A Review of The Westport Playhouse's Intimate Apparel

Last week we attended the Westport Country Playhouse’s stunning performance of Lynn Nottage’s “Intimate Apparel,” a play that brings marginalization out of the shadows and on to front and center stage.

The acting was superb. Nikki Walker’s Esther is compellingly believable as she pridefully rejects a suggested suitor then foolishly falls for a man in she only knows through letters. Her impeccable portrayal of the range of emotions she wears on her sleeve makes you want to hug her and kick her at the same time. Isaiah Johnson’s George, the rough laborer from Panama who steals Esther’s heart—and more—manages to be both surprising and predictable while reminding us that we are all human and looking to have our needs fulfilled. Leighton Bryan’s desperately lonely Mrs. Van Buren, Tommy Schrider’s commercially shrewd yet compassionate Mr. Marks, and Heather Alicia Simms’s simultaneously sad and sparkly prostitute Mayme complement the leads. Nottage’s brilliant dialogue often uses humor to convey bitter truth, and the actors’ gazes, gestures, and silences speak as much as their words.

Alan Moyers’s simple sets and Mary B. Robinson’s smart staging make use of sliding rooms, an upstairs level, and shifts in lighting to highlight the conversations characters are having, then move them into the background—frozen but not forgotten—while another scene transpires. Words accumulate in each room, and the space grows thick with layers of experience and memory, while the constraints that threaten to strangle the characters in a world defined by race, sex, religion, and economic class tighten like the strings on Mrs. Van Buren’s corset.

“Intimate Apparel” is a story of yearning and imagining, possibilities and limitations, and as Nottage imagines her characters and their twisted lives, Esther and George imagine each other through romantic correspondence, then learn painfully how different reality can be from the way it’s represented. The play is also about seduction and the way marginalized individuals with dreams of acceptance can be swayed and persuaded to give up everything they value for a chance at achieving what they long for. Mr. Marks, the Orthodox Jewish cloth merchant, alludes to this when he shows Esther a piece of embroidered silk. “Touch, then refuse,” he says, knowing she cannot.

If the first act reveals the fantasies of the characters against the all too real backdrop of their scripted societal roles, the second act points to the heartbreak that occurs when they try to escape those boundaries. As Esther’s life, carefully stitched together like the intimate apparel she makes for her clients or the quilt in which she stashes her life savings, unravels, she comes full circle and returns, finally, to herself.

W
Submitted by Westport, CT

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