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Intimate Apparel
By arrangement with Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
At
Steppenwolf Theatre Company
www.steppenwolf.org
1650 N. Halsted Street
Chicago, IL 60614
312-335-1650
Martha Lavey: Artistic Director
David Hawkanson: Executive Director
By Lynn Nottage
Starring:
Velma Austin, Cheryl Lynn Bruce, Eli Goodman,
JoNell Kennedy, Kymberly Mellen, Morocco Omari
Director: Jessica Thebus
Scenic Designer: Todd Rosenthal
Costume Designer: Linda Roethke
Lighting Designer: Ann G. Wrightson
Music & Sound Designer: Andre Pluess
& Ben Sussman
Stage Manager: Robert H. Satterlee
Assistant Stage Manager: Kerry Epstein
Public Relations: Will Nedved
Sponsorship: Bank One
Susan Weinrebe
January 25, 2005 In an apocryphal story about Florenz Ziegfeld, the great showman, he is reputed to have clothed his chorus girls in extravagantly expensive undergarments of linen and lace. When a financial backer reproved him for the cost of these underpinnings, which no one would see, he replied that the girls would know they were wearing them, and it would affect how they moved.
So it is with the six characters of Lynn Nottage’s multi-award winning play, Intimate Apparel at the Steppenwolf Theatre. Each character “wears” emotional underpinnings of race, class, education, hope, or despair, and it is these psychological coverings that impel their actions.
Anyone who has visited the Lower East Side of New York, specifically, the amazing Lower East Side Tenement Museum (www.tenement.org ) can attest to the authentic turn-of-the-century feeling conveyed by the wonderful multi-level set. A sepia rendering of the close-packed canyon between buildings is the background. Real underwear strung on clotheslines illustrates how, in such close living conditions, one’s clean (or “dirty”) laundry was open to public scrutiny. Ragtime tunes and super titles, like those at a silent movie, put the audience further into the aural and visual time period.
Each section of the stage compartmentalizes the actors, who affect Esther, a stitcher of gorgeous undergarments and the focus of the play. Successive levels of the set demark geographic, moral, social, and racial proximity between her and the others.
Esther’s place in her boarding house is stage right and center, and she fills the space closest to the audience. From the locus of Esther, the other characters’ places on the set radiate on successive levels of the stage, and it is in their little compartment rooms where they remain. Only Esther bridges the distances between them.
Stage right is for the folks of color in the play. An often-opened door gives Mrs. Dickson, the landlady, access to Esther. A platform level above, Mayme, Esther’s ragtime playing, gin drinking prostitute client and friend, is a contrast to the modest spinster seamstress. Above Mayme’s lair and farthest from Esther’s narrow bed, George, at work on the Panama Canal, monologues his Cyrano-like correspondence with Esther.
Across the stage and a level above Esther are the white people in her world. Mr. Marks, an Orthodox Jewish cloth merchant, waits in his tenement room for clients, and this is where Esther comes to select the sumptuous fabrics for her business. Next to him is Mrs. Van Buren, the society lady. Ostensibly, she lives across and up town, but she too is constrained by the compartment of her dressing room, albeit a more elegant and less apparent confinement of place.
Illiterate and unwed at thirty-five, Esther is unwilling to compromise her hard-won independence just to be married, especially to such an unappealing man as proposed by the erstwhile matchmaker, Mrs. Dickson. “I ain’t givin’ up that easy,” could be Esther’s credo throughout the drama. Indeed, she always has her eye on something better, someday: a beauty shop for black women, a man to love.
Besides keeping one’s place in society, love, or lack of it, is yet another theme. Each of the women has had miserable experiences with men or, in Esther’s case, no experience. She is the conduit for advice, as the others take her up in almost pet-like fashion to collaborate in her long-distance romance. Their advice presents opportunities for ironic humor that demonstrates one learns best from one’s mistakes.
Mrs. Dickson has hopes of making a match for Esther, despite her own flawed marriage. She recalls of her husband, “I forgave his infatuation with the opiates…. He came with this boarding house!” Yet she urges not to let a man have, “…no part of your heart without getting a piece of his.”
Mayme has a door that revolves with men arriving and leaving after they’ve used her for sex. Even though it appears that she’s going nowhere fast (especially dressed as she is En deshabille) and hasn’t a hope for a steady man on the horizon, she proclaims, “I ain’t waitin’ for anybody to come rescue me.” One wonders how she envisions a change in her life coming about.
Mrs. Van Buren is reviled and spurned by her husband for not getting pregnant. She drinks to blunt her pain and vicariously experiences romance by promoting Esther’s correspondence with George. As Esther fits her for the provocative lingerie that is unappreciated by her husband, this sad, desperate lady reveals her greatest emotional wounds to the little seamstress. Then she fumbles a physical connection with the only person who ever literally touches her.
Esther is a little brown bird. She has worked her whole life in the service of garbing other women in beautiful, if unseen raiment yet she herself wears only what is serviceable and drab. It is not until her heart is opened to loving and keeping her man that she dares to make something wildly luxurious and sensual to wear for him.
Though the setting was a metropolitan northern city, Esther, as a person of color, still must tread carefully as she moves between the races and classes, catering to others, earning her livelihood. When she finds some happiness and graces us with the benison of her smile, we are truly glad for her.
Velma Austin imbues Esther with a core of dignity. To get to the city, Esther has worked her way there picking berries. She has hidden life savings inside her quilt; the money is to be used in the service of helping other colored women feel beautiful at her hair salon. Yet, Esther gambles her nest egg on her husband’s truthfulness. This actress makes us believe that Esther has the goodness and hope to give George the money even when she likely knows it will be lost. She can’t afford not to make this investment.
This writer appreciated that Esther’s part was written without bombast, and that Ms. Austin quietly conveyed the strength of her character in a manner appropriate to the time.
The males in the play are absent or unavailable in various ways to the female characters. Esther, who goes everywhere and hears everything, because of her work, is the device through which we learn about these men.
Mrs. Dickson’s husband has died. Mr. Van Buren is only referred to when his wife recounts her sorrows. Mayme’s clients have blended into one nameless, faceless male entity. George is far away digging the Panama Canal. From his parents back, his family had been chattel in Barbados. He came to America, “…so story be different.” But he is lost to Esther in the anger of his dream deferred, once he comes to New York and encounters the prejudice that keeps him jobless. Mr. Marks, purveyor of luxurious textiles, is pledged to a fiancée whom he never met, who still lives in the old country. The frisson of the impossible attraction between this kind man and Esther makes us further aware that people were not to exceed their boundaries a hundred years ago.
Intimate Apparel is filled with siren calls to the senses of the characters and the audience. There is drinking from crystal decanters and bottles, the trickle of water being wrung from towels, the sound of a match struck, and the aroma of a cigarette.
Neither Esther nor Mr. Marks can resist the tactile pleasures of stroking, bunching, unfurling, and smelling the brilliant fabrics he presents to her, almost like the courting ritual of a bird. They never touch one another, nor do they need to. Their compassion and attraction are palpable without such an anti-climactic moment.
Mrs. Van Buren, however, cannot keep her hands off herself. As she models corsets and robes and garters that Esther fits to her, she positions her breasts, tugs her straps, smoothes her waist, and supplies the need for the touch she doesn’t get from her husband.
We hear the pop music of the day, ragtime, playing through the production, and it’s hard not to move to it. Mayme pounds a bawdy tune on her piano and belts out the words; she’s great! With those flashing white teeth and the long, tall charisma JoNell Kennedy brings to her part, we are moved for her character. We have to know the man she will choose, “…ain’t real. He a dummy, a spirit,” that she, “…gonna be chasin’ him forever.”
Then there is George. Speaking in an island patois, Morocco Omari brings life to Esther’s life. Though scribed by someone else, George sends letters embroidered with descriptions of the flowers, smells, textures, colors, and events in the Canal Zone. Are these his words or those of the mulatto man who writes for him? Like Esther, George is illiterate. But he is surely not inarticulate!
Mr. Omari has a voice that is a melody and his words are charms used to enchant women to his will. This is a physically beautiful man, whose feckless treatment of his wife might be forgiven if he chose the right blandishments. He well conveys the sullen attitude that promises good behavior, should he get his way!
How has Esther fared at the end of the play? She is back in her boarding house where we first saw her. Life savings have been given to her husband with the longing of a woman who thinks herself plain. Did Esther really believe George had a business plan? No matter. She had the opportunity to elevate her husband from his despair, and she took a chance. She loved and lost. Did she really have a choice?
The husband is gone and needless to the say the money is too. Esther sits at her sewing machine, and we are reminded of her words, “That my life, thousands of tiny stitches.” But we have hope for this resilient and modest woman.
With the sound of flash powder from an old-fashioned camera, we see Esther stilled in the moment as in a photograph. And we are able to see beyond that frozen moment and foretell the future. She may have been sidetracked, but she will keep on keeping on. Esther has, after all, that ineffable quality of “heart”, the most intimate apparel of all.
Following the performance, most of the actors returned to the stage for a question and answer session. This was a wonderful opportunity to discuss fine points of the production with these gracious professionals.
The Steppenwolf Theatre is renowned for its ensemble company of actors, many of whom are internationally known. Periodically they return to the site of their spawning ground to be featured in such ongoing productions.
Besides easy accessibility to transportation and two performances that are either sign language interpreted for the hearing disabled or “audio-described” for the sight disabled, the Steppenwolf Theatre is negotiable by wheelchair and provides listening devices at each performance.
JoNell Kennedy and Velma Austin in Intimate Apparel playing in the Steppenwolf Downstairs Theatre until March 13, 2005. For tickets, call Audience Services at 312-335-1650
Photo courtesy of Michael Brosilow
Velma Austin and JoNell Kennedy in Intimate Apparel playing in the Steppenwolf Downstairs Theatre until March 13, 2005. For tickets, call Audience Services at 312-335-1650.
Photo courtesy of Michael Brosilow
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