Esther’s equivalent of the sexy corsets she makes for her clients— that is, the stuff of fantasy that renders real life bearable.
At first, Lynn Nottage’s finely drawn character study evokes echoes of Fiddler On the Roof (“Even a poor tailor has a right to some happiness!”) and E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, with its kaleidoscopic class struggle set in New York of 1904. But Ragtime (the film even moreso than the novel) contended that in repressive societies, the people on the bottom— be they women, blacks, Jews, immigrants, the poor, whatever— are not merely more interesting than those on top; they are also the only people who make things happen. The ostensibly powerful male WASPs in Ragtime are so busy trying to keep a lid on things that they spend all of their energy reacting to events initiated by others; far from being masters of their destinies, they are slaves to the actions of their subordinates.
Nottage has something else in mind for Intimate Apparel. Her world of 1905 contains no male WASP characters at all, and indeed it alludes to only one: Mrs. Van Buren’s husband, who is never home and whom she yearns to leave (“If I were brave” she tells Esther, “I’d collect myself right now and find a small clean room,” presumably just like Esther’s). Instead, this compelling but also wrenching drama introduces us to people who’ve been rendered largely anonymous by history, enabling us to grasp why desperate people make bad choices. (George dreams of owning a stable with 12 fine horses, unaware that automobiles are about to render horses obsolete.) Tim Vasen’s direction and staging— in which the characters and their props meander in and out of each other’s spaces— reinforce the notion that although these people may be separated by barriers of class, race, gender and religion, ultimately they’re all in the same boat.
What’s remarkable about Intimate Apparel is the depth and empathy Nottage manages to plumb within all her characters (with the possible exception of Esther’s landlady, Mrs. Dixon, who functions mostly as background support). I was especially struck by the relationship between Esther and her fabric supplier, Mr. Marks. Although she is black and he is Jewish, they share a great deal in common: an appreciation for fabric, mutual gentlenesss, a day-to-day connection to God, and a prospective marriage to a stranger (Marks awaits the arrival of his arranged bride from Rumania). Were it not for such social constraints as race and religion, Esther and Marks would make a loving and compatible couple. The subtlety of their unrequited affection is a wonder to behold; I haven’t seen anything like it since the unspoken love between Alan Ladd and Jean Arthur 53 years ago in Shane.
What’s lacking in Intimate Apparel is any sense of the support groups that enable most people to survive. Sooner or later even society’s loneliest and most despised creatures find a church, a ladies’ club, or a music group or a bowling league, not to mention a marriage or a family, to provide the strength to soldier on. These don’t seem to exist here (and the play’s marriages appear to be disasters). But this is a small quibble for a well-performed work that amply succeeds at doing what theater should do: Enable the audience to enter the skin of other human beings.— Dan Rottenberg.
To view a response to this review, click here.
Sign up for our newsletter
All of the week's new articles, all in one place. Sign up for the free weekly BSR newsletters, and don't miss a conversation.
