A SOFT TOUCH: Sews people together.

Plain Esther Mills (Candice McKoy) sews the most ravishing of unmentionables. That’s her business: it’s how this unmarried African-American makes a living in early 20th-century New York. Her finely-worked corsets and nightdresses win her both the accounts and the confidences of all manner of women — from white upper-class society wives like Evangeline Van Buren (Jean Arbeiter) to African-American prostitutes of the Tenderloin district like Mayme (Victoire Charles). As these women reveal themselves to her and are fitted with her delicate garments, Esther yearns to share more of herself, in Lynn Nottage’s rich Intimate Apparel, produced with great warmth and color by Portland Stage Company, under the direction of Lucy Smith Conroy.

Esther lives and sews in lower Manhattan in the boarding house of Mrs. Dickson (the wonderful Vendida Evans), in a room set center stage with a crazy-quilted single bed and a sewing machine. To stage right is the vermilion boudoir and gorgeous wooden bedstead of Mrs. Van Buren, who owes her desperate, bitter vivaciousness to her inability to conceive. On the other side of the stage is the warm little room of ill repute where Mayme entertains her callers and, during breaks, entertains herself on the keys of an old piano. Taking us in and out of these three very different rooms (beautifully rendered by designer Anita Stewart), Nottage’s script uses a fine dramatic symmetry to explore turn-of-the-century New York’s dynamics of race, class, and sex. Despite the differences in culture and economics of these women, all three endure limitations and longing.

As for Esther, 35 years old, she hankers for a beau after her many years of independence. She feels twinges of intimacy with Mr. Marks (the excellent Tzahi Moskovitz), the ebullient Orthodox Jew who sells her fabric, but then she starts receiving letters from George Armstrong (Leopold Lowe, lithe and with fine rhythm), an Afro-Caribbean laborer on the Panama Canal. As Esther can’t read or write, the subsequent postal romance is carried out with the help of Mayme’s and Mrs. Van Buren’s vicarious sublimations.

The story line of Intimate Apparel is simple, takes a classical shape, and has a gentle inevitability. Its power is in the richness of its characters, powerfully portrayed by this excellent all-Equity cast, and in these characters’ cultures. The script peppers their dialogue with allusions to their common historical time and place — to black vaudeville performer Bert Williams, to the “electric shows” at which inventors displayed their tricks for audiences. And then there are the cultural lines between the characters, which often contrast starkly with the closeness between them. Despite Mrs. Van Buren’s professed love for Esther, for example, she doesn’t invite her to society events — or even to enter through the front door — and Mr. Marks, due to Rabbinical law, cannot even shake Esther’s hand.

These divides in the diverse city make it all the more stirring when characters meet and commune over tangible, common pieces of culture — which in this story are Esther’s exquisite unmentionables, and the fine fabrics from which they are made. The sensuous tension is fraught, for example, whenever Esther and Mr. Marks share moments admiring the sumptuous bolts of cloth he pulls from the stack and unfurls for her. These are magnificent, charged scenes, as together the two plainly dressed and culturally incompatible New Yorkers finger the magenta satins and purple Chinese silks, which they are unlikely to ever wear themselves.

Portland Stage Company’s production showcases the fine fabrics that mean such different things to different people, and Esther’s gorgeous corsets (the designs of costumer Jacqueline Firkins) may well give you some old-fashioned ideas of your own (I overheard a man in the next row suggest as much to his female companion). Just as important, however, is the lovely, sometimes troubling, intricacy of the characters behind the finery. Charles’s wry, sassy Mayme is a pleasure to watch both as she struts and as she wilts. In Arbeiter’s hands, Mrs. Van Buren is both languorous and tightly-wound, regretful behind a scrim of gaiety, and the moments when she slows down for more measured self-revelation are striking.

And as for Esther, McKoy gives us a woman who is warm, big-hearted, and beautifully candid. Her generous, sensitive performance shows a woman straining in good faith at the seams of her society, a world in which she threads so much desire.

Intimate Apparel | by Lynn Nottage | Directed by Lucy Smith Conroy | Produced by Portland Stage Company | through April 22 | 207.774.0465

Email the author
Megan Grumbling: mgrumbling@hotmail.com