Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel has everything historical-romance fans could want: a gilded-age urban setting, ragtime music, long dresses and frilly underwear. Its personnel are women, mostly the poor-but-independent variety (with a lone rebellious socialite, for contrast), accompanied by handsome rakes and shy admirers. This is no frivolous bodice-ripper, however, but docudrama steeped in grim compromise and survival bought at the expense of happiness.
Our locale is New York City in 1905. Our heroine is Esther Mills, a self-employed seamstress who earns her living creating ornate lingerie for piano players in cathouses and matrons in brownstones. Esther lives in a boarding house for colored spinsters, where her wares are in great demand by residents who eventually abandon their single status for marriage. Not that Esther is altogether bereft of male company—her landlady is an eager matchmaker, and her Orthodox Jewish draper would propose without hesitation if not for their religious differences—but as she approaches her mid-thirties, she forsakes her customary caution to enter into an epistolary courtship conducted by a laborer on the Panama Canal who writes suspiciously eloquent letters. Since Esther cannot read or write, her replies to this suitor are composed by a committee of her confidantes.
Sadder-but-wiser lonelyhearts pen pals and Facebook fishers can readily testify to misfortune arising from relationships founded on deception, but by the time Esther's betrothed arrives to find his fantasy-bride and her land-of-opportunity home falling short of his expectations, we are wholly invested in the hopes and dreams of every character in this shabby/cozy homespun universe. When fulfillment is too distant to imagine, the courage and resiliency required to settle for its lesser reward, contentment, is worthy of commendation. As the brothel's resident pianist remarks, she gets to make music every day, whatever she may have to do at night, and when Esther claims to want only to be loved, she doesn't stipulate that it must be forever (cf. "better to have loved and lost," etc.)
Eclipse Theater director Steve Scott has assembled a cast led by storefront-circuit rising star Kelly Owens, each forging wholly-realized personalities from their generic archetypes, with the assistance of a technical team that replicates the period milieu right down the gleaming-like-new treadle sewing machine providing the central image in a production as delicately stitched and skillfully tailored as one of Esther's exquisite chemises. Audiences waiting with bated hankies for this fall's lineup of Victoriana will find plenty to take the edge off their appetite with this wistful tale of corsets and regrets.
