Playwright: Lynn Nottage
At: Steppenwolf, 1650 N. Halsted
Phone: ( 312 ) 335-1650; $20-$60
Runs through: March 13
Intimate Apparel is playwright Lynn Nottage's attempt to get to know her great grandmother, a Black woman who made her living as a seamstress in turn-of-the-century New York City. Nottage's attempt to get to better know her ancestor and to bring her to theatrical life succeeds with humor, pathos, and remarkable empathy for the powerlessness of a then middle-aged Black woman of the period. All this and an immensely entertaining and well-plotted story to boot make this play an all-around achievement on both artistic and commercial levels.
Esther ( an honest and engaging portrait from Velma Austin ) , plain and hard-working ( but possessed of a resilient spirit ) makes her living crafting unusual and strikingly beautiful lingerie. Her work brings her into a paradoxically intimate, yet subservient, role with her clients. Two of them come from opposite ends of the social spectrum: Mrs. Van Buren ( spirited yet poignant work from Kymberly Mellen ) is a wealthy matron whose wealth has left her in a kind of luxurious prison, and Mayme ( a hard-edged, confident JoNell Kennedy ) , a prostitute in a brothel who shows Esther a seamier side of life. The only place where she is on an equal par is with Mr. Marks ( Eli Goodman ) , a Jewish vendor who supplies her with fabric. Nottage's maneuvering of this pair, and their burgeoning attraction and affection for each other ( which, during the times, is against all odds ) is adept and engrossing.
Esther's somewhat ordered world, one in which she is resigned to spinsterhood, tumbles down when she begins receiving letters from George Armstrong ( a laborer on the Panama Canal ) . The pair's correspondence ( Esther is illiterate and engages Mrs. Van Buren and Mayme to pen her missives ) soon turns into courtship and—before you can say the end of act one—George is planning on coming to America to wed Esther, who suddenly has a new life ahead of her, one which she did not expect.
Act two reveals that Esther's new life is much further afield from what she expected. George was not the man she discovered in his intensely romantic letters; in fact, he is a cad.
Intimate Apparel is a skillful work, deftly directed by Jessica Thebus ( and with a masterfully evocative set by Todd Rosenthal, supported by Ann Wrightson's subtle lighting effects and inspired period costumes from Linda Roethke ) under whose supervision, a marvelously accomplished cast create whole, real, and often flawed, characters … people we can love and hate, and everything in between.