Dropped Stitch
Since the invention of the printing press, literature has given us countless tales of lonely hearts, unrequited love and the deep yearning for emotional connection that lies within all of us. Equally plentiful are stories of single career women searching for love in the big city.
Theatre is taking a new shot at the genre in an Off Broadway play Intimate Apparel produced by the Roundabout Theatre Company with a few interesting wrinkles. This story by award winning playwright Lynn Nottage is set in the New York of 1905, and the main character is a Black woman.
Turn of the century New York offered limited opportunities for Black woman and Esther Mills (played by Tony and Drama Desk Award Winner Viola Davis), spent the early part of her life picking “every crop there is to pick” in order to earn money to travel up from North Carolina. Arriving as a young girl, she has since spent 18 years perfecting her skills as a seamstress and maker of elegant women’s lingerie. Esther works tirelessly sewing beautiful garments for Park Avenue socialites and downtown prostitutes alike, but lives in a women’s boarding house, where now at 35 she’s feeling life pass her by.
Despite having saved seemingly every dime she’s ever earned towards her dream of opening a beauty shop, the one thing she hasn’t got is a man, and she’s beginning to doubt things will ever change.
That is until a letter arrives from out of the blue. George Armstrong (Russell Hornsby), a Caribbean laborer working on the Panama Canal has gotten her name through a member of her church and decided to write. The flowerly language of each letter creates just the sort of romantic images a lonely woman dreams of. Despite her illiteracy, Esther gains the help of her clients, the wealthy Mrs. Van Buren (Arija Bareikis) and the prostitute Mayme (Lauren Velez) to read them and write her replies.
Despite warnings from her protective landlady Mrs. Dickson (Lynda Gravátt), Esther and George carry on a worldwind long distance courtship, that ends with a proposal by mail, his arrival in the U.S. and their subsequent wedding. Only after the wedding does Esther begin to grasp the consequences of her actions.
Davis plays Esther as a plain yet talented individual sorely lacking in self esteem, with a charm about her that others see clearly but to which she herself is blind. Her clients adore her work and her company. Mrs. Van Buren, despite her wealth, is married to a cold and distant husband. Mayme has talents outside the boudoir as a ragtime pianist but she knows her future too is limited. Both women are able to share their own hopes and dreams with Esther in ways they can’t with anyone else.
The play is dead on in capturing how society a century ago placed people in little boxes based on race or gender, and how that shaped their own self perceptions. But it fell short in not truly demonstrating the emotional pain Esther goes through in seeking and trying to hold onto love.
We don’t really learn enough about these characters, particularly George, to form strong opinions of them. The depths of their feelings, the sense of despair, isn’t fully mined, and as a result the major plot point--not to be revealed here--is predictable in the first act. Esther’s close friendship with an Hasidic fabric merchant (Corey Stoll) is meant to show us the power of her neediness, but comes off as just mutual curiosity.
Surprisingly the acting is also off in spots and not aided by the directing. On a spacious stage in the beautiful new Laura Pels Theatre, the characters at times seemed to wander aimlessly, with not enough legitimate stage business to do. Bareikis and Velez had difficulty projecting, in stark contrast to Davis and Hornsby who were more consistent in their delivery.
Despite these shortcomings, Intimate Apparel is not a bad play conceptually. The human need to find a soulmate is a timeless story in and of itself. Telling it through a period piece that also tries to explore the migration of southern Blacks and West Indian imigrants to New York is a noble attempt, that just fell a few threads short.
Intimate Apparel, now in previews, opens on April 11 and runs until June 6.
Posted by bernie at March 26, 2004 1:34 AMTrackBack