Intiman Theatre
Through Sept 24.
Writing about one's family is almost always ill advised. Stray to the left and you're airing soiled, melodramatic laundry. Stray to the right and you'll look saccharine and cowardly. Stick to the middle and you've got a bland history that doesn't say much of anything. No matter which road you choose, you're probably going to bore your audience.
Playwright Lynn Nottage chooses the center road, with a slight cant to the right, in Intimate Apparel—now in an uninspiring production at Intiman. Esther, inspired by Nottage's grandmother, is a hardworking black seamstress in early-20th-century Manhattan who sews custom undergarments for Mrs. Van Buren, a white uptown socialite, and Mayme, a black downtown prostitute. Appropriately, Van Buren likes her dainties slutty and scandalous, while Mayme wants classy, uptown designs.
A plain-faced 35-year-old, Esther has almost resigned herself to spinsterhood when she begins to receive letters from George Armstrong, a Barbadian digging the grim trough of the Panama Canal. Their correspondence grows, Armstrong proposes, he moves to New York, and Esther gets her groove back. Despite valiant efforts to lie to herself, even Esther can see that her mail-order spouse isn't a nice guy. He drinks and gambles her money away, can't get a job, and sleeps around. Esther eventually faces the ugly truth and returns to her old rooming house a little older and a little wiser. The end.
(It's also worth noting that Intimate Apparel is Intiman's Token Black Play of 2005, not counting the annual Black Nativity. Oh, come on—let's be honest with ourselves. The TBP has been a regional theater custom for years. Trying to attract dollars from the rising black middle class is smart business and a little artistic affirmative action is perhaps wise, but watching a TBP, no matter how good or bad it is, always gives me the uncomfortable feeling that the mostly white audience and mostly black artists are mutually condescending to one another.)
Directed by Jacqueline Moscou (who was recruited for Intiman's token black Crowns last spring) Intimate Apparel wants to cover a lot of ground—New York in the early 1900s, the old race-class-gender trinity, the Panama Canal, underwear, black migration to the North, et al. We get teasing appetizers of each, but Esther's journey is the bland main course. She's a picture of virtue, a hardworking, honest woman done wrong by her philandering husband and frustrated by 1905 social barriers. At two and a half hours, there's plenty to eat, but not enough flavor to be satisfying.
There are a few inspiring moments, especially between Esther (a rock-solid Gwendolyn Mulamba) and the two men in her life. Albert Jones as George Armstrong is appropriately seductive and enraging, and Marc Jablon is heartbreaking as Mr. Marks, the timid, lovelorn Romanian Jew who runs Esther's favorite fabric shop. The unspoken, frustrated romance between Esther and Mr. Marks is by far the most interesting thread in Intimate Apparel—I wish Nottage had abandoned her family history to embellish that relationship.
The prostitute, the socialite, the fabric salesman, and Esther's busybody landlady trap our hero in a vicious square of desire (Jewish), resentment (white), and love and betrayal (black). Each relationship has unrealized potential—Nottage eschews development for reiteration (Damn the conventions that keep Mr. Marks and Esther apart! Damn that decadent cliché of a rich white woman! And damn that shiftless Barbadian!). There's nothing wrong with a simple plot, nor a sociologically inclined script. But at two and a half hours, Intimate Apparel drags ass. The characters aren't interesting enough, and the social context isn't nuanced enough, to justify its length.
By the end, everything is as it was—Esther sewing in her room, George a disembodied fantasy, Mr. Marks in his shop, Mayme playing piano and drinking gin, Mrs. Van Buren bored on her divan, and the landlady bustling and gossiping. We've come full circle, and didn't learn much along the way.
I heard yawning and squirming throughout the show, but the actors got a standing ovation. On the way out of the theater, one older woman said to another: "I was expecting a fairytale ending."
"Yeah, but it wasn't a fairytale ending."
"No, it was real."
"It was just like real life!"
Unfortunately, it was just like real life—tedious and sad with occasional flares of unexpected beauty.
