Intimate Apparel is a play written by Lynn Nottage.
The play is a co-production and co-commission between Center Stage, Baltimore, Maryland, and South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa, California.
The play is set in New York City in 1905 and concerns a young African-American woman who travels to New York to pursue her dreams, becoming an independent woman as a seamstress.
Synopsis:
The time is 1905, the place New York City, where Esther, a black seamstress, lives in a boarding house for women and sews intimate apparel for clients who range from wealthy white patrons to black prostitutes.
Her skills and discretion are much in demand, and she has managed to stuff a good sum of money into her quilt over the years.
One by one, the other denizens of the boarding house marry and move away, but Esther remains, lonely and longing for a husband and a future. Her plan is to find the right man and use the money she's saved to open a beauty parlor where black women will be treated as royally as the white women she sews for.
By way of a mutual acquaintance, she begins to receive beautiful letters from a lonesome Caribbean man named George Armstrong who is working on the Panama Canal. Being illiterate, Esther has one of her patrons respond to the letters, and over time the correspondence becomes increasingly intimate until George persuades her that they should marry, sight unseen.
Meanwhile, Esther's heart seems to lie with the Hasidic shopkeeper from whom she buys fabric, and his heart with her, but the impossibility of the match is obvious to them both, and Esther consents to marry George.
When George arrives in New York, however, he turns out not to be the man his letters painted him to be, and he absconds with Esther's savings, frittering it away on whores, liquor, and gambling. Deeply wounded by the betrayal, but somehow unbroken, Esther returns to the boarding house determined to use her gifted hands and her sewing machine to refashion her dreams and make them anew from the whole cloth of her life's experiences. The final stage directions reveal that Esther is also pregnant.
The play is based on the life of Nottage's great-grandmother.
Lynn Nottage:
Lynn Nottage (born November 2, 1964) is an American playwright whose work often focuses on the experience of working-class people, particularly working-class people who are Black.
She has received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice: in 2009 for her play Ruined, and in 2017 for her play Sweat. She was the first (and remains the only) woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama two times.
Nottage is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship and was included in Time magazine's 2019 list of the 100 Most Influential People.
She is currently an associate professor of playwriting at Columbia University and an artist-in-residence at the Park Avenue Armory.
Music Video:
Gimme Shelter Live by the band Rolling Stones.
The Play:
Drew University's 2019 production.
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