Intimate Apparel @ Mainstage Irving
Photos by Kris Ikejiri
—Martha Heimberg
Two or three scenes unspool with a spare dignity before I mentally slow down to match the pace of the people and their stories in Lynn Nottage’s intricate and poignant Intimate Apparel, which debuted in 2003 and opened Friday at MainStage Irving. Last year, The Metropolitan Opera commissioned Nottage to write the libretto for an operatic version of the play (with music by Ricky Ian Gordon) that received strong reviews.
Director Dennis Raveneau takes us back to New York City in 1905, describing it in his director’s note as “a melting pot of immigrants from the South, Europe, and the Caribbean, (where) issues of racism, classism and gender bias crashed heavily against their hopes and dreams.” Sound familiar? Raveneau and company avoid a cynical “so what’s new?” approach to the play, as we watch each character’s unique style and circumstance unfold on the proscenium stage at Irving Arts Center’s smaller Dupree Theater.
The characters stay with us on the drive home, and the next morning we remember a lyrical line or an actor’s shrug, and begin thinking of how the language of making clothing and making a life resonate so in thiis play.
Esther (Stormi Demerson, reprising this role from the January 2022 WaterTower Theatre production) is a lonely 35-year-old seamstress who sews gorgeously detailed corsets and negligees alone in her boarding house bedroom. Her good-hearted, bossy landlady of 17 years, Mrs. Dickson (a commanding, suddenly eloquent Yolanda Davis), urges her plain, prim tenant to forget romance and love and marry any man who can take care of her—and to do it soon. Esther just keeps sewing and saving her money, stuffed inside a quilt, so she can open her own beauty shop one day.
Aside from her faithful hand-cranked sewing machine, Esther touches nobody and nothing but the sumptuous, delicate silks and fine woolens she lovingly selects from the middle-aged Jewish fabric merchant Mr. Marks (a touchingly restrained Blair Mitchell). He clearly adores his favorite customer, a woman who shares his passion for beauty in the form of exotic, imported cloth. Still, he respects his familial promise to marry a woman of the faith, just as he wears his grandfather’s threadbare coat to honor the frugality and memory of his ancestors. Esther is clearly drawn to the gentle, kind Mr. Marks, but in this world their attraction is an impossibility.
Steadfast Esther stitches with pride and artistry for her own best customers: the white wife of a wealthy man and a high-priced black whore. Mrs. Van Buren (a needy, vain Lindsay Hayward, constantly primping her coiffed hair before a hollow mirror) squeezes into the latest corset, as she confides her husband’s neglect and infidelities to Esther, as good a listener as she is a seamstress.
Serious Esther actually smiles when she delivers a golden, beribboned corset to the shapely Mayme (a glossy, sardonic Kayland Jordan). Mayme is so alluring she commands top dollar from her eager customers, although she’s grown tired of so much relentless sex. Esther tells her about the wealthy lady across town. “What you got she wants, and what she got you want,” she tells her weary friend, who swigs whiskey straight from the bottle on her dressing table.
Then Esther gets a letter from a workman named George (a swaggering, laughing, sensual Brentom Jackson) who is digging the Panama Canal. Because she can neither read nor write, she must ask her customers to read George’s letters aloud, and help her write back to a man she’s never seen.
The plot thickens, and her high hopes for a marriage of her own propel Esther forward, or rather left and right and forward and back on Ellen Doyle Mizener’s clever set design. Each character has a distinct bedroom, shop or playing space; together, they form a half circle around the stage, with those in the rear elevated for easy sight lines. When Esther leaves her boarding house bedroom stage and goes to see a customer or buy sewing supplies, she literally walks to the lighted space and the scene begins, thanks to Hank Baldree’s lighting design.
We also can see, at strategic moments, what’s happening in other bedrooms when Esther is not there. A spotlight hits handsome letter-writing George, stage left, who is from Barbados. We see him before Esther does, of course, as he waxes longingly in ink of his love—and of how he dreams of marrying her and coming to America. In our views of these other spaces, there is sheerest poetry in Nottage’s outtakes on a washerwoman’s bleeding hands or a prostitute’s suddenly wistful romantic seduction.
Sharp design and direction keep an increasingly complicated plot clearly focused, as we move from bed to bed, changing corsets, smoking jackets, handmade suits and wigs, as smooth as, yes, silk. Michael A. Robinson and the Dallas Costume Shoppe dress the actors in handsome, well-fitted period clothing. Matthew Rafanelli designed the wigs. Pianist/composer Thiago Nascimento plays a lovely ragtime piano offstage between scenes—sometime upbeat, sometimes melancholic—setting the mood for what’s ahead.
Demerson brings such restrained passion to Esther in her scenes with Mitchell’s Mr. Marks. How wonderful to see that passion burst into a smile of sheer joy in the moment when she first embraces George or hears his big plans for a business. We also feel her pleasure as she touches a fine fabric, and her pride in presenting her work, intimately made and worn.
Jackson’s George is not just a lady’s man, but also a man with the rhythm of his island homeland in his cocky walk and easy laugh. His frustration in job hunting is as real as his naivety about the immigrant experience in New York at the turn of the century.
We watch Esther and those around her as they struggle to achieve their dreams of success, to find emotional as well as physical intimacy in a society where all are marginalized in different ways. And yet there also is sweetness and delight in the lives of these people. Strong ensemble performances and cohesive direction bring a play that might easily fall into fragmented scenes to a happy emotional high, and then to a quiet and powerful conclusion.
Slow down and go.
WHERE: Through March 25
WHEN: Irving Arts Center, 3333 N. MacArthur Blvd., Irving (south entrance)
WEB: mainstageirving.com
