Last year, Lynn Nottage won a Pulitzer Prize for her play Ruined. Now Live Arts has revived Nottage’s 2003 play Intimate Apparel, set in 1905, which depicts the fragmented love life of Esther Mills, an African-American woman who makes her living in New York City sewing lingerie. Live Arts’ production is a little clumsy at times, but on the whole smart and skilled. Even with its flaws, the play manages a moving portrayal of failed romance.
Esther’s work puts her in contact with a high-class, white socialite, an African-American prostitute and a single Jewish man who sells luxurious fabrics. Although Esther has meaningful (if limited) relationships with each of these characters, she longs to fall in love and marry. Early in the play, Esther receives a letter from a man in Panama named George Armstrong. We see George (played convincingly by Jared Ivory) downstage left and lit by a bluish spotlight. With a sonorous voice, George reads his letter to both the audience and to Esther. Nottage’s language manages to be both poetic and light, but the real credit here should go to the director, Ray Smith. By placing George almost offstage (but not beyond the pale), Smith suggests that this character is both real and a fiction of Esther’s fantasies.
Neither George nor Esther actually writes the letters they send to each other. George has a gifted friend write his letters to Esther; Esther’s friend Mayme and her employer Mrs. Van Buren write her letters to George. Thus, George sounds like a thoughtful, poetic soul (which he’s not) and Esther, in her letters, is a composite of the sensual Mayme and the aristocratic Mrs. Van Buren. Neither version, of course, is all that accurate. But the play hinges on these holographic selves and the havoc they wreak. Ivory, surely aware of this complexity, infuses George’s letters with a beautiful and surreal intensity. George’s voice hovers at the edge of the stage bathed in a light we all wish was real.
It’s in the more everyday scenes that this production suffers. Esther’s dialogue with her landlady, Mrs. Dickson, and with her employer, Mrs. Van Buren, never take on the spontaneity of authentic speech. (The dialogue with Mr. Marks and Mayme is a little better.) The actors’ movements and gestures are forced and at times unanimated, which is a shame, since we need the scenes with Mrs. Dickson & Co. to contrast with (and combat) the unreality of George’s letters. That said, each fragment of Esther’s life—Mrs. Dickson, Mrs. Van Buren, Mayme and Mr. Marks—contributes enough to depict the intimacy we often overlook in the pursuit of love.
