Proxy rhetorician of love Cyrano de Bergerac is drawn into a less romantic age in Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel, which won the 2004 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play, beat out August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean for the American Theatre Critics Association’s Steinberg New Play Award, and is now in its area premiere at Merrimack Repertory Theatre (through March 5). Set in 1905 Manhattan, the play focuses on a God-fearing, no-longer-young seamstress (loosely based on the playwright’s grandmother) who finds herself the homespun Roxanne of a courtly correspondence initiated by a Caribbean laborer doing the dangerous duty of helping build the Panama Canal. But Esther Mills, whose fleet needle fingers have amassed a nest egg stitching unmentionables for ladies of society and of the evening alike, can neither read nor write. She employs her clients, including a tippling, transplanted Southern white woman and a spunky African-American prostitute, to set the facts of her life and the depths of her yearning to paper. And it turns out her Barbados-born swain isn’t entirely on the epistolary up-and-up either.
Nottage’s play, a quiet departure from earlier works that have ranged from Mozambique to the court of Louis XIV, is as discreetly supple as Esther’s handiwork — albeit less fancily trimmed out. In more ways than one it is about what we wear close to the skin: loneliness, desire, a fragile framework of stays just waiting to be draped in love and trust. Is it any wonder that the spinster seamstress, bent over her machine piecing together erotic underthings as downstairs prettier girl after prettier girl is married off from the rooming-house parlor, starts to bear just the right stamp for a mail-order husband?
One could wish for a production as subtle as Nottage’s minutely observed, heart-wrenching small-scale work — one that might undercut its flaws, which include some jarring unsubtleties and a few bent-to-the-breaking-point plot turns in the second act. (With all the lovely loose women in New York, what are the chances that Esther’s romantic undoing would be on the doorstep of a friend and customer?) But Janice Page’s staging at MRT (a co-production with Virginia Stage Company), which I saw in preview, makes up for some overstatement with a liveliness that embraces the play’s awkward, roughhewn romance and its blinkered, unintended cruelties. As Esther (a role played Off Broadway by estimable August Wilson vet Viola Davis), the charming Nadine Mozon hardly embodies Rosalind’s advice to shepherdess Phebe to “Sell when you can: you are not for all markets” in As You Like It. But she has an ebullience that conveys both the seamstress’s demure, sensual appreciation of fabric and its potential to be applied elsewhere. Without beating sociological context over the head, the play acknowledges the factors of race, class, seemliness, and religion that conspire to trap the inwardly impassioned Esther in a smart-women-foolish-choices near-destruction (and redemption) of her own making. And Mozon captures the innocence, the humiliating need, and the ultimate strength of this brave, anonymous woman whose crushing adventure of the heart Nottage unfolds amid snapshot-like friezes titled “Unidentified Negro couple ca 1905” and “Unidentified Negro seamstress ca 1905.” (Local playwright Kirsten Greenidge tried to do something similar in 103 Within the Veil but according to most reports with less success.)
