3.+Nottage

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//Please discuss this statement in GROUP 1 discussions ONLY.//
J.K. Curry (Wake Forest University)

=Lynn Nottage's //Intimate Apparel//=



With //Intimate Apparel// Lynn Nottage firmly established herself as a playwright who gets produced. Following the commissioning and first production by South Coast Repertory and Center Stage, //Intimate Apparel// was produced in New York by the Roundabout Theatre Company in 2004. //Intimate Apparel// then topped the Theatre Communication Group list of most produced plays by member theatres in 2005-2006 with 16 productions and made the top ten again for the 2006-2007 season. The award winning play raised the profile of Nottage who was given a MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship in 2007. Nottage’s 2009 Pulitzer Prize for //Ruined// further enhanced her status as a recognized and produced playwright. //Intimate Apparel// appeals to producers and a wide audience, while utilizing an African-American woman as protagonist and a feminist perspective on several issues raised by the story. With its accessible narrative, this is a history play that speaks easily to contemporary issues and features a relatively small (affordable) mixed race cast. The play focuses on Esther, a sympathetic heroine, who, despite humble origins and the restrictions of a racially segregated society, displays what might be termed “middle class values”—she is a hard working, self-employed, a churchgoing Christian, and sexually virtuous. In many ways, it is a conventional story about a woman who hopes to find love, marry, and live happily ever after. And, if that is not enough to appeal to mainstream theatergoers, the play also offers the opportunity to display beautiful, intricately constructed undergarments on the bodies of three of the female characters.

Yet, Nottage clearly has a purpose beyond providing a commercial, accessible entertainment. Nottage has stated that //Intimate Apparel// was inspired in part by her great-grandmother, a woman who sewed ladies undergarments and surprised her younger sisters, who thought she would remain single for life, by marrying a man who had worked on the Panama Canal. Using the few known details of her great-grandmother’s life story and her own imagination, Nottage creates a history play focused on ordinary working people and little known events, such as the migration set in motion by the building of the Panama Canal and the economic lives of African-American women in New York at the start of the 20th century. Nottage’s stage directions call for both acts of her play to end with simulated photographs, captioned “Unidentified Negro Couple” and “Unidentified Negro Seamstress, ca. 1905,” indicating her project of giving voice to figures not fully documented in the historical record. When the first caption appears at the end of act 1, it encourages a perspective shift in the audience. After becoming closely acquainted with Esther by eavesdropping on personal conversations in private rooms, the audience is momentarily pushed into the role of detached observer of a 100 year old photograph. At that distance we do not have the opportunity to gain the same intimacy with the anonymous women we might see “marrying” or “laboring” in such a photograph. But, using the simulated photograph as a framing device, Nottage reminds us of the variety of human experience we may glimpse in those scattered artifacts of real lives.

Her great-grandmother’s occupation sparked Nottage’s imagination because of the unusual access to intimate spaces (various boudoirs, client’s personal space when fitting the clothing) required to do the job. In the play Esther’s boundary crossing allows Nottage to explore the regulation of desire—especially restrictions based on race, religion, and gender—and consideration of the ways money/social class/power intersect with intimacy and sexuality. Esther’s landlady, Mrs. Dickson, had married an opium addict in order to secure a livelihood running the boarding house she eventually inherited. She also admits to having bartered sexual favors with various men to avoid hard manual labor and washerwoman hands. Esther, because of her skill and industry, will not be forced into a marriage of economic necessity. Of course, Mrs. Dickson is quick to point out that beyond basic economic survival, women choose to marry for many other reasons including companionship and sexual intimacy. Because Esther can afford to be choosey, Mrs. Dickson warns her first against a long distance courtship and then against marrying a common laborer. As we see during the play, Esther’s nest egg (in addition to her earning potential) gives her greater agency in choosing whether to marry, but it also gives her something to lose. Of course, the gamble of marrying George, an immigrant stranger, lured by his own American dream, is magnified by the deception of the letters exchanged between the two illiterate correspondents.

In many ways, Marks is presented as a more appropriate match for Esther than George. Esther and Marks have similar values and a shared aesthetic appreciation of fine fabrics, along with a business acquaintance quickly growing into friendship, emotional sympathy, and mutual attraction. Yet they both recognize that social segregation by race and religion (to which they both largely conform) make a romantic or marital relationship between them impossible (even as Esther pushes the boundaries by deliberately touching Marks). While Mayme makes clear that not all sexual partners respect socially prescribed boundaries, Esther and Marks seem concerned that their most intimate personal relationships not be in open conflict with their public identity.

By contrast, Mrs. Van Buren is a character willing to let her intimate relations contradict her tightly limited social role. Unhappy despite wealth and elevated social status, Mrs. Van Buren seems to envy the freedom and pursuit of romantic love she perceives in Esther’s situation. Mrs. Van Buren confides her problems in Esther and enjoys her company and eventually she kisses Esther. Initiating a sexual relationship with Esther would be convenient for Mrs. Van Buren, given Esther’s “discretion,” her regular, unobjectionable presence within Mrs. Van Buren’s boudoir, and her social invisibility. Mrs. Van Buren’s advances are rejected emphatically by Esther who denies that Mrs. Van Buren and she have ever been friends and calls attention to the unequal terms of the relationship for Esther who maintains back door, “servant” status within the Van Buren home. Instead of a conventional happy ending, //Intimate Apparel// concludes with Esther abandoned and bereft of her life savings. Yet as she sits down to begin sewing a new quilt, we are presented with a powerful image of a resilient, self-reliant, economically independent woman. Though not directly stated, the script implies that Esther may be pregnant. (“Esther lightly touches her belly. A moment.”) An audience may conclude that Esther’s marriage gamble has paid off in an unexpected way with a new child for her to love. While hinting at a pregnancy as a possible silver lining (Nottage, after all, is descended from the woman who inspired Esther), Nottage does not present motherhood as the only source of meaning and joy in a woman’s life. Rather, as Nottage’s //Fabulation// does more explicitly, this play challenges and complicates the negative cultural stereotype of the unwed black mother. After getting to know Esther and the circumstances that led her to being pregnant and alone, an audience is likely to wish Esther well and believe that, though it will be difficult, she has the skill and determination to be able to provide for her child.