REVIEWS ...
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
GableStage's 'Intimate Apparel' elegantly sewn
By Christine Dolen
cdolen@herald.com
Stitch by stitch, too many to count through the years, a black seamstress sews her way toward a dream.
It is New York City in 1905. Esther creates, from silk and fantasy, gorgeous intimate apparel worn by everyone from high-born ladies to low-down prostitutes.
But for this lonely, disciplined woman, those exquisite undergarments are just the means to an end: independence, her own beauty parlor, the chance to make other black women feel pampered and special.
But in Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel, a play as beautifully crafted as the sexy corsets Esther makes, a new dream -- love -- supplants the old one.
And that's where the real drama begins.
Nottage's award-winning off-Broadway hit is, after the plays of William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, the most-produced script in America's regional theaters this season, a list that now includes GableStage. Director Joseph Adler, six terrific actors and an inventive design team that brings Esther's long-ago world so vividly to life do the playwright proud.
On the intimate theater's broad, shallow stage, set designer Lyle Baskin has created an elegant boudoir for Mrs. Van Buren (Sandra Ives), a society type just as lonely as Esther, and a compact Lower East Side shop where Mr. Marks (Antonio Amadeo), an Orthodox Jewish merchant, shares with Esther both a love of extraordinary fabrics and an impossible attraction.
There's also Esther's tidy, stark boarding house room, where landlady Mrs. Dickson (Dorothy Morrison) pops in to offer unwanted advice, as well as the flashy bedroom where Mayme (Lela Elam), an alluring black prostitute who is both customer and friend to Esther, plys her trade. And there is also the cot where George Armstrong (Bechir Sylvain), a laborer helping to carve the Panama Canal through hostile land, sits as he shares dreams of a better life through correspondence with Esther -- a woman he has never met. Once that changes, so does everything else in Esther's carefully ordered world.
Though Intimate Apparel is rich with detail about the differences in the lives of its characters, its emotional terrain -- an overpowering longing for love, a man's unendurable frustration, a woman's devastation at betrayal -- touches us all.
Duncan is a fierce Esther, Sylvain both boyishly charismatic and cruel as George. Ives brings charm, Morrison warmth, Amadeo a sweet playfulness and Elam sheer irresistibility.
Final kudos to the real creator of all those pretty undergarments and costumes, Erin Amico, who makes Intimate Apparel the best-dressed -- or maybe best-undressed -- show in town.
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
GableStage fashions a stylish, intimate look at a seamstress's dream
By Jack Zink, Theater Writer
The most heartbreaking moment in Lynn Nottage's celebrated drama Intimate Apparel is not the tragedy but its foretelling, when the good woman risks all to test the man she already knows has done her wrong.
The audience at the GableStage ripples with suppressed anguish that will be transferred soon enough to the characters within the story itself. Yet while playwright Nottage barely disguises what is about to happen, thinnest hope keeps that audience clinging with the woman to her fantasy.
Intimate Apparel is the story of a 35-year-old spinster, a black seamstress in New York City in 1905 who specializes in expensive ladies' lingerie. She dreams of one day owning a shop, and perhaps eventually marrying the right man if she can find one who sees past her ordinary face.
The story was inspired in part by Nottage's great-grandmother, a connection that adds resonance and warmth to the play, which won the New York Drama Critics Circle and the American Theatre Critics Association's ATCA-Steinberg Best Play awards in 2004.
GableStage director Joseph Adler's production realizes every nuance in the drama that opened off-Broadway's intimate Laura Pels Theatre two years ago. Adler shapes them to the different dramatic contours that his cast provides, to splendid effect.
The good woman Esther (Kameishia Duncan) works from her room in a boarding house. She's been there 18 years. Her landlady Mrs. Dixon (Dorothy Morrison) has a soft spot for her and is trying to be both mother and matchmaker. On Lyle Baskin's set, that plain room is flanked on different levels by the boudoir of a lonely rich white woman, Mrs. Van Buren (Sandra Ives), a bedroom belonging to black prostitute Mayme (Lela Elam), and the Orchard Street fabric shop of Jewish merchant Mr. Marks (Antonio Amadeo).
Duncan is stern and yet radiant as Esther, who bypasses natural affection and practical advice to marry a handsome immigrant from Barbados after a courtship through letters. When George (Bechir Sylvain) turns out to be less than the gentleman on paper, Duncan becomes a classic tragedienne.
Sylvain's portrayal keeps George from seeming a deliberate heel, yet doesn't fully get across the shocks of disappointment that contribute to his character's fall. There's more emotional electricity when Duncan and Amadeo share scenes.
Morrison, Elam and Ives are all engaging as women who each have a special friendship with, and in some ways dependencies on, the seamstress.
Baskin's set is an intriguing array of dark woods festooned with rich materials by propmistress Claire Savitt, lit with subtle shades and streaks by John D. Hall. Erin Amico's costumes reflect Esther's first-rate handiwork spelled out in Nottage's script, as well as the prosaic garb of the poor working folk of Esther's world, which Nottage makes so much more interesting to us than to them.
Jack Zink can be reached at jzink@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4706.
Friday, March 24, 2006
Theater Review: Intimate Apparel
By Hap Erstein, Palm Beach Post Theater Writer
CORAL GABLES - GableStage has made its reputation by going against the tide, producing the plays that most other theater companies would be afraid to tackle. Currently, however, it is featuring a script that is one of the most popular at regional playhouses all across the country, Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel. You can quickly sense why this heartfelt tribute to Nottage's own great-grandmother has attracted so many productions. It is the tale of a lonely, 35-year-old African-American seamstress who makes delicate garments - and undergarments - for uptown ladies of means and downtown ladies of the evening. The biographical work is inspiring, involving and a lot more sentimental than director Joseph Adler is accustomed to presenting.
Still, he has found a worthy cast of actors who mine the feelings well of spinster Esther Mills and those around her in New York City, just after the turn of the 20th century. Through her exploration of one woman's struggles, and attempt at finding romance, Nottage has hit upon a universal story of yearning. Audiences will not walk out unnerved, as they often do at GableStage, but they will probably not mind having spent time in Esther's sewing room either.
Esther (Kameisha Duncan) has her dreams, squirreling away money in her bed quilt until she has enough to open "a beauty parlor for colored ladies." And when she allows herself the luxury, she entertains thoughts of being swept off her feet by a lover and soul mate. So when a letter arrives for her from a sweet-talking laborer named George Armstrong who is helping to dig the Panama Canal, she convinces herself that he is the answer to her prayers. Being illiterate, Esther cannot actually read George's letters, let alone respond, so she enlists the aid of her clients - society wife Mrs. Van Buren (Sandra Ives), who is almost as lovelorn as Esther, and the no-nonsense prostitute Mayme (Lela Elam).
After considerable correspondence, George (Bechir Sylvain) arrives in New York and he and Esther have to sort out the reality from the postal fantasy. Intimate Apparel is a play about boundaries and limits, brought on by the time period, skin color, ethnicity, finances and the human heart, but it explores the characters' personal barriers and never feels like an issue drama. As appropriate to its period, Nottage gives Esther's journey the flavor of a vintage play, a family scrapbook that literally ends each act with a photographic portrait pose.
The need to move cinematically among a handful of locales is managed well by scenic designer Lyle Baskin, who carves up the GableStage playing space into Esther's boarding house room, George's Panamanian camp site, the contrasting residences of Esther's lingerie clients and the Orchard Street shop of an Orthodox Jewish fabric merchant (Antonio Amadeo) who understands Esther's loneliness all too well.
This is a play where the clothing helps define, and often confine, the characters. Erin Amico's costumes, particularly the intricate corsets, add so much to the evening's authenticity. Intimate Apparel wraps itself in the garb of history, a look back at lives reaching out to embrace the potential of a new world.
